Not much news today. I will return next Wednesday to NYC and that is good. Less stress. Though of course the first days will be a bit complicated, getting organized and setting up everything for us and the baby at home.
So I am hoping to catch up with delayed orders no later than Saturday 26. I will have the new release to come out on March 10 but I will update the website that last weekend of February with all the pertaining information about this great new retrospective.
Other than that, I feel I am very much out of the loop of new releases. So if anyone has any recommendations of good indiepop that came out in the last few months please leave me some comments!
—————————————————————–
As I was saying on my post about Godfish and previously on the post about Yellow Bird, there is another band with Tim Groves in their ranks that I want to write about, Spinning Belinda!
I had mentioned some of the other bands he had been in before (The Ultra Parents, The Gemms, Big Humming Noise, The Direction, Scuz, Pencils, Godfish, Yellow Bird) but I’ve been a bit slow discovering all of the songs he has on his Soundcloud.
Most of the songs had been uploaded time ago. 8 years ago for Spinning Belinda tracks. There are a few here. There is “June“, “Cold Sudan“, “Run” and “Liverpool“.
On this band Tim was the drummer. We know some details about the band and the songs too. We know Ali was on vocals, Cos on lead guitar, Steve Jenkins on guitar and vocals, Paul on bass and vocals, and as I said Tim on drums. There are no last names for the band members other than Steve’s. It seems Tim has forgotten them. He says that Ali and Cos were teachers, that Paul was Irish.
Steve Jenkins was in the Chalk Farm. Cool! Maybe that’s a way to find out more. Because I interviewed Steve time ago! When I asked about his other projects he said:
I auditioned as a drummer for Spinning Belinda. I wanted to learn to play the drums mainly to make me a better drum programmer, but also because I thought it would be cool to have played guitar, bass and drums in different bands. At the audition I was blown away by the quality of the songs, suggested that they deserved a better drummer than me and asked if they would allow me to audition as a guitarist. I got the gig and roped Ken in to play drums and later persuaded Tim, the other old CG’s drummer to take over from Ken. At the time I thought the songs were great but the sound was a bit staid and boring and would struggle to get noticed. I started writing my own songs with Ali, the singer and formed Bel-Air Lip-Bombs out of that. Initially Paul, the song writer behind Spinning Belinda was persuaded to throw his lot in with us and we performed a mixture of my songs and his songs which I re-arranged and tried to make a bit more interesting musically. Nobody understood what I was trying to do, including me, but it worked well live in spite of this and we did a number of really successful gigs. Unfortunately we struggled to make things work in the studio and by 1993 Paul had decided to return to Ireland and Ali became disillusioned and quit.
Shame! The songs are great. And you do wonder why they never released anything! Another detail is the Ken Steve mentions would later bee in The Free French.
We know too that the song “Liverpool” wasn’t really called “Liverpool” but “Pretty Remains”. That all of the songs we know, these 4, were recorded in March 1992 at The White House Studio in Weston-Super-Mare.
“Run” was intended to be the A side of a single that never happened. “Cold Sudan” was also known as “Never Get Excited” and it is my favourite song I think!
Now I look at Steve’s Soundcloud. Here we find another Spinning Belinda song. This one from a live rehearsal! It is called “Really Something” and it sounds great! And we find here Paul’s last name… he was Paul Kelly!
And one more. The last one. It is called “Kiss Me” and this one was also written by Paul Kelly and was recorded at Steve Jenkins bedroom on a port-a-studio in 1991. How cool! Are there more songs by them?
What else can we say about them? That they took their name from the Prefab Sprout song? Sure.
Then I find that Ali’s last name was Griffin. So we are just missing Cos’ last name.
And that’s it. Sure. I think I should drop Steve a note, ask if he is up for another interview! We need to know more about them!
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
