Paper Hands are Jordan Campbell 31 (lead vocals) and Billy Taylor 32 (drums/ guitar/ bass) and the pair have been lifelong friends since meeting in the early 90’s aged 3 & 4!
They met as next door neighbours when their parents were in the air force at RAF Leaming in North Yorkshire. They had a bond from the start and remained best friends ever since. Musically, this bond had remained unexplored until the whole world changed and forced the majority of humanity to remain inside.
Tell us about the meaning behind your latest single release 'Early Warning'? The way we write songs isn’t quite as ‘on the nose’ as other bands. We don’t always put specific and definite points across in our lyrics as we like them to be driven more by feelings. Early Warning is a prime example of this. The lyrics just felt right to us. We’ve had a lot of people connect with it and comment that they feel it’s about addiction, or lost loves and we love that it can be different things to different people. What does a typical day in the studio look like for you guys? Most of our songs start life as a voice note of an idea. That could be a lyrical idea or a riff and we then build from that. We are both able to engineer and record parts of the songs wherever we are and we bounce them between each other until we’re happy to start mixing! Both of us being multi instrumentalists also helps as it means Jordan can record guitar or bass tracks, some synth and then I can add more guitar, keys, synth, drums and percussion without having to pull in other players. It keeps it really personal in that sense! How long have you been writing songs for? Billy: I’ve been writing since I was about 13. I remember cutting and printing my own CD’s for one of my first bands at about the age of 15? Jordan: I wrote my first song when I was 15. It was almost as terrible as you’d expect. It wasn’t until I was 19 that I started to really embrace the weirdness within me and write about that. Who did the creative direction for the music video accompanying this release? That would be our extremely talented friend (and director) Paul Berterlotti. With assistance from Samuel Fenton who handled camera and videography duties. We can’t wait for everyone to see it! We both nearly drowned several times that day… Aside from music, what do you guys get up to in your spare time? We both love dogs, so if we’re not recording or playing you can find us with the nearest dog! Or sending each other pictures of cars on Instagram haha!
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