Day 27. Getting closer to a month. The fanzine is now already available to be ordered on the website. Isn’t that some good news? We need news like this in these times for sure!

And I’ll share new music too of course.

Suffer Fools: this Vancouver project is new to me. It seems it is the work of Debbie Debased. Not that I know her. But her latest two songs, L’Maclicheblues” and “When I was a Monster” sound great. They have some great vocals, they are catchy, lo-fi, fuzzy and dreamy. It also looks like their debute album is coming out this year.

Shimmerance: now is the turn for this shoegaze band from Moscow. The band has been going since 2016 and they have just released their self-titled album. It has 9 songs of bright shimmering guitar based popsongs with boy/girl vocals. The band is formed by Maria Kondakova, Nikolay Babukhin, Yuri Yakovlev, Mikhail Churikov and Konstantin Grayznov.

Stay Inside – Songs from the Great Indoors: this 4 song compilation from Sydney, Australia, introduced me to four terrific songs and bands. We have Diana’s “Million Dollar Baby” (terrific track), Emma Shields’ “Lucy”, Popfilter covering Stolen Violins’ “Romance at the Petrol Station” and Blessé’s “Sudoki”. These are songs that have been recorded during this period of isolation. It seems there will be more of these compilations so I’ll keep an eye!

Gum Country: even though on Bandcamp it says the band hails from LA, then the bio says they are from Canada. So yeah, they are Canadians from Vancouver that moved to the California city. The thing is that the band is releasing their album “Somewhere” on June 19 on vinyl. But these songs are not brand new. From what I gather they were previously released on Lollipop Records in 2017 as a self-titled cassette. Well, I wasn’t aware of them then! So the one song I can preview now, “Somewhere”, is totally new to me! And it sounds good!

Centrefold: and lastly more from Canada, this time from St. John’s. Not a fan of the opening track of their new EP “Not Enough”, but then things get much much better. “Desintegrate” is a rush of a song. Then comes “Late” another strong track and finishes with the swirling “Not Enough to Fall in Love (Too Much to Forget)”. The EP seems to be available digitally only for now.

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Let’s continue with this challenge. As you know I’m featuring bands that wrote a song with a weekday name on them. And they have to be bands I haven’t featured before on the blog. So that makes it harder of course. For Friday I thought the Belfast band Four Idle Hands would be great, the B side of their first 7″ was called “Friday Man”, so they fit in this challenge of course.

My favourite songs of them is the A side of that 7″, the song called “99 Streets”. This 7″ (GOT 21) was released by the Belfast label Good Vibrations Records that was founded by Terri Hooley. This label supported many Irish punk bands in their time. Of course Four Idle Hands was a poppier band. The 7″ was released in 1990 and both songs are credited to D. Mc Mahon.

The year after the band released their second record, a 12″ on Good Vibrations Records (GOT 24). It included four songs, two on each side. The A side had “Blind” and “Put a Light in Your Window” while the B side had “In Years of Black and White” and “Terry and Julia”. I found a TV live performance of “Put a Light in Your Window” tough I can’t say which TV show this was on. All songs again are credited to D. McMahon and the production is credited to the band and Alan Galbraith who also engineered the record.

I couldn’t find any compilation appearances on Discogs. Was this the case really? They didn’t appear on any? I do find though that they were on “Breaking Sound Barriers Vol.2” a compilation released by PPI Records (BSBCD2) with the song “Rainy April Day”. This song was recorded at Homestead Studios in their hometown.

On Youtube I could find many more songs by the band, some of which I believe are unreleased like “Corner of My World” and “Brilliant World“. Then a super cool promo video for the song “People Shouldn’t Have to Live This Way“, which I wonder if it was released in any way? And a live performance at the BBC playing the song “One Summer” which sounds GREAT!

But that’s not all! There’s a Soundcloud with even more songs! There’s “Funeral of the Sun”, “Boat (That’s Going Nowhere)”, “Treehouse”, “That Might Be Wonderful”, “Killer (in the Ice-Cream World)”, “When the Ship Was Sinking”, “That Might be Wonderful”, “Mr. Moon (Solo Guide)” and “The Trampoline King”. A whole bounty of great tracks! You start to wonder why there hasn’t been a retrospective compilation yet, right?

And finally a Facebook page. Here I find that the band was formed by Davy McMahon, Tommy McMahon, Stephen (Boon) Rooney and Paul Burke. Gerry Carson and Gary English were original members of the band, not sure who they were replaced by and when. On the Facebook page there are photos and other memorabilia. Among them I see that for their “Leading the Blind” tour they played all over the UK, from Belfast to London, playing Larne, Armagh, Enniskillen, Bangor, Coleraine, Lame, Derry, Antrim, Hull, Newport, Warrington, Liverpool, Edinburgh, York, Beverley, Driffield, Manchester and Bridlington. They also played at the legendary Mean Fiddler in London alongside Ashanti, Tiberius Minnows and Answer from Limbo. They also played at the Cork Rocks showcase of 1990..

I keep looking and I find a website about notable people from Rathcoole.

Rathcoole (from Irish Ráth Cúile, meaning ‘corner/nook of the ringfort) is a housing estate in Newtownabbey, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It was built in the 1950s to house many of those displaced by the demolition of inner city housing in Belfast city. Rathcoole is within the wider Newtownabbey Borough. Its approximate borders are provided by the O’Neill Road on the north, Doagh Road on the east, Shore Road on the south and the Church Road and Merville Garden Village on the west.

Turns out that the McMahon brothers were originally from Gortmore Terrace at the north-western edge of the estate.

I believe they took their name from the 1976 BBC programme 4 Idle hands that featured Ray Burdis and Phil Daniels.

I keep searching. I find that the brothers had been involved before being in Four Idle Hands in two punk bands, Pure Mania and Tarot XIII.

Sadly I can’t find much more. The thing is, I wonder how many songs they recorded, I feel there might even be more than the ones on Soundcloud and Youtube. Why was there no release for the song that got a promo video? Did they go to make music with other bands afterwards? What are they up to these days? Would be great to find out!

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Listen
Four Idle Hills – 99 Streets