Hip Parade: All About the Audience

Exclusive Interview with Orange Unsigned Act’s Liveliest Contenders

Jan 25, 2009

Suite 101 talks exclusively to Glasweigan band's frontman ahead of competition final with Scarlet Harlots and Tommy Reilly.

Hip Parade consistently wow the crowd at the Orange Unsigned Act competition. Not least today when frontman Rob Shah launched himself into an unsuspecting audience after their first performance of the final. They work the crowd like their lives depended on it.

Having diligently worked their way from thousands of acts to just the last three, Hip Parade have won over both judges and public and have garnered increasingly positive comments from Lauren Laverne, Alex James and Simon Gavin. Now they face The Scarlet Harlots and fellow Glasweigan Tommy Reilly in a dramatic final show.

Suite 101 managed to grab the band’s charismatic frontman, Rob Shah, backstage at the live TV show ahead of the final for a few minutes, where he talked about performing live, their plans for the future and teenage favourites McFly.

Energetic Live Shows

Suite 101: After your performance today the audience went mental, and they didn’t really react that way to the others, so what do you make of that?

Suite 101: Well I think they respond to your performance, you’re energetic on stage and you invite that kind of response.

Rob: Yeh, it was a bit harder today, because usually we get a little intro and I get to get the crowd going. But I hard to work quite hard in the song today to get everyone jumping up and down.

Rob: It’s gotta be done. That’s what a gig’s about. You can’t come to see a band and then stand around saying, “Oh yeah that was a fantastic chord”. You need to go and be like… [mimes ‘fan going mental’].

Suite 101: It’s quite weird for an audience that clearly wants to jump around and go crazy but that also is quite conscious of possibly looking like idiots on TV?

Rob: Yeh well we help with that by acting like arses on stage. So if they see us and think “Oh well, they don’t care, so $£%& it”. [Laughing] I forgot to sing at one point!

Audience More Important Than Judges

Rob: I don’t know. It’s different people every week. If you can get the audience on your side you’re on to a winner straight away. I think the audience are more important than the judges. I’ve seen that every week. Every time you’re going on stage I’ve seen the judges sitting there and I’ve not even looked at them once. They’ve picked up on it with other bands too saying “you won’t give us any eye contact”. When I’m on stage I don’t care what they say. After it I’ll listen, but when I’m on stage the people that are standing right in front of us jumping up and down, those are the people I want to impress.

Suite 101: Well they’re the ones who are going to buy your records aren’t they?

Plans to Tour and Record

Suite 101: Let’s take the competition out of the mix for a minute. What do you guys want to go on and do? Where do you want to be in 12 months time?

Rob: I’ll hopefully be on a tour bus driving up and down the country, maybe driving up and down some other countries, saying hi to people, meeting new people, writing new songs, recording new songs. That’s all I want.

McFly and a Changing Audience

Suite 101: You’re all good looking boys, can you see yourselves taking things down the McFly route, or can we continue to expect a more serious kind of sound from you?

Rob: We don’t have any kind of route. We’ve never had a route. The McFly route is not something I’ve ever considered. I guess we need to accept that with a T4 audience, there are going to be a lot of younger people listening to our music. Before it was more kind of 25s to 30s, we weren’t sure how we’d do with a teenage audience and we needed to address that. We don’t play ‘Dynamite’ that often any more which has got a fair few swear words in it! Yeh, so our audience has changed a little bit.

Suite 101: Yeh I can imagine that wouldn’t do too well with bleeping on TV?!

Rob: Nah. We can adjust all that but we still need to be ourselves, we’re still going to write songs that will be Hip Parade, so it’s not going to change that much.

Suite 101: Who would you rather have in the audience: teenage girls throwing their knickers at you, or older, more serious, more sober types?