The Metros

The Metros are quickly becoming one of England's best London based bands and they name The Blockheads and King Kurt and the Bananas among their influences. Outline’s intrepid new recruit, Joe Goodwin, caught up with lead guitarist Jak Payne before they set off on their headlining tour.

How did the band start?Basically we were about 16 living in South East London and we wanted to get into pubs, but we couldn’t ‘cause we were under age and had no money. So we thought if you carried a guitar into a venue they will generally let you in for free and give you free stuff, so we decided to do that. Then, somebody came who liked us and gave us some free money and that was even better so we did that and now, here we are.

Why did you choose to change your name from Wank Skankers to The Metros? Um, that was a different band, which was just like really rubbish and we only had a keyboard to play drums on. Then, we chose the metros because we’re not very imaginative and we couldn’t think of anything better to call ourselves unfortunately, ‘cause its not a very good name. We wanted to have a good name like the Fun Loving Criminals, but that had already been taken, so, erm, I dunno! We just had to deal with it. It’s kinda like, well it’s just a name really so it’s not really important, but it would be good to have a better one.

You were the only one in the band that did A-levels - was that hard? Well, I wasn’t there very much which made it really difficult ‘cause I didn’t learn anything, which was kinda the point of me being there at all. But I think it’s important to enjoy learning stuff and I feel like I've become more stupid since I stopped going to school, ‘cause you kind of stop using your brain from drinking all the time and doing nothing, so you just like become a bit stupid, but I think it’s important to keep challenging yourself, which I haven’t been doing at the moment. Maybe I will one day with crosswords and Sudoku, but I'm not very good at them.

How would you describe your music? It’s kind of like punky-funk pop music. It’s hard to describe your music; just like punk you know good music.

Who are your modern day influences?I like the new Mystery Jets album, that’s good. Who else is good? Erm, I like some of the angular stuff like The Maccabees - they're alright. There's a lot of bands in south east London that are unsigned; there's a band called Rumshaveen and there used to be a band called the Hooves who were good, but don’t think you would have heard of them, but yeah, there's a lot of bands like that I think we are influenced from kind of south east London. There's quite a good scene down here which helps us creatively and it makes you want to be better, which it does.

How do you and the band come up with lyrics for songs?Well for me it’s just… I kind of write stories about other people that do or don’t exist ‘cause I find my life generally isn’t interesting to write songs about; there’s not stuff that you find really interesting, and in a song its got to be really magical, embellished and exaggerated to ridiculous degrees. I kind of write stories about people who are loosely based on myself or other people and just kind of run with it to further extremes to make it more interesting.