Oh Papa press photo

This week CLOSEUP Spoke with 70s ‘soft rock’ quartet Oh Papa for our Artist Spotlight feature following the release of their new EP ‘Sitcom’ to discuss all things live.

Oh Papa, It’s great to have a chat! We love your music as you well know. We’re keen to know about your live shows, what does an Oh Papa show usually bring?

Thanks for having us! Our live shows are pretty varied but I guess we just focus on curating a personal (possibly sensual) environment where everyone is comfortable and hopefully can enjoy our music. We tend to have a good mix of intimate shows and bigger shows where we can strut around a tad more maybe even do an Elton John cover.

What part of the musical process do you enjoy most, and why? is it performing live, creating your tracks or..?

Oh man, it’s tough because they’re all so different. Think for sure playing live is and should be treated as a different art form. Writing can be done in your boxers or in the bath, live not so much, although it’s not such a bad idea, maybe we’ll do a bath show one day if we can figure out how to navigate the hazards. We all just love being in the studio, I think that’s where we come into our own when we can just try whatever we want and see what happens. We have a pretty childlike mentality when we’re in the studio and that’s always a good thing. We really miss playing shows though hopefully, we’ll be doing it again in the not so distant future.

Your tunes have been listened to hundreds of thousands of times across the world as Spotify informs us, Spotify is now such a big player in the industry, how important do you think it is for acts?

It’s a bit of the old two sides of the coin with Spotify. We are so humbled by all the people who have listened to our music and it’s such an easy platform to get your music on and for people to discover new music, however, it’s hard to treat it as ‘oh wow we’ve got all these plays we’re basically Beyoncé’. Think you just gotta quantify it differently, but all in all, for the modern musician sharing their material, it’s become a huge part of that process.

If you created an Oh Papa Festival, and could pick 3 headliners, who would you go for?!

Going DOA and making it a one-day thing, Joni Mitchell opens just as we get into the evening (but only if Jaco Pastorius is on bass), followed by The Flaming Lips (went to go watch them do ‘The Soft Bulletin’ in full in Manchester and it was outer body experience kinda shit) they’ll play just as the sun goes down, and finally, from 10pm till the early hours, Prince will play the majority of his repertoire revealing his complete mastery of at least 25 instruments.

Tell us a little about what your new music, when should we be expecting it?!

Well before lockdown, we were working on a little something that we hope to be sharing with you over the summer, don’t want to give too much away but it’s the best song ever written according to my mother.