There’s a strong case to be made that Crewe is the least culturally significant town in the country.
The word “railway” is mentioned 40 times in the town’s scant Wikipedia page, whilst “music” gets three pretty illustrative mentions: one for an opera singer who was born in the town but basically never lived here; and two references to the town’s live music venues. The most significant of those is the Lyceum Theatre, whose listings as of writing include Jonathan Pie – Work in Progress, Luke Combs UK, and An Evening with Tom Meighan (The Original Voice of Kasabian). The adage of Crewe life is this: there might be nothing worth seeing here, but at least it’s easy to get to somewhere else.
“There was literally nothing when we first started,” UNIVERSITY drummer Joel Smith explains as the band wrap up the first half of their rehearsals for the night and head out for a cig. “There was no curation and none of the bands knew each other. You’d have hardcore bands headlining with like Arctic Monkeys cover bands or metal bands as the main support and then us. It wasn’t even DIY, bro. It was nothing. Empty.”
I’ve always been fascinated by this band. It just seems impossible that there could ever be a band like theirs – one who has a proper album on Transgressive Records, who’ve played in America, who sell out shows in London, who were a genuine word-of-mouth recommendation at an ungodly hour at Green Man Festival – from Crewe. They themselves feel similarly. Singer and guitarist Zak Bowker calls the fact that they hail from these parts “hilarious” and concedes that he “didn’t want to admit it at first.” Meanwhile, Smith relays that there was something quite liberating about their hometown. “Being from Crewe gave us a kind of freedom, you weren’t bound by anything and people thought we’d go nowhere with it anyway,” he says. “It became very insular; we were just trying to impress ourselves. We weren’t in Manchester or London so there was nothing around us to emulate. So we’d end up just trying to emulate our last song and build on that.”
The early stages of the UNIVERSITY saw them hunkered down in bassist Ewan Barton’s dad’s box room, listening to Nouns, playing video games, smoking, and working out what kind of band they wanted to be. “Early days, we’d be there all the time. I’m talking Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, and birthdays. No days off,” Bowker declares. Afforded the opportunity to put full-time hours into the band by the lack of jobs available to them and the lack of funds or real desire to actually go to university themselves, they soon landed on a compelling midpoint between emo, post-hardcore, and math rock.
The early buzz around UNIVERSITY seems mad when you look at where they came from but makes so much sense when you revisit the songs themselves. Squalling walls of guitar trade blows with sections of real, wise-beyond-their-years melodic sections. It’s angry and weird enough to attract the alternative crowd but smart and nerdy enough to reach into other circles far beyond. It’s hard to imagine any other band that sounds remotely like theirs, for example, would get booked for End of the Road or Green Man Festival.
Despite piquing the interest of industry types, you get the sense that moving away was never really on the cards. Instead, they’re still cramming onto once-an-hour buses with too many instruments, and balancing an extensive international tour schedule with regular DIY nights in Northwich and Winsford.
“There’s some people who’d get the tiniest bit of recognition and be like: ‘London is my home. The Windmill is my home.’ It’s like, what the fuck? What are you talking about? What?” Smith balks. Besides, who needs The Windmill when you’ve got The Salty Dog? “That place, especially over the last couple of years, it’s become the spot. It’s better than The Windmill because it’s got a record shop upstairs,” he adds.
With improved infrastructure as venues began to open around them, the band of four made a deliberate effort to lay the foundations of a scene close to home rather than jumping into one further away. “When we started being able to headline, we’d only ever put on us mates. I felt weird at first because I didn’t want it to feel exclusive, but that’s what we ended up doing. That’s what curates a scene,” Bowker explains. “Now we’ve got a thing.”
“They’re what made us want to start a band, watching them around Crewe, Winsford and Northwich. That spawned lots of bands,” says Tom Woolstencroft of noisy emo trio Sativa, some of the aforementioned mates. “It’s kind of mad seeing a band from down the road go to California and open for Deftones, you know? There’s no excuse not to try. As unlikely and as far out as it seems, they’re proof that it can be done.” Leo from the fuzzy, 1990s indie-indebted Myria adds: “There’s definitely a lot more original music now whereas, say, five years ago basically all live music around here was cover bands.”
Whilst there was nothing on UNIVERSITY’s doorstep that excited them when they first started out, the exact opposite is true for those who came after them. Yona, who puts on shows under shuddertothink and Sativa both brought up the fact that UNI’s influence is now so strong that there’s now a real sonic throughline across a lot of the bands circulating in and around Crewe – something the band is aware of. “I guess we got to mould it a bit, it was always going to be the band that got the biggest who’d do that,” says Smith. “So I guess it’s fucking… screaming bands who like math rock and shit. Sorry guys.” Other staples of the Crew City sound are, quote: “Fuck loads of bass feedback” and “tunes with no choruses. Love a tune with no chorus.”
Pretty much everything I’ve ever read about UNIVERSITY has in one way or another made a massive deal out of the fact that they have Eddie (surname officially unknown) play Xbox on stage during their shows. And I mean, I get it. It’s a laugh. But we’re three years on from those first singles and the relentless touring cycle that followed. The tone of all of that early press was very much: “These guys are weirdos from a shithole town but they’re actually alright!” That was probably fair at the time, and was a reasonable angle to cut through the extremely bloated indie music press. Now, though, that description really undersells them. They’ve built something unheard of in recent years out of less than nothing.
Not only do gigs exist in Crewe now, but people regularly turn up early to Pigeon Nights – shows put on by the team behind the North West emo scene publication Pigeonhole – to see local bands play their inaugural shows. There’s a genuine belief that not only does the area have a couple of good bands, but there are plenty more to come.
In their early days, UNIVERSITY made a big song-and-dance about hailing from Crewe because: 1) it was funny; and 2) it was a point of difference. Bands are shouting about being from there now because, unbelievably, Crewe now has clout.
My conversation with UNIVERSITY was sandwiched between two rehearsal sessions, partly at the back of their practice room and largely outside it. They were on their patch and comfortable, trading quips about each other and their friends. They laughed throughout, but nobody smirked when the idea of Crewe having one of the better music scenes in the country was floated. As Smith puts it: “I’ve got a mate who came back after like 10 years living in Bristol and was like: ‘Why is everyone shouting Crewe City at shows? When did this happen?’”
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