These Lottery Winners give many good reasons to leave the house
THE LOTTERY WINNERS The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea Thursday, May 5 wedgewood-rooms.co.uk
With their usual creative avenues cut off, there have been many projects born out of the pandemic that might never have otherwise happened.
The unexpected rise of the sea shanty and an unusual cover choice by a fast-rising indie-pop band, combined with the social media platform of the moment, gifted us with a rather surreal song.
And so we have The Lottery Winners’ cover of the 2005 Nickelback global smash hit Rockstar, in a sea shanty style. With contributions from the Canadian hard-rock act themselves.
‘I'm still not sure how that happened,’ laughs The Lottery Singers’ frontman Thom Rylance. ‘I'm still not sure if it actually did happen or if I dreamt it, but it was a bizarre time.’
The band, who hail from Leigh in Wigan, had been looking into TikTok, and Thom was on the phone with guitarist/vocalist Robert Lally, suggesting, given their popularity, that they try a sea shanty.
‘So he said, do a sea shanty of what? I just happened to be cleaning my house at the time, and I had this Spotify playlist on called Cleaning Bangers, and Nickelback's Rockstar just happened to be on, so I said, just do this one man, I think it'll work...’
Their version instantly went viral, bringing it to the attention of the song's writers.
‘Nickelback got in touch the next day and were like, let's do this together, so we did, and theirs went viral as well. They wanted to release it properly, and that will now forever sit at the top of our Spotify most popular songs chart.’ Thom laughs – since early 2021 the song has racked up just shy of 10m streams on Spotify.
Although still popular Nickelback are often reviled as terminally uncool. Were the Winners ever worried about teaming up with them?
‘They're one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, so we were never going to say no to it!
‘We’re really serious about what we do, but there's always a tongue-incheek outlook in our band.’
The band's second album proper, Something To Leave the House For, hit 11 in the charts on its release last December, and the hard-working band have been tipped for the top.
And although they hail from the north-west, the band have a close affinity with Portsmouth. They are managed and produced by Tristan Ivemy, who is from Portsmouth, and they also played a memorable opening slot on the main stage at last year's Victorious Festival.
‘It feels like a second home now,’ says Thom. ‘I love Pompey, I really do. It reminds me of home.
‘I think people are really proud to be from Portsmouth, and that feeling is quite common in working class towns and where I'm from. We fit in in Pompey.
‘We had a great Victorious festival. We didn't know what to expect – when you get those early slots, you could end up with nobody there.
‘But it turned out we were playing to loads of people and everybody said it was amazing.’
With the band now on tour, they hope to make up for lost time. After all, they released their self-titled debut just as the first lockdown was announced in March 2020.
‘That first week of lockdown was supposed to be the week we broke through, went out on tour and made a difference, you know?
‘It would have been really easy to get disheartened – everybody was going through it obviously – but we had the choice of whether to stop and mope or to throw everything into it and we did the latter.
‘We wrote so many songs, we made our own TV show with crazy guests which ended up on Sky TV, we put a covers album together by pinging over audio files to each other. We really just didn't stop.’
The band’s name suggests someone incredibly lucky – but this is one band clearly not willing to sit back and let others make their luck for them.