Easy Life hope to emulate The Streets on their own albums.
The ‘Skeletons’ hitmakers – whose debut album ‘Life’s a Beach’ dropped last month and hit number two in the UK – have been influenced by ‘Dry Your Eyes’ rapper Mike Skinner, and it goes far beyond his “delivery” on 2002’s ‘Original Pirate Material’ and 2004 follow-up ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’.
Frontman Murray Matravers exclusively told BANG Showbiz: “Mike Skinner, those first two albums were so important for me growing up listening to those.
“His delivery is definitely something that I’ve stolen for my own – I’m just a BTEC Mike Skinner, I’m happy to do that.
“Something we did with the album – and something we’re doing on the next project as well – is referencing the album title in the same way that he did on ‘Original Pirate Material’.
“I think it’s quite an interesting to think create a world and keep going on about it throughout the songs. It’s a nice thing to do.”
The band – completed by Sam Hewitt, Oliver Cassidy, Lewis Berry and Jordan Birtles – are forging their own path though, and they are inspired by their eclectic tastes.
Sam added: “We all come from a really weird background of what we grew up listening to and what we listen to now.
“We’re constantly bringing other genres of music to each other and recommending things. The mixing pot is an absolute mess, but it all comes out in the end sounding different and interesting.
“It keeps us all on our toes as well. We’re not doing this because we want to be rich or famous… We love writing music and we love performing it.”
However, they’re certainly hitting the big time after it was announced they’ll be performing a special virtual show at London’s O2 Arena in Epic Games’ ‘Fortnite’ later this week.
Reflecting on the differences between this and a regular live show, Murray said: “The thing is with gigs, obviously you’re limited by the real world and budgets.
“How can you make this exciting? Or perhaps one day you could parachute into a gig and that’s the top tier of how exciting a production could get.
“But in the game, you can just do anything. We’re performing underwater, inside a fish, we get flushed down to the toilet. The possibilities were literally never-ending, we could do anything.”
easy life will be performing at The O2 inside Fortnite Creative – the result of an exclusive partnership between O2, Island Records and Epic Games – at 8.30pm BST this Thursday, 24th June. For more information visit www.priority.o2.co.uk.