Tigercub: "We were worried that people would take the piss…"

Everyone’s heard of pay-what-you-want downloads, but pay-what-you-want vinyl?! Tigercub took a massive risk with their new EP, ‘Evolve Or Die’.

Hey Jamie, we saw you guys at 2000trees the other week – how was it? Did you have fun?
Trees was dope. Practically everyone we know was playing this year. As soon as we got on-site, we bumped into Black Peaks, Dinosaur Pile-Up and Pulled Apart by Horses! We ran into Jamie Lenman of Ruben fame too which was pretty cool – he told us he’s digging TC at the moment, so our egos were very inflated the whole weekend. He asked us to play Lenmania fest at Tufnell Park, but we couldn’t do it due to another London show we have around that time, gutted!
Anyway, name dropping out the way – the show was great, the tent was rammed, and everyone wanted it. Now people have had a chance to live with our debut album it feels like the shows are getting a lot bigger and better. Kids know the words now and seem to enjoy starting pretty brutal pits at our shows, even to our softer songs!
We were asked to do an acoustic set at Trees as well which was initially terrifying. Jallix brought an old drum machine along to practice, and we came up with this lo-res ‘Steve Zissou’-esque interpretation of our tunes. It ended up being really fun. We played at dusk, and it felt like a séance, it was super chill, but people seemed to enjoy it. Acoustic sets really test the foundations of your songwriting, so it was nice to find our tunes work live with smaller arrangements.

What else have you been up to over the summer? Has it been a busy one?
We’ve been on the road since November last year. We had two weeks off in March, so we decided to get back in the studio and do an EP. Then festival season started which is nice cos you get to be a weekend rock star for a while – play two festival sets a weekend for a month, get smashed then have the rest of the week to recover. We’re not a major label band, so the only way to get big nowadays is through fuckin’ hand to hand combat. We’re not gonna stop touring until we’re massive, so doing this EP gave us a means to tour again in the winter. We wanted to test the water on a more Industrial sound we’re thinking of taking into album two, so it was a good opportunity to experiment a bit and see what works and what doesn’t.

You’ve an EP on the way that includes a limited edition pay-what-you-want vinyl – how did that go? Pre-orders sold out really quickly, didn’t they?
People have been losing their fucking minds. We did this treasure hunt online with coordinates to an exact line in the entire Library of Babel which was only meant to reveal the cover of the EP, but our fans went batshit and ended up hacking into our website and coming with conspiracy theories over what we’re doing. Not to mention getting hassled by my mates in bands constantly about what we were up to.
We were worried people wouldn’t give a shit, but it quickly turned into fucking Wikileaks. It escalated fast. After that, we mailed out 500 letters personally to our dedicated fans with the password to our website where they could pre-order the EP before anyone else. Incredible scenes of me licking stamps in the post office for hours that day! Anyway, we fucking sold out of ‘em all pretty much before we went public, so we had to put up a second pressing pre-sale for people who missed out, which is now about to sell out too.

“People have been losing their fucking minds.”

It sounds like a super risky idea, who came up with it? Was there some convincing?
JackPOP at the label [Alcopop!] thought of it, and we all said yes straight away – zero convincing, it just felt so tight with the overall ethos of the EP. It was nice to see the label getting stuck in and taking the risk with us. We were worried that people would take the piss and not pay anything – but we gave it to our dedicated fan base first before it went public and luckily they’re all decent people, so they paid for it. The average spend was about £10, and some people paid £30-£50 for it! (I love you all). The risk paid off I guess.

What’s ‘Evolve or Die’ about?
Firstly it’s a mission statement for Tigercub. They say old habits die hard, but that’s never gonna be the case with Tigercub. We want to be the sort of band that takes risks and are constantly changing and getting better with every release, so it’s a statement of intent about the direction we’re heading creatively into the second album.
Then there’s this short story by Jorge Luis Borges called ‘The Library of Babel’ which is about how there’s this universe which contains hexagonal rooms of bookshelves, which themselves contain all the basic elements for human survival. The content of the books seem totally random and chaotic to humans, but the infinite nature of the content means that they contain every book that has and will ever be written. There are these superstitious librarians that try and order the books and get rid of the incoherent ones in search of a book that contains the perfect Index of the library’s contents… It’s such an incredible idea, and someone actually created the library on the internet, so Jimi suggested we use it, and it just turned out to tie-in so well with the themes of the songs – the longing for meaning and order in this chaotic world.

Do you have any other plans in the works at the mo? There’s a tour coming up, right?
We’ve announced a headline tour in October, and we’re going to do two big shows at Scala in London and Concorde 2 in Brighton in January – we’ve got some exciting stuff planned for those gigs. We’re also currently writing the next record.

Taken from the October issue of Upset, out now. Tigercub’s EP ‘Evolve Or Die’ is out now.

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