Real Sounds Feature
Champion Trees Interview
By Real Sounds
Real Sounds is proud to present this Champion Trees interview, produced in collaboration with SupaJam Education. About the BAND: Champion Trees began at the University of Cape Town, where cousins Francis Christie and Lex Pienaar joined forces with drummer Langa Dubazana. Their music brings together off-kilter indie charm, playful lyricism and a love of 90s alternative touchstones such as Belle & Sebastian and Pavement. After introducing themselves with their 2022 debut album NOW 3000, the...
Real Sounds is proud to present this Champion Trees interview, produced in collaboration with SupaJam Education.
About Champion Trees
Champion Trees began at the University of Cape Town, where cousins Francis Christie and Lex Pienaar joined forces with drummer Langa Dubazana. Their music brings together off-kilter indie charm, playful lyricism and a love of 90s alternative touchstones such as Belle & Sebastian and Pavement. After introducing themselves with their 2022 debut album NOW 3000, the band have expanded their sound on second album A Duck’s Water Off My Back, with new members James Bickford-Smith, Michael Burke and Michelle Hromin adding violin, synthesizers, saxophone and clarinet to the group’s palette.
About SupaJam
SupaJam is an inclusive music education programme for young people aged 16–25 with social, emotional or special educational needs, using music industry learning to build skills, confidence and future opportunities.
The conversation was led by David Maitland alongside SupaJam students Alfie and Tyler G.
Champion Trees will be headlining The Old Church on 10th June 2026.
Tickets on Real Sounds
Full Transcript
Transcript source: SupaJam Education. The transcript below is based on auto-generated captions and has been edited for readability.
Introduction
[Opening music excerpt plays.]
Welcome to the SupaJam podcast. I am really excited today because we have Champion Trees with us. Lex and Francis from the band are joining us. They have a show coming up on June 10 at The Old Church in Stoke Newington with Real Sounds. This is part of an ongoing series where Real Sounds, the gig promoter, links us up with brilliant artists and bands who are doing gigs for them, so we can find out a bit about them before the show. Lex and Francis, how are you doing today?
We are well, thank you. Thanks for having us.
Great to have you here. I have also got Tyler helping me from SupaJam. How are you doing, Tyler?
Hello. I am doing okay, thank you very much.
Great. We had a lot of fun listening to the band's music.
There were a few songs I have already added to my playlist.
Amazing. Tyler and I went into our listening session almost blind. I knew we had the interview coming up, but I wanted to wait and listen together for the first time. When I heard the anti-folk, folky feel, I thought, "This is right up Tyler's street." We both loved it.
Meeting in Cape Town and Starting the Band
I thought it would be fun to rewind the story a bit. Alfie helped prepare some of these questions, and he read that you met in Cape Town. Could you tell us how you met, and what studying and living there was like?
Francis and I met at a very young age. We are cousins, so we go back a long way. We grew up in different parts of South Africa and would see each other on the family summer holidays when everyone got together. It was only at the University of Cape Town that we were in the same city for an extended time. That is when we decided to start the band. It was something we had always wanted to do. We were lucky to meet Troy, the original guitarist for Champion Trees, who played on the NOW 3000 album, and Langa, who was also in Cape Town at the time studying music at the University of Cape Town. The four of us kicked it off. It was a really nice thing to do there. Cape Town has a good music scene, with lots of different things going on.
Moving to the UK and the Looser Band Setup
Are you based in the UK now, or are you touring and travelling around?
It is a bit scattered now. That was part of the strange thing about how we made A Duck's Water Off My Back . Everyone lives all over the place now. We are older, and everyone has got on with what they are doing. Langa, the drummer, was still living in Cape Town, so he recorded the drums remotely. Three of us were living in London. After we left Cape Town, it became a much looser thing. Everyone was all over the place. In London we joined forces with the newer members of the band. James, who plays violin and keyboards, is another cousin of ours, so there are three cousins in the band now. He grew up in England, so it was only when we moved here that we could start working with him. Michelle, our clarinet player, we met through mutual friends. Mike, our saxophone player, is a childhood friend of Francis and is also from South Africa. We all joined together to work on the previous album.
The Album Title: A Duck's Water Off My Back
The album is great. Alfie wanted to ask about the title. You reversed the familiar saying "water off a duck's back" into A Duck's Water Off My Back . What made you choose that?
Our grandfather always used to say it as a silly joke. We did not have a title for ages. We had one title, but then that became another song that was not going to be on the album, so we scrapped it. I thought of A Duck's Water Off My Back , and at the same time I thought of an artist in Cape Town, Jayshal Gajjar, whose work has a lot of duck motifs. I thought it would be great to ask them to do the cover art. It all came together from there. I like that it is a familiar phrase turned around slightly. It becomes more interesting, and you do not quite know what it means, but it is still a nice phrase. It seemed to suit the songs.
It is cool that it goes back to your grandfather. It feels like another family reference in the band.
