Marmozets Prove Families That Play Together, Stay Together

English math-rockers Marmozets are a family band, a quintet comprised of two sets of siblings: the MacIntyres (Rebecca, Sam, Josh) and the Bottomleys (Jack and Will). Suitably, they're a band that owes a huge debt to their families.

"Our dad and my mum have both been into music all their lives," says guitarist Jack Bottomley, 25. "When my dad would drop me at football practice, he used to just blast loads of records I still listen to now: Pixies, Big Black, Nirvana. I used to get myself revved up by listening to that then go run around and play football for an hour and a half. I discovered The White Stripes through my uncle who was a big fan of theirs. It was when they only had three CDs out, and I just bought all them and soaked them up like a sponge. It was like I'd found this new world."

Growing up in West Yorkshire, Jack (the elder of the two Bottomleys) went through childhood loves that were "pretty standard procedure for a lad in England": first he was obsessed with football, then skateboarding, then music. "I was so poor I used to just sit in my room all the time, play guitar, look up lessons online, look up other guitarists [playing]," he recounts of his formative years. Jack and his brother used to jam in their bedroom and "put on shows for [their] parents", calling themselves "The Arrows", he tells us. But they never played a show. "It was just fun."

Marmozets started when Jack was just 14. "We were aged between 13 and 15 when we started, so it was almost impossible to get a gig anywhere," he recounts. But their parents - the Bottomleys' dad and the MacIntyres' mum - used to go online and find them gigs around Leeds and Bradford. They found a home at The 1 In 12 Club, a 100-capacity punk dive founded on anarchist principles. "It was where The Cult did their first shows and New Model Army, another big Bradford band, they played there," Bottomley says. "So we just used to gig there as much as we could; most weekends we'd play there doing the same set every time, playing the same song twice because we didn't have enough to fill out half an hour."

In between their weekend sets, the band were still in school. Bottomley took subjects that he thought could help the band - music theory, graphic design, business - but never dreamed their collective adolescent obsession would bear fruit. "I was always very realistic, so I knew that getting to be in a famous band was about as difficult as getting to be a professional footballer," he says. "It was my dream to play music, but I never really thought that I'd be able to."

When Marmozets signed with Roadrunner in 2013, they were still in, or just barely out of, their teens. When they released their debut LP, The Weird And Wonderful Marmozets, in 2014, they found the career that they'd dreamed of, but also a bunch of comparisons that were just as unexpected. "We used to get compared to bands like Paramore or Flyleaf, purely because we had a girl singer, which always made us be like, 'Ugh, ok'," Bottomley says. "We felt a bit pigeonholed. It was still successful bands we were being compared to, so it wasn't the end of the world. But it just wasn't how we saw ourselves, at all."

In writing their second LP, Marmozets upped the sense of ambition, wanting to "innovate" and "write better material". They called it, tellingly, Knowing What You Know Now. The album was released after a health scare: Rebecca MacIntyre dealing with the fallout of hypermobility syndrome, which required, essentially, learning to walk again. Heading back out on the road, a ready-made support system was in place: Marmozets being, literally, family.

"It's definitely a positive thing, being siblings," Bottomley says. "We know each other inside-out, completely. We're super-close. It just helps everything. Obviously, we've never known it any other way - we've been doing this for ten years, it's all we've ever done - but, it's so lovely to have family around. It's great, at shows, when both sets of families show up. It's just nice."