Welcome back to another edition of Let's Talk Retro with Merseyside’s very own Crawlers, an incredible band that you’ll no doubt have seen playing sold-out shows and festivals all across the world and whose music has captured the hearts and minds of a generation.
While you might already know that they’re signed to Polydor Records and no strangers to sharing stages with bands like My Chemical Romance and Jane’s Addiction, it might come as a surprise as to how much Retro Gaming has played an important part in their lives growing up, and how it continues to provide inspiration both on and off the tour bus.
I sat down with Holly, Liv, and Harry on the Retro Dodo Podcast to talk about all things Zelda, speedrunning classic Resident Evil games, taking Pokémon Nuzlocking rules to the next level, how video game music influences the writing process, and much more! And for those of you wondering where Amy is, she's not really a gamer so chose to sit this one out!
The following article has been created using snippets from Episode 91 of the Retro Dodo Podcast, so if you like what you've read and want to hear more from Crawlers, then listen back to the full episode here or at the bottom of this article!
Getting To Know Holly, Harry, & Liv From Crawlers
Retro Dodo: Welcome back to another episode of Let's Talk Retro. Today I am joined by three of the four members of Crawlers - Harry, Liv, & Holly. Thanks for joining us, guys! So, for anyone who hasn't listened to your music before, do you guys want to just go through and give us a little brief introduction as to who you are and what you do? I sound like I'm on a game show, don't I?
Holly: I feel like I'm on The Chase!
Liv: Yeah! Well, we are an alternative rock band from the Northwest. We started in Warrington, and then we ended up growing in Liverpool. And we met Harry probably about two years into our journey. From there we just sort of we played every gig we could get our hands on, probably overdoing it really. Everyone was sort of sick of hearing the name around Liverpool, and we just kind of grew and grew and grew really, got very lucky and found a very, very wonderful fan base who are super dedicated and are just the sweetest people you could ever meet. And here we are, where we are today.
Retro Dodo: Talking to a bald Northerner about retro games on a Thursday afternoon!
Liv: I wouldn't want to do anything else!
Retro Dodo: I mean, you guys have had some amazing success with your EPs, and you've toured with some fantastic people. The fact that you guys are touring with Hot Mulligan later this year is making me insanely jealous. You've played with Jane's Addiction, Royal Blood, the list goes on! And you've not been doing this incredibly long either, have you? It's been quite like a springboard to success, as it were.
Liv: Yeah, I mean, we've been we've all been in bands since we were like no age really, but Crawlers itself started in about 2018. And then, like I say, we just kind of carried on from there. We started writing our own music immediately. The very first song that we ever wrote was the very first song that we ever released, which was 'So Tired'. And we've come a long way since then. Yeah.
Harry: I swooped in at the right moment just as things started kicking off. I reaped the benefit. I was actually a Crawlers fan before I joined the band. I'd done a review of Hush, which was the latest single at the time. And then literally two weeks later, they needed a drummer. So I was like, 'Hello, I'll swoop in here.'
Retro Dodo: That's the power of incredible writing, and this is the part where I segue into Retro Gaming.
Holly: Or what about Sega-ue, as in SEEEGGAAA?
Harry: And on that note, thanks for having us!
Retro Dodo: I'm now out of a job, Holly, that's brilliant!
Why was I twelve, speedrunning Resident Evil 4?
Holly Minto, Crawlers
Gaming & Gigging Go Hand In Hand
Retro Dodo: So, you guys tour a lot and spend a lot of time gigging. What part does gaming play in your everyday lives and your touring and gigging? Is it something you use to wind down or when you want a little break from the writing process?
Harry: I think I wouldn't be able to tour America if I didn't have a switch to play in the back of the van or the car, wherever we're traveling in, because it's like... it's such a big country. You play one show in one city and then you've got a show the next day or in two days time in the next city, and that next city is like a 16-hour drive. I would not be able to just sit in the back of a van, like listening to music for more than a few hours, then eventually it's like, 'No, I need something to do. I need something to play on.'
Retro Dodo: So what are you playing on there then? What's the go-to?
Harry: Well, on Jane's Addiction, it was Liv's copy of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And I just, I've never played a Zelda game before. And that was the first.
Retro Dodo: That's a big thing to admit on a retro gaming podcast, man. That's very, very brave.
Harry: Well, I was pleasantly surprised. I think it's one of the first RPG games where usually when I play an RPG game, I'll play like the main quests and then boom, that's it. I get bored of it then. It was the first RPG game where it's like, 'I actually want to do the side quests. I actually want to do all the puzzles on the side.' 'Cause it's like, the premise of the game is you can do that last mission straight away if you want to, but obviously you can't cause you need to go out, go about gather everything you need, then go do that main quest. So it's the first game I've ever played where it's like, 'No, you need to do all this stuff on like all these side quests in order to not only appreciate the game, but to get to the end.' I loved every minute of it.
