If Scouting For Girls were a dog, they’d be a two-year-old Collie – slightly barmy, bursting with energy, and hard not to like.

By Miles Salter

Photos by Dave Lee

This is a band that works hard to win over an audience. There can’t be many frontmen out there who work as diligently as Roy Stride. The man is fitted with batteries. He’s like a musical Duracell Bunny.

During Posh Girls, he runs off the Barbican stage, only to reappear on the balcony overlooking the audience a couple of minutes later. Posh Girls ‘go like the clappers’, he sings, but the phrase could be applied to Stride – he never lets up.

He urges the audience to jump up and down, gets them to play musical statues, splits the audience in two for a singing competition, and acts as infectious, unrelenting ringleader. The band are lucky to have him. The young, female-dominated audience lap it up. 

Formed around a nucleus of school friends (Greg Churchouse on bass, and James Rowlands on drums), the band first came to prominence when they were signed to Epic in 2007. The following year, their debut album went to number one, taking the record company by surprise. There have been seven albums in all, and already they’re eyeing up the future, warming up the crowd for a new release, due out on 27 March 2026. From this album they sing These Are The Good Days, a celebration of the present. 

There’s a cover of Come On Eileen, references to Elvis, and a song called I Wish I Was James Bond, complete with Bond-esque fantasy visuals. This is an unpretentious band. They are determined to be good fun and don’t take life too seriously. I can’t imagine many Radiohead fans are into Scouting For Girls.

A lot of the songs collapse into each other – similar pace, similar melodic structures – so that it feels like one long medley around the same theme, but they do it so well that’s impossible not to enjoy the show. They end with the irrepressible hit She’s So Lovely.

If you take this collie for a walk, it won’t be long before it wants to get excited again. 

Scouting For Girls played at York Barbican on Tuesday 17 March 2026.