Day 399

Po!: good news for Po! fans! A new “bedroom tape” is on the band’s Bandcamp. This one is number 4 and has 9 songs on it. As always Ruth Po! delivers beautiful songs, music, melodies. This tape was released in 1993 and six of thee songs on this tape were later re-recorded and released on Po! albums.

Madder Rose: “To Be Beautiful” is the name of the album that was released last June. I am only discovering the 9 songs that were on it today. They are really nice. Smartly crafted. And Mary Lorson’s vocals are reall y nice. The album is still available from Trome Records from England on blue vinyl.

The Tropicanas: when I first heard the song “Your Man on the Moon” I thought… wow, this is like the Jim Ruiz Group. And I was sold. The four-piece from Livingston in the UK have just released this song and also one called “Shooting Star”. Digital only.

The Churchhill Garden: a favourite of the blog, this project that is made up of Andy Jossi in Switzerland and Krissy Vandeerwoude in the US, has a new song. It is called “Lonely”. It starts slow and soft, but then it becomes bright and shiny. A bit different to the more direct songs the band has put out previously, but still it possesses that beauty they know how to make.

FERS: and the last band on this Wednesday review hails from Singapore. This new project released the “Shallow EP” back in March and it is great to find out about it. It has 5 songs, a combination of vibrant and dreamy sounds.

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Returning to one of my favourite blogs out there, the Fanning Sessions Archive to discover a post from 2014, when Dave wrote about the band The Kendalls.

There is a song posted there, “A Place in the Sun”, which I really enjoy, jangly as I like them. There’s also a photo too. I think I can see the lead singer with an acoustic guitar, a bassist to his left and a guitar player on the right. Happily the post tells us some names. So we know who they were. Johnny McMahon was on vocals, Ben Rawlins on guitar, George Murphy on bass and Alan Biggs on drums. The only other details we get from this post is that the band hailed from Walkinstown in Dublin and that this song came from a 1988 demo tape.

Walkinstown (Irish: Baile Bhailcín) is a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, situated on the Southside of the city, approximately 6 kilometres south-west of Dublin city centre. Walkinstown is a suburb consisting primarily of privately owned residential housing with some social housing remaining in the Dublin City Council area between the Walkinstown and Long Mile Roads and Ballymount Lower. It was built as an estate of starter homes after World War 2 with the council housing being developed as social rented homes later in the early to mid fifties. 

Then I check at the comments and I find a very sad thing, George Murphy, the bassist, seems to have passed away. That’s not the kind of info I like finding when I search for obscure bands.

There seems to be no more info about the band on the web.

So I try to see what are they up to now. I am not sure how common the name John McMahon might be in Dublin. There is a musician of the same name who was in a band called Rollers/Sparkers. Is it the same person? Ben Rawlins I believe is a recording engineer these days and part of a band called Saso.

I couldn’t find anything for Alan Biggs…

Not really surprising. But what surprises me is that even Irishrock.org doesn’t have any info on The Kendalls, they usually do.

So I will require help from anyone that remembers them. Would be great to find more info about them, especially what other songs were on that 1988 demo tape and if there were more demo tapes of course!

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Listen
The Kendalls – A Place in the Sun