Retro Dodo: So if you're the Zelda fan, Liv, then what is your go-to Zelda game?
Liv: So my actual first start with Zelda was Twilight Princess, and I was about seven. It wasn't long after the game had been released. My mum was more of the gamer in the family, if you want to call it that. She played the original Doom when she was meant to be working. She'd get it on the work computer, and everyone would gather around and sort of take turns. When I was a kid, we had a PlayStation 1, and I used to play a lot of the Spyro games back then
Liv: So gaming was always kind of just there in my life. Twilight Princess was a bit of a different world for me to get used to, but I very quickly fell in love with it. And then when I was a little bit older, I managed to get a copy of Ocarina of Time, and I completely fell in love with it. It completely changed the way that I saw games and the whole Zelda franchise, and after I'd finished that one, I immediately went on to Majora's Mask, and I found that a lot of the gameplay was very similar to Ocarina of Time and it made me love it even more. So it kind of became a thing when I was like 15 where I just wouldn't shut up about these games and was trying to get everyone onto them. I didn't have very nerdy friends growing up, so they were all just a bit like 'mm-hmm.' I didn't really enjoy Skyward Sword, but I preferred Wind Waker. That was quite fun.
Liv: But when Breath of the Wild came out I was super super excited and I'm gonna say something really controversial. I bought it and I didn't get very far into it because I just didn't love it. I think I had such an expectation for it to be like Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask because I loved those games so much that to have a different kind of gameplay again, don't think it was, it wasn't quite what I was looking for in a game really. So I sort of left it alone a bit. So that's why when Harry was like, oh, this game's amazing, it was brilliant for me because I love Zelda so much.
Speedrunning Resident Evil
Retro Dodo: So, from your Sega joke earlier, Holly, have you grown pulling off all-nighters on Sonic?
Holly: Yeah, so I feel like my gaming story is quite different from Liv and Harry's to be honest. I have never done anything casually in my entire life; If I'm not the best at something, I don't wanna do it. So the first thing that kind of started me off is I had the original Game Boy my dad got me, and then moved onto playing Sonic.
So much so that the first drawing I ever brought home to my mum from nursery was a picture of me and Sonic holding hands under the rainbow, which I think really sums up who I am as a person today, to be honest. And I remember begging for the Game Boy Advance when that came out and playing all the Sonic Advance games. Sonic Advance 2 was my personal favourite when you could flip-flop between Sonic and Tails.
Holly: I loved Sonic, but that was the thing that got me into the real thing that ruined my life - Pokémon. So I am the biggest Pokémon nerd ever. And it's revisited my life very recently with the trading cards. So, so much of a nerd; I used to have a banner on my wall when I grew up, and every day before I got up, I needed to say the Kanto and Johto Pokedex in my head before I left my room, which is really funny. I look back now and I'm like, 'probably should have known that I was a little bit like, you know, ADHD on the spectrum or something.'
Holly: My first kind of official game was Pearl, but then I started exploring the older games. I got Crystal and Emerald, and my Emerald cartridge was actually broken. There was a few kind of botched batches where time-based events would occur. And if you tapped the cartridge, it would delete your save game. The family arguments we had, because they did this thing where if my sister had a fight with me, she'd tap my Emerald card and just delete my game. It was awful.
Holly: I have finished Emerald so many times since, but like the after game, I only really got to do once I got Omega Ruby because my game would always delete before like all the like post game, which like kind of sucked. But yeah, I trained all my Pokemon to be like competitive battlers. And then I got into my like really nerdy era, which is when I got into Resident Evil.
Holly: So I started with Resi 4, and I became a speedrunner at that game. I look back, I'm like, 'Why was I twelve, speedrunning Resident Evil 4?' Like, it's so stupid. So much so that all my English essays would be about Resident Evil 4, or I started getting into like, Resident Evil 3, as well, with Jill and Professor X. I love Resident Evil.
Holly: I don't know why everyone always talks about, 'Oh, Resi 4 is where it starts to get more action-heavy. It's basically a Legend of Zelda game, the exact kind of turn-based action with regards to how you kill the bosses. It was very similar to The Legend of Zelda. Coincidentally, my favorite Legend of Zelda game is Phantom of the Hourglass. I love Toon Link. I loved that game. I just hated how it had no post-game.
Retro Dodo: You're throwing so many curve balls. don't honestly, don't know, but there's so many things, there's so many things you've said that I'm like, I need to go back to. You're only person I know who's compared Resident Evil 4 to The Legend of Zelda. That's wild.
Holly: It's so similar though! Honestly, I think the bosses are so similar. Like in Legend of Zelda, it's always like, 'You've got to hit here, hit here, hit here. You think about any of the bosses in Resi 4 and it's the same. Obviously, when they came out with the remake I finished it in two days, because I used to speedrun it. So I was like locked in. These guys were like, 'Where's Holly gone?'
