Elizabeth Sankey, one half of English indie pop outfit Summer Camp, says Zack Morris, the loveable, bleach-blond star of high school television show Saved By the Bell, is one of her main influences. Her thing seems to be 1980s and '90s Americana. 'California Dreams? Yeah loved that show, but the band was rubbish. Hang Time, that was probably the best,' she says.
There's no irony, no knowing humour: she's serious. The Hong Kong-bound Summer Camp may be a pop band, but it's pop from another time. The London-based duo's critically acclaimed debut album Welcome to Condale on the surface sounds like a post-modern, meta-irony hipster concept album, with its imagined Californian locations and characters, and overt references to '80s fashion, music and pop culture. And that's before you get to the Instagram-like blog and music videos suffused with sunny nostalgia.
But Summer Camp's music will strike a nerve with everyone who was or remains a suburban teenager feeling suffocated by the boredom of small-town life. 'Condale isn't a real American place, it's made up, but it's still more exciting than Walton-on-Thames,' Sankey says.
Summer Camp comprise vocalist Sankey and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Warmsley. Friends for years, the duo came together quite by accident in 2009. 'We began with making a few songs just for fun. We covered this song called I Only Have Eyes for You [by The Flamingos] and put it on MySpace under a fake account. We weren't really thinking about it. We had the default location as Sweden and pretended we were seven Swedish teenagers who met at summer camp when we were 14.'
The internet being what it is, within days the song went viral and was picked up by trendy music blog Transparent. After more positive feedback followed the uploading of a few more songs, Sankey and Warmsley came clean and things moved on at a bewildering pace.
'It all happened really quickly. I had never really sung before, and Jeremy had his own music. We decided to put on a couple more songs and then eventually we got management and then started playing live. It's just sort of snowballed,' Sankey says.