Holiday Ghosts – now based in Brighton, but originally formed in Falmouth - feature drummer Katja Rackin and guitarist Sam Stacpoole, along with returning bandmate Charlie Murphy and a host of talented local Falmouth musicians.

Together they mine the works of eras past to cast the best of artists such as The Kinks, Violent Femmes, Alex Chilton and Modern Lovers as a backdrop onto which they deconstruct myriad social issues. Themes of breaking out of moulds and expectations whilst addressing displacement, disillusionment and living in the midst of heavy advertising and commercial landscapes, spider their way through their latest album.

Falmouth Packet:

We spoke to Sam about signing to indie label Fat Cat Records, their up coming tour, including a date in Falmouth and what makes Holiday Ghosts tick.

Your latest album North Street Air was BBC Radio 6 Music's Album of the Day at the beginning of the summer. How did that recognition feel?

"It was awesome. Quite hard to know about response though. I don't spend lot of time looking at internet, but to go off response from people telling me personally I guess it paid off. Gigs have been going crazy."

How did Holiday Ghosts come about?

"I actually started doing it alongside [Falmouth indie rock legends] Black Tambourines. Nearly for how long that band was going. Playing very occasional gigs with a different band and completely different set. There was no pressure. I was using it for stuff that didn't really fit with the Black Tambourines at that point.

"Playing with different people until we got settled with my girlfriend Kat who I got to play drums, who then taught herself and Charlie Murphy from the Red Cords, so we became the core. We all started writing and contributing. Took three years before we said 'Maybe we should make an album?' and play gigs outside Cornwall.

"We've been a thing for ten years now, took five years to stop just being a way of hanging out. Now we have an expanded band, with others from Falmouth, Morgan Lloyd-Mathews came to Uni in Falmouth and Ben Nightingale of The Spankees.

"We got them in to help us tour the last album then did a gig and next day it was lockdown. So we just formed this group just got them onboard and then pandemic hit so we ended up writing loads of songs together. We are making our fourth record now as full band."

How would you describe the band's sound?

"We are into quite high energy rock and roll that has punk attitude we are not a heavy band, quite lean in sound, multiple different vocalists and high energy fun band live."

How has it been signing to Fat Cat Records?

"Fat Cat are a pretty big label. They've been going for a long time. They have done some massive albums and have a very strong infrastructure, it helps hugely for us being on that label. A label I always used to buy records from and still do. It infinitely helps. They are interested in doing our own thing going our own way."

What is the philosophy of Holiday Ghosts?

"We always use the same instruments live, we have an acoustic that goes through an amp. We don't use a lot of distortion, it's reminiscent of the Velvet Underground and some New York proto-punk stuff . That's how we sound because that's what we use, but all of our writing is from kind of music we listen to. We don't want to be part of one genre. We just like to make our music as varied as we can make it. We listen to all kinds of music I really don't have a favourite genre. So our philosophy is to do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want."

Where do you get the inspiration for your lyrics?

The band share songwriting, sometimes writing together. Lyrics are a commentary on life around us. Life is very political, very interested in that. Kat has very political background with her parents from Iran. We don't write political music with a capital P but life is politics, We write whatever we feel strongly about in the moment."

Holiday Ghosts play The Cornish Bank, Falmouth on October 27 with support from Speedboat.