Bug Teeth

Words by Kiera Ford Photographs by Immie Hartley Styling by Summer Crane

Bug Teeth is comprised of PJ and their band (Geo, Sonny, Alex, and Adam), and they create music that evokes a sense of drifting through the clouds. The combination of PJ’s vocals and guitar, Sonny’s guitar and lapsteel, Alex’s synth, Adam’s bass, and Geo on drums, provides a wholly unique listening experience from this group. Poetic lyrics and intricate music intertwine in Bug Teeth’s discography, and after a fun-filled photoshoot soundtracked by Vengaboys and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, I sat down with PJ and the gang to find out more about themselves and their music.

Where does the name ‘Bug Teeth’ come from?

PJ: I was just trying to find something that hadn’t been used before, I wanted two random words, and it worked.

Geo: You should tell them the weird significance of Bug.

PJ: Oh yeah, my mum was called Bug at school because she was really annoying. When did you realise that music was what you wanted to pursue?

PJ: I don’t think I ever intended that, I never really wanted to be a musician and I never thought I could. I only started making music when I was, like, 15 and didn’t show anyone until I was 18, so I never thought I’d get to the point where I was playing gigs or releasing things properly on streaming services.

How did all of you meet?

PJ: We met at uni, Bug Teeth was just me on my own and then Geo found my music through Twitter or something, and their other band [Gladboy] spoke about me on the radio. I went to see them all live and recruited them 2 years later. We are all best friends.

Sonny: BEST ... FRIENDS...

How have you found getting back into live performance after the pandemic?

PJ: It’s been fucking weird! We had this small sit-down gig and we were only a fully-formed band right before the pandemic so we’d only done 2 gigs in total at that time. We couldn’t really rehearse or anything. Then the sit-down Norwich gig happened after COVID. We started working on more tracks after that, we wanted to release more music quickly.

Geo: I think the last few gigs have been when we’ve felt the most comfortable performing live and they’ve been some of the best we’ve ever performed, because now we’re all living together we get to rehearse a lot more together and in our other project we throw stuff together at the last minute, but with Bug Teeth it feels somewhat more professional? Question mark?

Sonny: Gladboy is very improvisatory whereas with Bug Teeth I come along in my suit and play my part.

PJ: Yeah you’d get told off otherwise.

Geo: Yeah prior to COVID we weren’t really ready to be a live act, we were better off just recording, the last few months we’ve really sorted our shit out.

What would be a dream venue for you to play?

PJ: I think when I lived in Norwich it was always NAC (Norwich Arts Centre) we played that straight away, then after moving to Leeds it was Brude (Brudenell Social Club) and we just played there, so now it would probably be the moon! I always really wanted to play at End Of The Road festival on the Wood stage, I think about that all the time it would really work for us.

Geo: A big show at Brudenell is always what you want. We played it a few weeks back and it was reasonably busy, but a packed out gig there would be the dream. We are generally quite modest with that stuff though, we’re not gonna turn around and say the O2. PJ I thought you’d say Eden Project.

PJ: Oh yeah! That would be the ACTUAL dream venue at Eden Project in with all the leaves. God that would be mad.

Where are your favourite places to go in Leeds?

Adam: Work. I love it there. (Adam works at Waitrose.)

Geo: I love going to Brude, got pies, got pool, got darts, got bands. It’s cheap and you always see people you know. I don’t have a more interesting one.

Alex: Ilkley moor

Sonny: I quite like Bradford.

Geo: The amphitheatre in Ilkley Moor. That would be a great place for us to perform. But venues, Wharf chambers is a great one. It’s so interesting there, anything can happen when you go to a gig.

Sonny: Yeah literally anything could happen. We went to see this group and one of the members was playing a Playstation game called ‘Music’ to an audience of people rolling around on the floor.

Geo: Wharf is a place for you to do anything unhinged, there’s a platform there to be free, which is becoming rarer as I guess it’s not really profitable. But Leeds in general is good for embracing those aspects of life, and people can take risks there.

Talking more about your music, are there any specific aspects of your life that is reflected in your music?

PJ: Jesus. I guess it changes, music is an emotional process, same as writing. I’ve only ever wanted to be a writer and a storyteller. Each of our songs tells a story and I never intended that to be my own one, at the start it was always fictional and inspired by other things. I think it’s getting more and more inspired by my life and the world we inhabit. ‘Ice-9’ is about a fictional apocalypse, but it feels very close to real life if you know what I mean. I’m not the type of person to write specifically about my love life it would be a bit weird seeing as Geo and I are dating, so it would be difficult to write about that. The music is definitely influence by what I’ve been through, but I don’t want that to be obvious, I just want people to relate to it.

How do you achieve the wondrous, ethereal vibe that’s given off by your music?

PJ: I guess in a full band, everyone knows what I want it to sound like and how we do things now. I don’t specifically say oh we have to sound dreamy in this one because everyone already knows that’s what I want and I never intended to write music the way that it ends up sounding, it just all happens naturally, sometimes influenced by who I’m listening to at the time. I’m not sure how we achieve it, everyone just plays how I want them to.

Geo: I think the interplay between Alex, PJ, and Sonny has a big effect on it to the point where when I’m playing, I cant work out who’s playing what because they all use sustained dreamy sounds. I remember at the gig we did the other day, Sonny said “I don’t know what I was playing just then, I couldn’t tell if it was Alex playing it”, they both create a bed of drones and reverbs, which I think gives it a unique quality.

Sonny: Combined with song structures it’s the best thing EVERRRR.

Geo: And we listen to a lot of ambient music, where there’s not necessarily a strict verse or chorus, when we take those sorts of elements and fit them into a song structure it’s a unique approach to songwriting.

PJ: Textures are really important in our songwriting, there are so many layers to everything.
Adam: Living together and making music together all the time just means one person can try something and everyone feeds into it and works out what they should be doing. It’s not necessarily easy, but we read what each other are doing and react.

Geo: Some of us have been playing together since we were like 10, and there’s aweird relationship with the people you play with, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but we can all tell what we are going for.

PJ: We are echoes of each other definitely.

So far we have heard 2 new singles from you this year, what is next for Bug Teeth?

PJ: We are releasing an EP, not sure when, I hope it’s soon. Not sure if we are allowed to speak about this in interviews but we will be releasing a single with a label in Leeds, which is very exciting. Big things we hope.

Geo: We need more gigs too. But I still find it so hard to see ourselves as professional musicians because I see us as completely ridiculous, we carry our snare drums in a bag for life. What’s endearing is that we don’t really know what we are doing, we talk and think about music every day but it feels like we are winging it, and that’s how we like it.