Pictured from left: Matt Mole, Amina Bates, Tom Hutt and Sarah Daly
by Mary Waldron
Inside the crowded ladies room of the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa, Calif., a herd of indie 20-somethings anxiously swarm around Sarah Daly, lead vocalist and bassist for the quickly rising London rock band Scanners, questioning her about her music and travels. Music violently booms from the nearby DJ booth as Daly, a haunting beauty with bangs in her face and blue eyes beaming through, answers politely in a humble and enchanting British accent.
Ten minutes ago, Daly was on stage growling, “I’ll take you to my grave;” lyrics from her band’s latest single, “Salvation,” with fury that you’d imagine would startle the meek English girl from the bathroom. On the crimson-lit stage tucked away in the bustling club, Daly’s slinky silhouette jolts and sways along with her melodic moans, which are pleasantly reminiscent of PJ Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux. Her showmanship and poise are infused with a fiery passion that’s quite refreshing.
But Daly didn’t always put her dark side on display.
Sarah Daly
“I used to sing when I was little, but I got shy when I was a teenager,” Daly says of her musical roots, which began at age 2 when she asked her mom for violin lessons. “Playing with my first band was quite good practice for getting through my stage fright,” she adds. Raised in London, Daly’s childhood was flooded with classic rock acts like David Bowie, The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, as she and her friend used to steal their older brothers’ records. Naturally, she took up guitar as a teenager.
As Daly grew musically, she became a fan of the minimalist music movement, following founding composers such as Steve Reich, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt. Inspired by the movement, she later enrolled in the University of Salford in Manchester to study music composition. Around this time, Daly joined her first band, Delica, playing guitar with the group until she met Matt Mole in 2004. The couple began songwriting together, and pretty soon they were playing shows with only a drum machine to back them up. Throwing around many band names that just sounded “silly” to them, Daly and Mole finally decided on the name Scanners while watching the 1981 sci-fi film of the same name. “I still haven’t seen the end of the film. I should probably get around to that,” Daly jokes.
Frustrated with the band’s limited abilities with only two members, Scanners sought additional band mates. “We could just never get all the parts,” Daly said of the early Scanners duo. The group finally took shape in 2005 when mutual friend Amina Bates joined on guitar, keyboard and backup vocals and recent London implant Tom Hutt took over for the drum machine. Daly learned to play bass and assumed lead vocals. Mole remained on guitars, synths and backup vocals.
Scanners released their debut album Violence is Golden through Dim Mak Records, the label of Los Angeles DJ and record producer Steve Aoki, who signed bands like Bloc Party and The Kills. When the record dropped in 2006, Scanners toured the world with bands including The Horrors, The Wedding Present, The Charlatans, Mindless Self Indulgence and more.
The group continued writing and recording the next album Submarine during a busy touring schedule. Finally, the album was done in late 2008, but record label bureaucracy delayed the U.S. release until last February. Daly describes their sophomore release as “more coherent” than the first album, saying, “These songs were written closer together. Violence is Golden has some really early songs and represents four years of writing.” Submarine was recorded in Daly’s living room, saving the band studio time expenses. The group was also able to experiment with a variety of instruments on this record, thanks to Bates’ collection she acquired while working at a music shop in London. This, along with the support of Daly’s violin and cello playing, created an array of moods on the album.
These collages of emotions can also be heard in Scanners’ other work. The band’s ability to produce such a range of songs that sound very distinguished from one another is something Daly says she quite likes. “I don’t like all the songs to sound the same,” she says. Even in the song “In my Dreams,” from Violence is Golden, Daly gears back and forth between an ethereal Hope-Sandoval-sounding serenade and a PJ-Harvey-like power belt in seconds flat.
After wrapping up a European tour last winter with actress Juliette Lewis’ band Juliette and the Licks, Scanners recently traveled to the U.S. to shoot the music video for their single “We Never Close Our Eyes.” Besides playing Costa Mesa’s Detroit Bar, they did a mini-tour of Southern California and Texas. Scanners will play a free show with So Many Wizards at the Silverlake Lounge tonight, April 5. The final show of the tour is with Transfer this Wednesday, April 7 at Beauty Bar in San Diego.
