Do312 - What to do in Chicago

Making music was the furthest thing from Scars on 45 co-founder Danny Bemrose’s mind until the professional soccer player for England’s Huddersfield Town F.C. broke his foot at 21 and his world came crashing down. “I was in limbo, without knowing what to do with myself,” he says. It wasn’t the first time that fate would intervene in the band’s formation. Danny put down the soccer ball and picked up for his father’s guitar. “I’m quite an obsessive person. I became kind of addicted,” he says. “I used to lock myself away to write songs and record on four-track recorder.”

Indeed. On search for a name, the nascent group ultimately picked Scars on 45, taken from a radio interview that Danny heard with Harris, in which she recalled her father telling her as a young girl that she better not get any “scars on his 45s” as she played them.

The band recorded the self-produced “Scars on 45” on their own, first starting in “Fawlty Towers,” as Danny and Stu called their crumbling apartment, and then moving to the basement of a church that a friend has purchased to convert into apartments. “He let the congregation live there for awhile, so there was this little rock and roll band recording in the basement and we had a lot of praying going on next door,” Danny recalls. “They were lovely people.” Although enjoyable, the studio is “the work part,” Danny says whereas the real fun comes in playing live. “Just to be able to put yourself out there and let people know who you are is wonderful,” he continues. “What I write about is who I am really. When people listen and react to one of your songs, there’s no better feeling.”