EXCLUSIVE: Scouting For Girls frontman and fan of ITV’s The Voice, Roy Stride, has revealed he’s ‘gutted’ to see Sir Tom Jones be axed from his position but believes Aitch will be a ‘superstar’
Sir Tom Jones being axed from his position on The Voice has left people dismayed, but Roy Stride believes Aitch will become a “superstar”. The Scouting For Girls frontman, 47, has never shied away from sharing his love of the ITV talent competition, but after the news emerged that Sir Tom, 86, was let go from his position, Roy admits he was “gutted”.
Although Sir Tom is appearing on the current series of the show, next year will see a fresh panel. Will.i.am will be returning alongside Kelly Rowland, and they’ll be joined by rapper Aitch and Girls Aloud star, Cheryl Tweedy.
Sir Tom previously said: “The only thing I know right now is that there’s never a good time to fire an 86-year-old who’s still pretty good at his job.” ITV thanked the “irreplaceable” Sir Tom for his contribution to the show.
“Sir Tom is such a legend; he was so good on the voice. Aitch, he’s such a legend, he’s such a star, I think this platform will send him into superstardom,” said Roy, adding: “I’m excited for him. I’m gutted about Tom, it’s Tom Jones, isn’t it?!”
The band previously performed on the same TV show as Sir Tom and caught him soundchecking, praising his vocals and calling them “incredible”. He added: “It just filled up this entire TV studio. We played with him a couple of years ago, which was incredible.”
Roy went on to say of the new coaching line-up: “It’s always good to have a bit of fresh blood on there, isn’t it? Keep it exciting. And uh, it’s a bit like, you know, with The Grand Tour, you know, everyone’s now saying that Bourgeois is the secret sauce to it, you know, the one which people aren’t quite sure about. But I think Aitch is going to kill it.”
Next year, Scouting For Girls will celebrate their 20th anniversary, having signed their first record deal on February 14, 2007. Since then, the band have gone on to achieve unprecedented success, and each year they are a staple at most British festivals. “We started the bands when we were kids,” Roy said, adding that he and Pete Ellard founded the group while members of the Scouts and used to practise in the Scouts hut.
“We were 12 and 13,” he commented. Before signing their deal, the band had to do “everything,” including the promotional work, album artwork, producing and recording every track. “We got to a point where we were selling out shows,” he said, adding: “Once we started moving the dial, the record label came along. Once we signed the deal, that felt like the culmination of all the work we’d done.”
But while they’ve been in the business for two decades, the industry has changed significantly, even in the last five years, with the rise of digital streaming platforms and the resurgence of vinyl and CDs.
Roy, however, feels like a “veteran” of the industry, with Scouting For Girls’ first album, titled Scouting For Girls, selling over a million copies when it was released in 2007. By the time their second record, Everybody Wants to Be on TV, came along in 2010, streaming had been introduced. “It was the Wild West,” he laughed, reflecting on the rise of piracy streaming before giants such as Spotify came into fruition.
He said: “We came back and we had This Ain’t A Love Song, which went straight to Number One, then it felt like in that time, everything had changed from CDs to iTunes streaming. In some ways, it’s booming again now in terms of, like, everyone’s got access to music.”
However, Roy acknowledges that launching a music career today isn’t as easy for new artists. “I feel like there’s so much just to listen to when you have access to everything, you end up cherry-picking the best of different things, so it’s hard for artists to actually create a career.”
And it’s not just the vast amount of music out there; artists make around $0.003 to $0.005 per stream on Spotify and around $3,000 to $5,000 per one million streams. “If we lived on the money we got from streaming, well, we just wouldn’t,” Roy said. He added: “The three of us wouldn’t be able to, I don’t think it would even be minimum wage – and we get 100,000 streams per day.” He acknowledged that the only way to make a living out of music is to play live, but it can be “tough” to build up that audience.
His biggest track with his band, She’s So Lovely, has racked up over 227,000,000 streams on Spotify alone, while Atlantis by Seafret, written by Roy, has racked up over 1,000,000,000 streams on the platform. “I think you can’t really even process those sorts of numbers,” he said of the staggering figures.
Throughout his career, Roy has written for the likes of Take That, One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer and The Vamps, to name just a few – but with his own band, he can do “whatever” because there are “no rules”. Reflecting on the rise of 5SOS, he said: “They were such good writers, it was amazing to see their development.”
He said of One Direction: “It was those songs I did for One Direction before they even started writing, they’d barely even formed as a band, and I sent a few songs off. I remember getting an email from Simon Cowell saying he loved the songs, which was one of the most exciting emails I’ve ever had. They cut it for that first album.”
Working with 1D, Roy saw a completely different side to the industry – with the boys often recording before performing to thousands, or even after gigs. “I went on tour with One Direction for a while, where there were some songwriters, we travelled with them,” he said, before adding: “The boys would come after the show, listen to what we’ve done and maybe do a vocal. This is after they’ve done a show, they worked so hard. You’d look out the window, and it was like The Beatles – it was a mad time doing a tour with 1D.”
Next year, Scouting For Girls will play a sold-out show at Wembley Arena and a show at Manchester’s AO Arena to celebrate their two decades in the business. But Roy still hasn’t processed selling Wembley out. The last time the band headlined Wembley was 2010, and the arena was three-quarters full.
“To sell it out 20 years on is mad, I still don’t understand it,” he laughed, before explaining that the logistics behind an arena show are much more complicated than any other tour. “It’s incredible. When we started, we didn’t think we’d get a record deal; we were just thankful to make music as a living. We thought that if this lasted a year, it would be amazing. To still be doing it 20 years on is a miracle.”
Many fans of the band would disagree that their success is a “miracle”, having witnessed Stride’s live performances, which often draw huge crowds at festivals, with everybody singing along. But he sees his role on stage as a “conductor”, trying to get the crowd involved at any given moment.
“Every show is different,” he explained, adding that he works out when and how to get the crowd involved. “With Scouting, we’re completely live,” he said, adding that if “things are going a bit bad,” the group can throw a cover song in. “Everything is completely fluid in a show,” he said.
Next month, the band will headline Girlguiding’s Big Gig at Wembley Arena, something Roy instantly said yes to. The band have previously performed on the line-up and had one of the loudest crowds to date. “I felt like we were The Beatles because there were just 10,000 Girl Guides going crazy,” he said.
He went on to add: “To be invited back is very exciting.” Roy’s own daughter, Rosie, was a member of the Girl Guides before the family relocated to Los Angeles. Reflecting on his own time in the Scouts, Roy revealed: “We’re called Scouting for Girls because me and Pete met in the Scouts, so we’ve—you know, we really appreciate the time we spent in the Scouts, and we’re really appreciative of all the work that the leaders put in looking after the kids. So I’m so excited to be there.”
And while he and his family now live in LA, Rosie “misses the movement” of the Girl Guides, which is unique to Britain. He said: “The best thing about it was that it’s amazing for girls to have a safe space. And I think it really helped her confidence, too.” He continued: “There’s some sort of stat out there that Girlguides are 30% more confident. I definitely saw that in Rosie, she went climbing, abseiling, canoeing, kayaking – all these outdoor adventure sports, she loved her time in the Girlguides.”
Girlguides’ Big Gig will take place on October 10 at OVO Arena Wembley.
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