Summer Camp Call It Quits
Summer Camp are calling it quits. The British duo, made up of married couple Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey, are playing a farewell show in London next month. To usher in the end of the band, they have re-released the first song they ever recorded, a cover of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You.”
“In October 2009 when Jeremy was on tour with a solo album, Elizabeth made him a playlist that included one of her favourite songs, ‘I Only Have Eyes For You,'” they wrote in their newsletter. “A few weeks later we decided to record a cover of the song, just for fun. We were proud of it so we put it on Myspace with a fake bio saying we were 7 friends from Sweden who met at summer camp. 13 years later we have released 4 albums, played gigs all over the world, met so many wonderful people, got married and had a son.”
Summer Camp released their debut EP, Young, in 2010. In 2011, they followed that up with their debut full-length, Welcome To Condale, which came with a whole conceptual framework about a fictional Californian town steeped in nostalgia for the American suburbs that was largely lifted from movies and television. Later on in their career, they’d channel those cinematic influences into a soundtrack for the Charlie Lyne-directed teen culture documentary Beyond Clueless and, eventually, Sankey directed her own documentary about rom-coms called Romantic Comedy.
They released three more albums after Welcome To Condole: 2013’s self-titled, 2015’s Bad Love, and Romantic Comedy, which was released in 2020 and was a companion to the doc of the same name. Warmsley is still making music under his own name and composing for various different types of media — he’s currently in the middle of putting out an album inspired by the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. And earlier this year, Sankey directed a film for Channel 4 called Boobs.
Summer Camp’s farewell show will take place on September 21 at Moth Club in London.