Picture this. It’s 2008, Christ’s College May Ball, and headlining alongside The Wombats are Scouting for Girls, a new pop-rock band that everyone is talking about. After their set, you head to the food tents, flaunting a Topshop dress that perfectly compliments your non-existent eyebrows. Beside you in the queue are the musicians themselves, who are practically boy band royalty. The only guests not in black tie, they stick out like sore thumbs posing next to you in the Survivor’s Photo. Your friends will be so jealous.

The story told from the inside sounds slightly different. For Roy Stride, the lead singer of Scouting for Girls, it’s a blurry memory. “We got chucked out because we weren’t wearing tuxedos,” Stride tells me. Dejected, the members returned to the tour bus, and told the tour manager – a “pretty old school guy” who had tour managed the likes of Madness and The Smiths. “He phoned up the entertainment manager and went ballistic,” remembers Stride. “He was like, ‘performing animals? Is that what we are? You just bring us in, make us sing, and tell us to fuck off? ’” 20 minutes later, the committee stood apologetically outside the bus, their president in tears. They let the band members in after the ranting phone call, who took full advantage: “I drank more champagne that night than I’ve ever drank in my entire life”.

“We got chucked out because we weren’t wearing tuxedos”

The early 2000s pop-rock sensation have played many Oxbridge Balls in their time, including Jesus May Ball in 2018 (“we were better behaved there”). Stride tells me that they carefully target those shows for the student audience: “There are gonna be people there who literally only know ‘She’s So Lovely’,” so they play more interactive songs, more covers. These performances resulted in the band playing some wealthy students’ “super swanky 21sts”, which are “the most fun you can have” according to Stride. “When you get it right, one of those shows is as good as playing Wembley Arena”.

Scouting For Girls’ upcoming tour celebrates the anniversary of 2010 album Everybody Wants to Be on TV. Their frontman is excited to revisit their older tunes, but the revival, he tells me, is not that different to their usual sets: “to be honest, we return to them quite frequently anyway!”. They’ve never been the sort of band who doesn’t like playing their big hits: “I much prefer playing a big song that everybody knows than a new song that nobody knows.” This perspective doesn’t prevent Stride from embarking on new projects: “I love writing the new stuff; I love recording it” – yet the band’s approach to big shows and festivals is definitely audience-focused: “we know what people want”.

It’s true – Scouting for Girls’ greatest hits take you back to the pop-rock-filled haze of the early 2000s. For many Gen Z-ers, they soundtracked childhood. If you’re anything like me, you sang along to ‘This Ain’t a Love Song’ when it played on the car radio, ‘She’s So Lovely’ immediately brings to mind a human-sized olive running across the seafront in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and ‘Elvis Isn’t Dead’ accompanied your teenage angst after you broke up with your first girlfriend (just me?). I ask Stride how it feels to produce such nostalgia in listeners, to which he laughs with relief: “I thought you were gonna say, ‘what does it feel like to be so old?’”

The band, says Stride, was a “nostalgic project” since its inception in 2005, so he’s “really happy to plug into that”. Memories of their genesis bring the singer back to the golden age of CDs. “We sold a million CDs just in the UK, which is a ridiculous figure – nobody would even sell 10,000 CDs now!”. He reminisces that there was a “shared culture back then,” so playing their older songs creates a special togetherness in audiences.

“I drank more champagne that night than I’ve ever drank in my entire life”

If 2026 really is the year of analog media, then Stride is its biggest fan. “The value of music has been diminished so much now because the barrier to entry is so low”. Think back to 20 years ago, Stride tells me, when you had to pay £15 for one album: “The smaller songs, the B-sides sometimes became more important to you than the big songs”.  Now, he remarks, nobody really listens to albums all the way through: “When you get to an artist’s shitter songs, you think, well I could be listening to ‘Let It Be’, you know?”

Still, Stride looks forward to playing their B-sides for audiences on the band’s jam-packed 2026 tour. “We’re at a really great level of success now,” says the singer and producer “where we get looked after really well, we play shows to amazing crowds […] but we don’t play anything to click track; we don’t have a big light show”. These shows, Stride suggests, are the perfect blend of intimacy and excitement.

The 46-year-old from West London remembers the band’s prime with fondness too. Stride recalls: “Headlining Wembley Arena in 2011 was massive for us,” the performance just round the corner from where he and his bandmates grew up. “It was the peak of where we got to as a band”.

“I much prefer playing a big song that everybody knows than a new song that nobody knows”

Scouting for Girls is formed of three childhood friends: drummer Peter Ellard and bassist Greg Churchouse have played alongside Stride since the start. “We’re godparents to each other’s children,” Stride tells me, “and it’s probably the best thing about this whole thing – a friendship that’s 35 years strong.” The frontman stresses that he’s the creative one, always coming up with new ideas, while his bandmates are “very good” at calming him down.

I can imagine this dynamic between the members easily. From the moment we meet, Stride is a bundle of intense energy. It’s clear that his mind travels at a thousand miles per hour, but he’s attentive too – he asks about my degree, where I’m from, and my own musical background. Typical Brits, we compare the sunny weather in LA to the intermittent drizzles of the English countryside. He often sets his treadmill screen to show him the South Coast, he confesses, missing the pebbly beaches of Sussex.

As teenage buddies, Stride, Ellard, and Churchouse started the band “wanting to be like Oasis or Blur,” the singer remembers. They honestly thought it was going to happen, receiving a record label in Stride’s university years. Then, they were dropped. “It took another six years before we got another chance”. By the time they got a deal again at around 26 years old “everybody had written us off”. With care in their hearts, friends and loved ones told the band to give up on their dream. So when Scouting for Girls finally made it,  Stride says “it was a riot”.

“Talent plays very little part in success in music, and in anything really in life”

This tumultuous experience has led Stride to create his own philosophy of fame. “Talent plays very little part in success in music, and in anything really in life. It’s the people who keep going and making their own luck”. God-given gifts are rare, he argues; he doesn’t often encounter them even within his more collaborative work. Stride has also written for bands such as One Direction and 5SOS, and worked on Seafret’s ‘Atlantis’, which recently blew up on TikTok and has since accrued over a billion streams on Spotify. He knows the industry inside out: “It’s the writers who keep going every single day who write that magic song”.

My conversation with Stride has meandered almost effortlessly from English degrees to songwriting, to our mutual distaste for stadium shows (and his children’s perplexing obsession with them). It’s strikingly unawkward, nothing like the usual experience of talking to a stranger. We land on Scouting for Girls’s most famous songs, ‘She’s So Lovely’ and ‘This Ain’t a Love Song’, which Stride reveals “took almost two years to write, from the moment we got the first hook”. You can become “transfixed,” says Stride, “with why a song becomes successful, rather than just writing a great song”. That’s what he’s trying to return to now, he says firmly: “falling more in love with music”.