The Vocal Sound on "I Wear a Shirt That Says Australia"
We listened to "I Wear a Shirt That Says Australia," and I wanted to ask about the vocal. It sounds close and intimate, almost like having a deep conversation with a friend in a pub or cafe. Was that a deliberate artistic choice? Technically, how did you achieve that sound?
It was not exactly intentional. We had never self-recorded to the extent we did for this album. We bought some basic gear and did most of it in a house that three of us were living in. I usually tracked the vocals myself. Towards the end of making the album I realised that the gain settings worked better on certain songs than on others. I started to standardise that more towards the end of tracking, but that vocal take came out that way partly by chance. I liked it, but from a technical perspective it was accidental. I probably recorded it late in the evening, with people living above, and I did not want to be too loud.
It adds something special to it. I would not have guessed the album was mostly self-recorded. The production sounds great.
A big part of that is Andre, a Cape Town-based mixing and mastering engineer. He really got it to where it is. The recordings did not sound nearly as good before the mix, but we figured out enough to track everything.
That is good advice for musicians listening. You might not have to track in a studio, but handing it to a professional mixing engineer can be a great hybrid approach, especially because studio time can be expensive.
The Story Behind "I Wear a Shirt That Says Australia"
For "I Wear a Shirt That Says Australia," was there a song or band that inspired the track? What is the story behind it?
It was less about a specific song or band. Usually I write the underlying songs, then we arrange and work on them together. I tend to stumble on a lyric idea that seems interesting, then ramble on until it becomes something, or does not. This song is an example of that. There is a reference to The Microphones in the lyric, but there is not a direct link between that band and the song. The title lyric came from my girlfriend having an Australia tourist shirt. I thought it was funny that those shirts are often reverse indicators: they usually show you are not actually from the place written on the shirt. I had thought about that a week or so before. Then the first few lyrics came, I rambled, plugged that idea in, and it worked. There is another aspect too. As a South African here, I often get asked whether I am Australian. Mike, our saxophone player, had also said around that time that he had been mistaken for Australian about three times in a week. That fed into the line as well.
That is true. When I am back home in Scotland, I am not usually walking around with "Scotland" written on my T-shirt. But souvenirs from other places can become things you hold dear.
Expanded Instrumentation
On this album, you have an expanded lineup and more instrumentation compared with the previous album. How did that come about, and what motivated it?
When we first moved to London, we wanted to join forces with James and Mike first. Michelle came in slightly later. We played to the strengths of what those musicians brought. James is good across a wide range of instruments. He can make synth sounds versatile across different styles and is also a great violin player. So we had that to work with. Francis came up with the underlying songs, and then we thought about what we had in our arsenal to serve each song. Mike is an accomplished jazz saxophonist, so we thought about where we could add saxophone. Michelle is basically a professional clarinet player and classically trained. That was what we had available, and we tried to make it work. It was also almost a social thing. They were our friends, they wanted to get involved, and they could add something. It was a laid-back process of trying things.
That is a great takeaway: tap into your friend circle and get people involved. When a bunch of friends make a record, that feeling comes through.
Genre, Listening Habits, and "Chamber Folk"
A lot of artists do not only listen to the genre they make. Are you fans of different genres from what you are making now?
Definitely. There are aspects of many genres that I like. At the moment I have been listening to the most recent Knocked Loose album and the most recent Jim Legxacy mixtape, and also lots of jazz. There is a wide range across the band. We have a Venn diagram in the middle where we come together.
What is the genre you listen to that is most different from the music you make?
Speaking personally, noisy shoegaze is one example. I listen to that fairly often. Weatherday and early Car Seat Headrest can be harsher on the ears than what we make as a band.
I listen to a lot of things too: heavy metal, jazz, all over the spectrum. I enjoy finding mixed genres. I recently discovered metal jazz, which is cooler than I expected.
I once saw a band called Acoustic Ladyland, who were like punk jazz. That blend is great.
Usually there is an underlying attitude or element in music that makes genre a bit irrelevant. There is something constant across most of the things I like, though I do not know exactly what it is.
Music becoming less genre-focused and less tribal over the last few decades has probably been a good thing. People have more access to different kinds of music, and you can see that reflected in new music.
Since our recent album got some listeners and we started seeing some discourse around it, I saw us labelled as "chamber folk." It was not a genre I was very aware of before we put the record out, but when I looked into it, it described the music quite well.
Sometimes artists get asked what genre they are, and they turn it back to the music journalists. Others have fun making up names. I remember a Scottish band describing themselves as "Haribo thrash."
"I'd Get My Ass Kicked for You"
One of the songs we really enjoyed was "I'd Get My Ass Kicked for You." What were you hoping listeners would feel emotionally when they heard that song?
I do not really know. I got the general lyric idea and followed it to the end. Originally we thought it would be more of a banger than it ended up being, and before recording the album we thought it might be a single, but it became something else. We do not get asked about that song very often, so I am glad you like it. None of us consider ourselves the toughest people out there, so maybe it was a bit of using our imagination. A bit of a love story, I suppose.
On NOW 3000 , a lot of the names are unique but meaning…