Hey there. Who are we speaking to and what do you do in Pickpocket?
Craig Strain, bassist and bandleader. And sole Scotsman.
Can you run us through a typical Pickpocket jam session?
I do the majority of the composition and bring songs to the jam. We play, and then the guys add parts, subtract parts, work out how both guitars are going to work together to not get in the way of the keyboard, that kind of thing. That’s when the tunes start to come alive. Then it’s five minutes of me awkwardly turning down ideas until my accent scares them.
You’re self described as unpretentious funk. What do you include or exclude to create this?
We aim for a certain amount of compositional sophistication to scratch our own itch. But we always think of the listener, and how we don’t always want people sitting at tables in the candlelight watching us with triangulated pointer fingers over their mouths assessing our use of melodic minor scales. We want to make arses move too.
You’re finally ready to release the massively groovy Sojourn. What can we expect at the launch?
If you think that’s epic, we’ll be playing the rest of the album at three times the volume and a hundred times the sound quality of listening to it on YouTube. It’s a gig for dancing audiophiles.
