Sienna Bentley

Next in the pre-festival series where bite mag gets to know the brilliant acts playing CloseUp Festival, we chat to British indie pop band Pale Blue Eyes as they prepare to headline on Sunday 24 May.

CloseUp Festival continues to spotlight the best new and emerging artists while giving audiences the chance to see headliners in a rare, personal setting. Set across three eclectic days in Shoreditch, it’s a festival built around discovery. As you can imagine, it’s right up our street.

We’ve asked them a couple of burning questions on how to persevere despite industry challenges, the pros and cons of knowing each other a little too well and some of their favourite memories.

What’s something you’re planning to test at CloseUp that you wouldn’t risk at a bigger, more surveilled festival?

Honestly, we haven’t thought about it in that way actually…  

We have released quite a lot of music in a relatively short space of time over the past few years, so I think at times we’ve been overwhelmed by the options of what we could/should play in our live set. But at the start of this year, after a short break from gigging, we felt like we settled on a nice setlist that we all really enjoy playing together, so really we just hope to settle into playing that particular set for the next few shows we do, including CloseUp Fest! 

Aubs is in London, Lewis is in Glasgow and Matt and I are based in Sheffield so we don’t actually get loads of time together between gigs – when we meet up it’s usually the day of a show or the night before!

What’s something you’ve learned about each other that only comes from making art together?

I think we’ve learned a lot about one another’s quirks and personality traits through spending intense amounts of time together in a van, in the studio and on tour – although the studio process and the live process are quite separate in a way – but the fact that we’re all still working together after all these years is a sign of strong foundations at the heart of Pale Blue Eyes! 

We have a lot of fun travelling together and playing gigs so it’s just nice that we’ve found likeminded people to do this with.

We spend an inordinate amount of time discussing fantasy football, and have learned that Aubrey is next level when it comes to his fantasy football team. He might win the league this year…

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced on your journey so far, and how did you overcome it? 

I think just hanging in there really. The industry is insane and ever-changing; there’s a lot of time spent worrying about making things work financially. But we get to play music with our mates, sometimes we get to travel and tour, some of the experiences and memories are just way more meaningful to us than financial gain. It’s just a juggling act!

Anyway, we’re very stubborn, so we keep at it. There are major ups and downs and such different scenarios to be faced with: one minute we’re playing to 100 people in Halifax in a rammed and vibey pub, the next we’re being invited to fly out to Athens to play on a line-up with Garbage and Moby to 20,000 people. So you just have to ride it all out…

We just try and crack on; when good or bad things happen – and we’ve had our fair share of both – we just keep on going!

Every festival has its own micro‑culture. What behaviour or energy do you hope CloseUp brings out in your audience?

It would be nice to see people let their hair down, put their phones away for a while and just get stuck into the music – lose their shit a bit, in a good way…

Can you each tell us about your most memorable gig to date, and what makes it stand out?

Lucy: Maybe Ypsigrock in Sicily, amazing crowd and atmosphere at that festival.

Matt: Glastonbury, seeing various friends in the crowd from all different bits of my life come to see our set – people from growing up in Devon, people we’ve worked with over the years at the festival. It’s a special one for me, Glastonbury. I have gone to it since I was a teenager, worked at it, played at it, and hopefully we will again!

Rapid fire questions

Describe your creative process in one word

Instinctive.

Your one, non-music gig essential

Hmmm, water and ear plugs.

Best live show?

We all saw Say She She at Glastonbury a couple of years ago after we’d played our slot on the Greenpeace stage. It was absolutely incredible and a special moment for us all to be at Glastonbury together and just stumbling across them – such an amazing live band, they are on fire.

Lucy: I saw Warpaint in London and they’re one of my fave bands ever so that was a special moment for me!

Matt: Sigur Rós at Brixton Academy quite a few years ago now – jaw-droppingly good. 

CloseUp Festival is taking place at Colours Hoxton from Friday 22 May to Sunday 24 May 2026. You can get tickets here. We’ll be there, come and say hi!

Catch up with Friday headliner Home Counties here.