Pictured from left: Sarah Daly, Matt Mole, Amina Bates and Tom Hutt
With a collection of songs written and ready to record, Scanners will return to London next week to start composing their third album. “We’re just going to concentrate on being together and just playing—banging things around and seeing what happens,” Daly says. Daly also revealed her plans to go to film school sometime in the future. A longtime fan of black-and-white suspense films and directors like Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor, she says, “I love the beauty of the cinematic experience. It allows you to create an atmosphere like in music.”
In between writing and recording, the group anticipates touring more of Europe as well as Australia and Japan to promote Submarine; something that Daly says just makes her happy. “I don’t sit around thinking, ‘Is my face on a billboard? That would make me happy.’ It’s the music that makes me happy. I get to travel and play music. That’s what makes me happy.”
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Scanners with So Many Wizards, Big Whup, Voice on Tape and The Fall Trees at the Silverlake Lounge
Monday, April 5, 2010. Show starts at 8 p.m. Cover is free.
2906 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
323-666-2407
Scanners with Transfer, Lyon Crowns and DJ Al Squared at Beauty Bar in San Diego.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010. Doors are at 9 p.m. Cover is $14.
4746 El Cajon Blvd., San Diego, CA 92115
619-516-4746
For more information, visit:
http://www.foldsilverlake.com/framesschedule.html
Garrett Nickelsen, bassist for The Maine, stopped to chat with us. We brought him a whole list of fan questions and he talked about everything from singing in the shower to game show fantasies.
All of Catharine Acurso’s photos can be found 
Instead of joining the crowd, we decided to head over to see You Me At Six sing for their hot, sweaty pop punk set. With heavy bass, rock distortion, and hangovers from the night before, You Me at Six played “Finders Keepers” to a huge crowd—much bigger than I saw the rest of the day at the Kevin Says stage.
This Providence from Seattle (with accents that might suggest otherwise?) were the next band we checked out on the Kevin Says stage. If it’s possible to shred with a tambourine, This Providence did just that. In “Playing the Villian,” the lyrics are viscous: “I hate who you’ve become, I don’t know you anymore.” You’d never know so much rock came from men with such baby faces. Everyone clapped along to “That Girl’s a Trick” and everyone shouted the lyrics to “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” with their hands in the air.
As the sun started to set, the bands only kept getting better. All Time Low hit the stage to “I’m getting fucked up…lets get drunk.” The ATL crew kicked off their set with their newest single “Weightless” jetting quickly into their foul mouth antics: “This is not a g-d damn concert, it’s a revolution… filled with dicks and titties, blood and sweat and tears… and cats that I hit in my car on the way to work… which is not true because I’ve never had a job in my life.” They played all their favorites—“Jasey Rae,” “Poppin’ Champagne” (with a rock thrash interlude), “Lost in Stereo” (off their newest release Nothing Personal), and “Six Feet Under the Stars.” Someone threw a pair of boxers on stage dripping with sweat and later Alex yelled that we all needed to get “a little more naked.” All ages of women (and men in women’s pants) were singing along to the poppy pop punk hooligans.
with, ADTR’s set quickly stole my heart. Super high energy and a sea of moshing and fist throwing. The air seemed to cool down just in time for the set so that we could mosh especially hard. The guys on stage seemed so genuine and earnest. The band shouted from the stage that “LA has been here from the start.” They sang an equal number of songs from their newest release Homesick and older songs like “I’m Made of Wax, Larry, What Are You Made Of?” and “Show ‘em the Ropes” with intense lyrics and even more intense guitar shredding. I felt the music through the crowd and it was a great feeling.
most recent releases Shudder and The Walking Wounded and a few of some oldies. “Devotion and Desire” set the mood for the set as Anthony’s smooth vocals wailed “I know the spark inside your eyes was just the match I use to set myself on fire.” Playing other favorites like “The Walking Wounded,” “Carry On,” and “Head On a Plate” caused the few who weren’t singing along to mosh in a circle pit.
It’s rare that I stay till the end of the day at Warped Tour but this year it seemed as though over half the attendees had the same reason to stay–3Oh!3. 3Oh!3 has managed to confuse people into liking them. Not that their music isn’t awesome, but they defy categorization and therefore manage to cross over some thought-to-be impenetrable divides.
Getting to chat with 
