Inter­view with drum­mer Jake Bogac­ki, just after Inde­pen­dent Venue Week.

Things are mov­ing at whirl­wind speed for tal­ent­ed young band Work­ing Men’s Club. The three mem­bers – Jake Bogac­ki (drums), Syd­ney Min­sky-Sargeant (vocal­ist, gui­tar) and Giu­lia Bonomet­ti (vocals, gui­tar) have been play­ing at venues in their local area in West York­shire, such as The Trades, Heb­den Bridge and The Gold­en Lion, Tod­mor­den, plus big­ger venues which could have been intim­i­dat­ing for such a fledg­ling act – sup­port­ing Bri­an Jon­estown Mas­sacre at New­castle’s Northum­bria Insti­tute for instance. WMC have signed with HEAVENLY and appeared at The Trades Club, Heb­den Bridge, as part of Inde­pen­dent Venue Week. They also came to the atten­tion of Steve Lamacq, who has been giv­ing the catchy new sin­gle Bad Blood plen­ty of air­time on his show on 6 Music.

It’s not been easy to grab a few min­utes with the busy young band, but I man­aged to ask drum­mer Jake Bogac­ki a few questions:

How did you all meet up orig­i­nal­ly? We met up at col­lege in Man­ches­ter about a year ago, and that’s when we decid­ed to form the band.

You bring in a guest bass play­er when you play live. Have you had any thoughts about hav­ing a fourth per­ma­nent band mem­ber? Yes, up until now we’ve been a 3 piece but when we play live we’ve used mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent peo­ple to fill in for us on bass. How­ev­er… we’ve now found a keep­er! He’s called Liam Ogburn. We’ll be announc­ing more news about this soon.

You’ve just played a gig as part of Inde­pen­dent Venue Week – what does this mean to you? Our first ever show was for Inde­pen­dent Venue Week last year at Night Peo­ple in Man­ches­ter so it feel nice to be a part of it again this year. I think we all have a soft spot for the Trades Club – we always have a great time play­ing there and we also go to gigs there our­selves. There’s a strong sense of com­mu­ni­ty in the place and there’s a fan­tas­tic team work­ing there. With­out them, none of it would be pos­si­ble. And they’ve just put on an amaz­ing week! Hats off to them.

Talk me through your song­writ­ing process. It’s a very col­lab­o­ra­tive process, we all pitch in our own ideas.  The lyrics are writ­ten by Syd and Giu­lia usu­al­ly on a song by song basis. Syd usu­al­ly takes the lead on songs that he sings on and Giu­lia with the songs she sings on – they share depend­ing on which one of them is to lead the vocals on a par­tic­u­lar track.

Who would you say are your major influ­ences? You’ve got that jagged, nervy Gang of Four-style gui­tar riff going on on the new sin­gle, are Go4 on your radar? We’re fans of The Vel­vet Under­ground, Talk­ing Heads, The Clean, Tele­vi­sion and Delta 5. And yes, we real­ly like Gang of Four! I think their first album Enter­tain­ment is prob­a­bly one of the best albums ever made. 

For such a young band, you’ve played some fair­ly high pro­file gigs. Do you get ner­vous going out on stage?  We did at first, but the more we play, the more con­fi­dent we get. 

Have there been a lot of changes for you now you are signed? Yes thanks to Dave, Andy, Josh, Will, Dil­lon, Alex, Tom­my and all at Melod­ic and Inhouse press. We’ve been able to open up to the rest of the world and not just be a pres­ence in the north west of Eng­land. Its crazy to think we’ve now been playlist­ed on nation­al radio when a few months ago we were play­ing at our local pub. 

What are you hop­ing for this year? More sin­gles.. an album maybe? At the moment we’re just tak­ing it as it comes, we’ve got sev­er­al gigs on up and down the UK, so that’s our main focus for now. The B side to Bad Blood will come out on the 15th of Feb­ru­ary, after that we’re just gonna have to sit tight and see what hap­pens lat­er in the year . 

And what about gigs and fes­ti­vals? We’re hop­ing to release some more music this year. Yes, we real­ly wan­to to play some fes­ti­vals this sum­mer; Green Man, End of the Road and Lat­i­tude are just a few of many we’d love to per­form at.

You did the art­work for the sleeve of the sin­gle Bad Blood, it’s a beau­ti­ful image and it’s had some pos­i­tive feed­back! Thanks! Yes, I’m hop­ing to do our first album cov­er too.

Tell me about the build­ing on the cov­er? It’s a pho­to­graph I took a few years ago – it is one of the last stand­ing mills in Heb­den Bridge. It’s a very icon­ic piece of archi­tec­ture and I’ve always been fas­ci­nat­ed by it. The town is for­ev­er chang­ing around it yet it is still stand­ing there as it was over a cen­tu­ry ago, untouched. 

There’s a more recent quick inter­view with WMC here

Octo­ber 2019: There have been line­up changes and Jake has now left Work­ing Mens Club – his future music plans will be revealed in due course…