Thanks so much to Geoff Suggett for the great interview! It’s brilliant to at last know more about The Lavender Faction!

++ Hi Geoff! Thanks for the interview! So let’s start from the beginning, you were first involved with Bulldozer Clarts right? Was that your first band? And then you left and started the Lavender Faction? Why did you take this decision?

Well actually The Lavender Faction was the third band after “XeX” and Eating Crow.

XeX were post punk and sort of a bit like early Cure and Joy Division recorded demo’s for EMI whose A&R rep Tony O’Conner was trying at the time to sign an unknown Manchester band called” The Smiths”, the history of The Smiths is well documented, XeX were promptly dropped like a hot turd. On the upside though I got to hear The Smiths before they signed to Rough Trade, “bonus”.

Bulldozer Clarts was a side project (to the already up and running Lavender Faction) that me and Stephen ( of This Almighty Pop!) started, he had a four track portastudio and as I was into the DIY ethic and decided to record some stuff together, I think we only recorded one song (”She Walked Away”). I still love that version of “She Walked Away” that we did on the four track.after that steve moved up a notch and got Mark in the band i was kicked out and resigned to being a lavy for the rest of the 80’s +early 90’s.

++ How did The Lavender Faction come together? Who were the bandmembers and how was the recruiting process?

Me and Rick were in a band called Eating crow who were a sort of Orange juice meets Echo and the Bunnymen with a bit of the Fall thrown in for good measure, we did some half decent tunes and once at a gig in Coventry were introduced to Roddy Radiation and Linval from the Specials they took us to a nightclub where we were told to fuck off by the doormen,and everyone went home, so close to fame yet so far away again, “ah well”!

After our brush with infamy rick and me left the band and formed the Lavender Faction who were: Andy Lee (drums), Marc Patterson (bass), Rick (guitars + voc), Geoff suggett (guitars + voc). Marc Patterson left to work as a journalist he was replaced by Richard miyers (bass)

The recruiting process:

As far as I can remember Rick knocked at my door one night and said “I’m leaving the band (Eating Crow) to form a band (The Lavender Faction) I want you to come and play guitar in the band and sing and write with me, that was just what i wanted so now i was in another band, we telephoned our friend Andy who had never been in a band but was a good drummer so now he was in the band, then we contacted a bass player we all knew called Jeff Macallum who also joined the band he was not punctual for rehearsals so he was out of the band I was friends with Marc Patterson he was a great bass player and joined the band.

++ Where does the name The Lavender Faction comes from?

The name comes from the idea that if we had something with a softer feel as in Lavender and something more edgy like faction and put together it seemed to create the feel we wanted to come through our music.

We were originally called The Angel Asylum we played our first gig under this name and then deemed it to be a bit heavy metal so The Lavender Faction it was.

++ Your first single, “Ride”,  is said to have influenced some guys to later name their band “Ride”! Do you know how true or false is this rumour?

This is a falsehood perpetrated by an unscrupulous type for the benefit of self promotion, namely me, after a serious acid session at Stephen Maughan’s bedsit, “what a night that was man”! I was telling Steve about my trip that had somehow traveled through Oxford where I met four guys who had a band and after watching our gig and buying a copy of the single decided to call their band Ride, well Steve was still on the comedown from the acid and believed the story to be true and wrote it up for the fanzine.

++ This single, as well as the other ones, were released on Lust Recordings, the new project of Stephen Woosh. Were you a usual at his Woosh club? How did you end up being signing to his new label?

To be honest at the time I wasn’t aware of the Woosh club ,only the fanzine which was always on sale in my favourite record shop “volume records” in Newcastle and other indie record shops in the city . I never even bought a copy. Then by chance I met Stephen (This Almighty Pop!) who told Steve Woosh about us and sent him a demo tape, Steve liked the songs and came to one of our gigs in Newcastle ,that night he asked us if we would like to release the first single on his new “Lust label” and shortly after that Woosh club became Lust club to which we became regulars whether it was playing gigs at the club or going to see other bands like Feral, The Keatons, The Sunflowers, St James Infirmary and getting off our face, the venue was the legendary but sadly no more Broken Doll .

