Roy Stride tells his kids that his covers of 1980s classics are his own.
The 44-year-old singer – who has Freddie and Rosie with his wife Lucy – has released a string of top-selling albums since launching Indie rock band Scouting For Girls with Greg Churchouse and Peter Ellard in 2005 and has also covered 1980s pop classics like Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ as part of their 2021 record ‘Easy Cover’ but because his children don’t really understand his job, he passes the songs off as his own.
He told The Daily Star newspaper’s Wired column: “My kids, especially my son, don’t really get what we do. But they do love the 80s covers and I pass them off as my own! They go ‘Daddy, is this one of yours?’ and I go ‘Yeah, yeah this is one of mine, Rosie. Pretty good, isn’t it?”
Pete quipped: “She will be so heartbroken when she finds out. She’ll be like ‘Dad, someone called Cyndi Lauper has covered your song!'”
Meanwhile, the ‘She’s So Lovely’ hitmaker went on to add that his daughter has even been earning her pocket money by helping out the band with their new album, and was given the duty of removing all the cling film from copies of the CD ahead of the release ready for the rockers to sign.
He added: “She was paid to take all the cling film off the records before we signed them, it wasn’t quite minimum wage and it took her a lot longer than we thought it would!”
The ‘Heartbeat’ rockers were the “largest unsigned band in the UK” after they found fame on now-defunct social media platform MySpace but Roy went on to admit that they are a bit “too old” now to think about utilising more modern platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to connect with their fans.
He added: “Honestly, we’re not really sure on TikTok, we are a bit too old. We were the biggest unsigned band in the UK and I remember when we had a meeting with Sony when they first signed us we said ‘Look, we don’t need a website, we are massive on MySpace and that’s not ever going to go” How wrong I was! We were really late to Instagram and we are already late to TikTok.”
‘The Place We Used To Meet’ is out on October 14.