Meet Bedroom vacation
Manchester, england Indie band
released November - 2024
If you’re interested in staying up to date with today’s music scene, Bedroom Vacation is definitely one to watch. The band consists of 5 childhood best friends who all came together and discovered their love for music. Heavily inspired by both shoegaze and ambient music, the Manchester-based band released their first official album in 2023 entitled Vacation 1, and 3 singles this year. Getting to know the band, I learned more about the inspiration behind their sound as well as how the band came to be.
I started my interview with the band’s bassist/guitarist, Lucas. I quickly gathered that he was the head of the band, as he was the one who started the group. I found his introduction to music to be a very special story. He began explaining to me that his dad was a folk guitarist, “as a young kid from the age of 6 or 7, every Friday he used to take me to this tiny club with a bunch of old dudes and accordions and all sorts of old english and irish folk songs”. He also revealed that his dad was the first person to show him a range of music, “he also then put me onto bands like the beastie boys which opened my eyes to what you can really do with the guitar”.
His bandmate, best friend, and second person to join the band was Ben. Ben gave more insight on how exactly they came together in the early days of Bedroom Vacation. “we live very close to each other and we started seeing each other at the skate park and chatting about music and then slowly we just started hanging out in bedrooms with computers and just started trying to record, playing guitar”.
Later down the line, Lucas’s sibling, Ruben joined the band, which had an interesting affect on their relationship. Ruben told me that “(Lucas) was always playing guitar, and as a kid I wasn’t too musical, but I remember he was in a band called The Prunes back in the day and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever”. After former members of the band left, Ruben had a chance to take over, “in the meantime i had been learning guitar and stuff just out of inspiration from him so i just kind of fell into the band i guess” . I found this story very touching, as they also told me that before the band they weren’t very close and were more like “roomates” than siblings.
Bedroom Vacation band run through the rainy streets of Paris for Noize Magazine November 2024 edition - Shot by Alessandra Berry for Noize Magazine
The rest of the band includes Tom, the band’s drummer, and Tom Hudson, the backing Guitarist. The two have known one another since they were young kids and started exploring music together. “I started playing the drums when i was about 7," said the drummer. However, he admitted that he “wasnt really too into music until lockdown when i had nothing to do.”, which lead to his joining of Bedroom Vacation in 2020.
Something else about the band that interested me when speaking with them was their inspirations. What drove them to make the music that they make today? “Ive experimented with a little bit of ambient music” Ruben admitted. Lucas has also worked on some of his own ambient music. “we spent so much time recording and mixing band music at home that anything with lyrics on it just started to piss me off and just get in the way of everything else that I really just needed to slow down.”, explained Lucas. Ruben also had a specific reason behind his love for making ambient music, stating that he loves “making something thats purely just weird and interesting. You can get locked in such a box with trying to make a certain sound or trying to be certain genre and it takes away from your creative output, really.”. Tom Hudson also studies and creates ambient music as a part of his university course. Hudson studies classical music…
A common theme in my conversations with the band’s members was their discovery of music at a young age. Most of them started playing music so young that they were unafraid of failure or “not being good enough”. “i think when your’e that young, your’e still into toys and stuff like that and guitar pedals are essentially toys.”, Lucas explained to me. He then went on to say that “since then we've moved on and matured a bit through just tightening it up and knocking things out that are unnecessary but keeping the core themes that were there.”. Tom Hudson went through a similar experience, saying “We couldnt really play our instruments, but then we kind of realized its just so fun and i just kind of wanted to do that for the rest of my life.”. These conversations intrigued me because
there is an inexplicable child-like wonder to their music.
Their use of music that they experimented with at such a young age and changing it to fit who they’ve grown into really shows how full circle they’ve come as a band and artists individually.