Nuzlocke Rules & How Gaming Influences The Writing Process
Retro Dodo: Normally,, I play Pokémon to relax, but I feel like you're the perfect person to get into Nuzlocke rules Holly.
Holly: Yeah, I remember playing my first Nuzlocke, and I think I did it on Pokémon Pearl. Obviously restarted my game. This was at the beautiful point where it was really easy to trade between games. So I just put all my Pokémon on Black so I could go on Pearl and use that for like challenges. And I can't remember how old I was, but definitely not emotionally mature enough to be doing something like this. I ended up with my starter, which was a Piplup and eventually an Empoleon, dying in the Elite Four. I cried about it, and my mum told me I could just heal it. I was like, 'You don't understand, he's dead. He's dead. I've had him from the start. He's really dead.'
Retro Dodo: Everyone remembers the first time you had to go to a Poké Center and you feel like your Pikachu is not going to come back again. And then he does, and it's a huge weight off your shoulders.
Holly: I used to do walkthroughs where I'd try to see how far I could get in the game without catching a Pokémon. So you kind of enable the cheats where you could walk through walls and I tried to get...go as far as I could in the game without getting a Pokémon. And obviously, this thing used to actually give me nightmares. Like I used to be really, really, really affected by this stuff. And I was like, 'Let's see how far I can get.
Holly: And I accidentally touched a blade of grass. Obviously, I was walking through walls, and I hadn't picked up a starter Pokémon, instantly got the bad egg. And if you guys don't know what the bad egg is, it's when the game can sense that you've kind of gone out of the mechanics that it's kind of created, and it'll find a way of putting that in the game. It deletes all your Pokémon slowly. It kills all your Pokémon. It was then at 12 years old that I threw my DS across the room and broke it because it messed me up so bad. I was like, no!
Retro Dodo: So how does Retro Gaming feed into the writing process? Have there been any gaming soundtracks that have stuck with you over the years? One thing that I remember seeing was... I don't know whether you guys know about the band Normandie, but the singer put up a video explaining that he based a track off the Gerudo Valley theme tune from Ocarina of Time. And you could really hear the influence of it in the background. And it got me thinking, do you ever kind of get any song inspiration from soundtracks or game sounds?
Harry: We nearly sampled a Pokémon in one of our songs at one point. I can't remember which song it was. Was it...
Holly: It was the Pokémon noise for Star Raptor in Feminist! I remember being like, 'Guys, I can hear the noise. It's like an eagle, it's a Star Raptor from the original Pokemon Pearl. Let's play it.' And we just had it over the speakers. I was like, this is the sound.
Holly: In GCSE music I actually did a Pokemon game as my composition and I had different kind of levels for each kind of motif. So you kind of had to do a symphony-esque piece where obviously you have like A and B and then it goes down to A. So I kind of did it in a Pokemon game thing. I think for me, like all of the Hoenn games, not just because of the amount I had to replay it because my cartridge decided to delete, but I also like play trumpet. There was the whole meme about the Hoenns with the trumpet and all that noise. So I used to really, really love that soundtrack and I think I could still hear it in my sleep along with all the battle themes. Yeah, that's probably for me that the main one.
Liv: I remember we were learning about quartal and quintal harmony as one of like our modules. And at the time I was going through a bit of a phase where I decided I was gonna write music for game, and Holly could probably vouch that it didn't go very well. And so I abandoned that idea. A lot of my hand ins were just dreadful, but I remember I had like the like Goron City music as inspiration and I tried to make it like really like tense, almosg as if there was not a lot there but like using minimal things to create tension, and it just didn't work. It was dreadful.
Harry: You played it to us. and it just went 'wommmmmmm' for about five minutes.
Liv: And then there wer like marimbas in the background being like, bink, bink, bink. it was shocking.
Holly: Liv played it for the whole five minutes, right? And me and Harry would like really try and like to be supportive. And we would just like 'hmmmm?'
Liv: But anyway, my point was that as we were learning about quartal and quintal harmonies, and I wanted to try and find a way to bring gaming music into it, and that's when I learned that's exactly what the composer for Breath of the Wild had done. She'd used a lot of quartal harmonies and quintal harmonies and I was like 'Oh my god this is amazing.' So that's something that's always kind of stuck with me, but I've never really found a way to sort of apply it to our music. Still, there's definitely like pieces of gaming music out there that are so recognisable and always stays with you and have like an emotional reaction anytime that you hear it. It doesn't matter, you know, what game is or how long it's been since you last heard it. I see a lot of the time.
Holly: Amy played some like crazy stuff in rehearsal the other day, and I looked at Liv and went, 'My God, it's Lavender Town. It's the Lavender Town theme!'
