Growing up quickly
Young for Eternity was only an album title — this band knows the music biz
John Kendle

It’s a long way from Welwyn Garden City to Bakersfield, Calif. Just ask Charlotte Cooper, 20-year-old bassist/singer with The Subways, a guitar-based rock trio that hails from the small British town with the bucolic-sounding name.
“It’s just insane and crazy for us to be here, three kids from the countryside,” Cooper says by phone from northern California.

“This is by far the biggest tour we’ve ever done. We’ve been here for about four weeks and we’ve been working with Taking Back Sunday and Angels & Airwaves. The other bands have been lovely to us, and their fans come early, which has been good for us.”

Cooper may be somewhat overwhelmed by her surroundings, but The Subways — which also includes guitarist Billy Lunn, 21, and his drummer brother Josh Morgan, 20 — aren’t exactly music-biz neophytes, either.

The threesome won the Unsigned Band competition at the 2004 Glastonbury festival, and singer-turned-producer Ian Broudie, former frontman of The Lightning Seeds, produced the group’s first album, Young for Eternity. That 2005 recording has already yielded two songs, Rock & Roll Queen and Oh Yeah, which have become popular on U.S. modern rock radio stations.

So Cooper understands how the business works, but says she still has a hard time believing the trio has come so far. The three musicians first met as young teens when they were involved with the same competitive swim team and she and Lunn became boyfriend and girlfriend (they are now engaged).

“We all sort of got into music together with things like Oasis and Nirvana. Then (the brothers) started playing instruments and Billy taught me to play guitar,” Cooper says.
v The trio’s first gig was as part of local band battle, and they were ultimately semi-finalists.

“We really learned how to be a band by playing live, and we got more confident as we went on and so started playing shows in places like Bristol and Manchester and London.

“When we first started we were doing mostly covers, only friends and family came to see us, and we were 15-year-olds playing with 30-year-olds,” she recalls.

Now, though, the group is travelling across North America in a tour bus with a soundman/tour manager, a guitar technician and a drum tech.

“Things have picked up quite suddenly for us,” she admits. “It’s amazing to see that people over here know the words to our songs, too. Some people know the words to all the songs, but most people who sing along just know Oh Yeah and Rock & Roll Queen.”

If it sounds like The Subways might be having the time of their lives, Cooper says that may be so. She adds, though, that a lot of hard work and determination have gone into getting where they are.

“Since we were young, all we have thought about and talked about has been music,” she says. “We spent hours and hours and hours.”