Day 546
The Stars on Fire 7″s are finally home! They arrived yesterday. Now just waiting for the inserts. As soon as they arrive I’ll start mailing the pre-orders. Remember that the official release date is Sept. 24, but I’m taking pre-orders both on www.cloudberryrecords.com and on cloudberryrecords.bandcamp.com. Thanks again for your support!
The Proctors: “Silhouttes” is the new 7″ single by the great West Midlands band! Wow! Two songs aree included in this pink vinyl record, the title song and “You and Me and the Sea”. The songs are ace, as usual, and it is only limited to 300 copies. Seems like a record no one would like to miss out!
Tapioca Tundra / Sounds Incarcerated: Tapioca Tundra is the collaboration between Mary Wyer and Julian Knowles from Even as We Speak and Beth Arzy from Jetstream Pony, Aberdeen and The Luxembourg Signal. The English label Spinout Nuggets is releasing a split 7″ with them and Sounds Incarcerated, which is the band formed by Viv Bonsels and Allan Crockford. Each of them contribute a song and yeah, it is really good!
The Happy Somethings: now a Derbyhire/Nottinghamshire band. A trio. Two guys, one girl. “Lollipop Licks EP” is the latest by them. Four pop songs, “Forward Now”, “Ignore You”, “Doctor Lollipop” and “Pretty Pants”, which are available to download for free on Bandcamp.
Chime School: Andy Pastalaniec (Seablite) from San Francisco is the person behind this new band that is releasing a self-titled album on Slumberland Records on November 5. The album will be out on vinyl and CD and will include 10 songs. Right now we can preview one of the songs, “Taking Time To Tell You” which sounds really nice!
Splashing Rainbows: Giorgos Kyriazis from the legendary band One Night Suzan has a new project, Splashing Rainbows. The fine Greek label Make Me Happy will be releasing a 12″ EP titled “Numbers” with 6 songs. So far I’ve been able to listen to one of the songs, “One (is Fine)”, which is a goodie.
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I return to an old post of mine. I’ve been doing a bit of revisionism. Azure Days from Ireland. Remember that post? Here I mention that Azure Days’ drummer Robbie Robinson was in a band called The Practical Householders. So, yeah, I wanted to find out more about this obscure Irish band!
The superb blog The Fanning Sessions Archive wrote about the band back in 2009. On this post it doesn’t mention Robbie Robinson as a member of the band. So that is a bit confusing. Here we see that the band was formed by Trisha Smyth on vocals, Jackie Kelly on backing vocals, Mick O’Rourke on guitar, Colm Walsh on accordion, Pat Casey on bass and Dave Ward on drums. Later on Paul Donahue replaced Pat and Dave Mulhall replaced Dave Ward. So when was Robbie part of the band? Or maybe that was an error I made when I wrote about Azure Days?
What wee know about the band is very little. The band appeared on Comet Records compilation LP “Comet LP Two” (COME 2 TP) in 1987 with the song “Your Love is Just a Four Letter Word”. On this sampler compilation they appeared alongside the aforementioned Azure Days and the amazing Cypress, Mine! The song was recorded at The Studios in Clonegal, produced by the band and engineered by Seamus Cullinane.
There is yet another compilation where they appeared. It was a tape comp called “Long Road to Travel” (ATHY 001) that was part of The Council Collection. This was the first volume of such tapes. The band contributed “4 Letter Word”. Is it the same song?
The Fanning Sessions blog mentions that the band recorded a 3 song demo that was produced by Stano. The blog promised doing a post when they got a copy of such demo. But it seems it never happened. I’d love to listen to it!
My best find online is an interview with Colm Walsh on the Leinster Leader newspaper. The interview is sort of recent, December 2019. Here we find that Colm was manager of the Sultans of Ping and was behind the wonderful Made of Athy Project.
Indeed, I didn’t mention it earlier, the band hailed from Athy in County Kildare.
Athy is a market town at the meeting of the River Barrow and the Grand Canal in south-west County Kildare, Ireland, 72 kilometres southwest of Dublin. Athy or Baile Átha Í is named after a 2nd century Celtic chieftain, Ae, who is said to have been killed on the river crossing, thus giving the town its name “the town of Ae’s ford”.
Another thing I find out is that the band is name-checked in the 2020 book “Made in Ireland – Studies in Popular Music” that was edited by Áine Mangaoang, John O’Flynn and Lonán Ó Briain. The book seems to be available for academic purposes, and is not on Amazon. Would be nice to get a copy of it.
Not much more info about them on the web. Hopefully we’ll find out more, and maybe we’ll hear that 3 song demo!
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Listen
The Practical Householders – Your Love is Just a Four Letter Word
