Scouting for Girls on 'Rockstardom'

No longer do Scouting For Girls have to scout for girls. Backstage prior to their gig there are plenty of trendy looking women lounging about on Koko’s Gonzo-style brown sofas. It wasn’t always like this. ‘I used to have a goatee ginger beard,’ confesses bassist, Greg. To make matters worse whilst filming the video for Elvis Ain’t Dead, ‘they ran out of Elvis wigs’ so Greg ‘just had some kind of regular woman’s wig.’

Now that they are real rockstars though Scouting For Girls have contracted a few unhealthy addictions: ‘ Pete, he just…he just couldn’t stop eating,’ Greg looks concerned, ‘you know the big share bags, to him, that was just like a normal personal bag for him. He’s been very good though. For the last three months he’s been totally clean of Doritos.’ Unfortunately, ‘the other day he lapsed and fell off the wagon.’

Speaking of nasty habits, Scouting For Girls happened to meet Pete Doherty when they filmed Transmission in Glasgow. ‘He seemed really lovely. I said ‘hello, he said ‘hello’ back. He was a lot taller than I expected,’ remembers Greg quite excitedly, though of his own admission he is not The Libertines’ biggest fan (that job is reserved for documentary-maker Max Carlish, both in terms of weight and depth of obsession.)

At the moment Greg would much rather listen to The Wombats and The Pigeon Detectives, though singer Roy is allegedly a Take That fanatic. While Roy would probably prefer to duet with Gary Barlow, Greg thinks that if Scouting For Girls did collaborate with someone ‘it would have to be a girl. Probably Kylie Minogue.’ The band has recently covered Kylie’s latest hit 2 hearts.

Sadly Miss. Minogue did not feature on Scouting For Girls’ album, which Greg describes as a ‘coming of age album.’ The culmination of ten years worth of demos, Greg feels that it combines their live energy with the ‘good groove’ of their recorded material.

While to most people Scouting for Girls’ fame has come pretty quickly, Greg explains that him and Roy have actually been playing together since they were thirteen, terming them ‘a ten year overnight success’. At this point, I must admit, I was not entirely sure whether he meant guitar-playing or school-boy playing. Afterall, the band were school mates and fellow boy scouts. ‘Roy and Pete were in the Scouts, I was an air-cadet,’ clarifies Greg.

Though its taken a while to make it to the top ( by ‘top’ I mean Capital’s exclusive ‘must-play-every-fifteen-minutes’ playlist), Scouting For Girls are not bitter about bands competing on shows like Mobile Act Unsigned getting it easy.’ Anything that kind of gets new decent music out there, I think is always going to be a good idea… I think its really nice that people who actually write their own music are getting the same opportunities as people on X Factor.’


Being in a band called Scouting For Girls has always ‘been a double-edged sword. Some people get the name, that it came from scouting for boys, whereas other people think we are just a bunch of perverts.’ Now that more people than ever have heard of Scouting For Girls, Greg decides to settle the situation once and for all: ‘we’re not.’

MK