Cairo keyboardist and songwriter Rob Cottingham was recently interviewed by Velvet Thunder about Cairo, the new album Nemesis and our future plans as a band. You can read an excerpt from the interview below or read the full interview here.
For you, does Nemesis suggest Cairo has made real progress since the release of Say?
I think so. I mean, I’m hardly likely to say no, am I (laughs). As a band you’re always trying to progress. What I would say is we’ve progressed as a band because it’s had more band input. The first album, I just wrote it and formed a band and we did it. We didn’t really know each other so well then, so the album’s mostly me in a way. But, there’s been a lot more band input on Nemesis and I think it’s been more effective. So, as a band, yes, we’ve progressed as we’ve now known each other over six years, and we can be open and constructive with each other about what can be done to improve the music, which is great. Say didn’t sound as much like Cairo then as we do now, if this makes any sense. So, yes, the band’s progressed, though, musically, Say still stands up on its own as a piece of music. You have to be honest… if I didn’t feel we’d progressed as a band, or the album didn’t stand up as a better album, I wouldn’t put it out. That’s a personal choice. I know, musicians sometimes have to get stuff out, forced by whoever or whatever, but I wouldn’t have put Nemesis out if I didn’t think it stood up.
The whole album’s good but a particular favourite is the instrumental, Save The Earth, which is like a ‘what are we doing to the planet?’ song.
It is, and on the album cover there are words relating to the song, which I wanted people to read it in their own voice, in their own head. Thematically the song’s fundamental to the whole album, which is how we treat mother earth. Would we treat our own mother like this, given what mother earth gives us… water, air, etc, all that… and it’s a fact we abuse it. The whole point behind Nemesis is we should all look at ourselves individually and see what small changes we could make, as a silent majority, which would help the planet, because what we’re doing to our planet’s crazy. There’re a lot of extreme voices out there who make a lot of noise and champion extreme causes, but it’s the silent majority making the smallest changes which will make the biggest difference to our lives.
There’s a new album out and ‘live’ dates on the horizon… what next for the scarab??
So, what’s next for the scarab is we’re looking at a possible UK tour, later in the year, to get Nemesis out there. We’re also writing album three, and we’re aiming to get the third album out next year so we don’t have another six year wait for the next album! I didn’t know about the pandemic coming, and I didn’t know we were gonna have the ‘Trussonomics’ fiscal event with all investment stopping, so there’ve been delays, but now these things have stopped and things are up and running and there’s momentum going, we can do things. For me it was really frustrating we couldn’t get Nemesis out, given we recorded the album in March 2022, so for the fans it’s new music but, for us, we’ve known this stuff for a long time and we wanted to get it out there as we’re proud of it, but we also wanna get another album out next year, if we can, to keep the momentum going again. If we get asked to play any festivals, we’ll do them, and there’s also the possibility of a single, a brand new song.
So we won’t have to wait until 2029 for the next album!!
No (laughs)… you have my word! The next album will be out before 2029!