++ He seems to have disappeared from the face of Earth, do you know where on Earth is he? Any anecdotes you can share about him or the Newcastle scene in general, like who were those people that were always at gigs? Or like the biggest Lavender Faction fans?

I haven’t seen Steve for about 4 years, it was at a Penetration (70’s punk band) gig out of town but we chatted for a good while about what we were both up too, he hasn’t changed much , still a snappy dresser in his white denim jacket and hoopy T-shirt although like me he is a little folically challenged these days but at least the mop top has gone or he would have resembled a Trappist monk, I think he said he was living with his partner, the girl from out of the Sunflowers and they have a child or children, and he works as a full time guitar tech, touring, ect, with major acts although I know he used to roady for My Bloody Valentine. I don’t know if he toured with them when they recently reformed .

++ What about the city in general, do you still live there? If so, has it changed a lot? What were the best venues back in the day for pop music?

Actually none of the band were from Newcastle, we all live about twenty miles south nearer to Durham city but we nearly always went to Newcastle to see bands or buy records, its still a great place for music, art, food etc, there is still a great scene but the venues have all changed, we had The Riverside which got most of the best acts its now a shit rave club, then there was the Mayfair suite, The Broken Doll, the Dog and parrot, The Bunker in Sunderland, etc etc, now there’s “Head of Steam” the Cluny or the Other rooms, not much else really.

++ The sound of the Lavender Faction is a mix of indiepop and shoegaze, what were you listening at that time?

When the band started I would think it was bands like The Wedding Present, The Marychain, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, M.B.V, Buffalo Tom, Mazzy Star, Pixies, House of Love, Dinosaur Jr, Band of Suzans, Cocteau Twins, Loop, Wire , The Fall, Yellow, Del la soul, Stone Roses, Nwa, Nirvana, Babes in Toyland , Blue Nile , Neil Young , Bob Mould, Grant Heart, Throwing Muses, Spacemen 3, Husker Du, The Sundays, R.E.M, Ride, The Pale Saints, Primal Scream, Red House Painters, Lush , The Edsel Auctioneer, Drive, Swervedriver, Teenage Fanclub, Julian Cope, The Woodentops, St Etienne, Blue Aeroplanes, Chapterhouse , Slowdive, Leatherface, Midway Still, Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips , Spiritualized , The Field Mice, The Pooh Sticks, Stereolab , Curve, Felt,  Sugar, the Lemonheads, Ministry,  Juliana Hatfield, PJ Harvey, Pavement, Belly ,etc, etc, etc, etc.

I think that about covers a lot of it .

++ Your last single was the “Four Riffs for Joe” 12″. What are those four riffs and who is Joe?

Really the “Four Riffs” are the four songs on the 12″ and Joe was Joe Girvan our roady, Rick wanted to call it this as a thank you for Joe’s help while we were on tour with” The Wedding Present” so that was how that came about. .

++ What are your memories of recording all these records? I bet there were also many songs that were left unreleased, will there be any sort of retrospective album some day?

My memories of the recording sessions are mixed ,it was always a laugh and a pain in the arse at the same time.

Although we saw the band as a bit of a democracy the final decisions always came down to me and Rick but many an argument would arise over levels of one instrument or another but in general it was good times and hearing something that was self produced played on John Peel was the best feeling in the world. As far as the band having more material there were a few tracks that never made vinyl but nothing I can remember being outstanding and I don’t own any masters if there actually is one, I haven’t spoken to the other guys in the band for a while but Rick and Andy work together they might be planning a comeback for all i know but don’t hold your breath. No there aren’t any plans for a retrospective .

++ You also released a couple of flexis, the one with Stephen Maughan’s This Almighty Pop Fanzine that included the track Harbour Me, but there is another flexi that is not very well known, one shared with St. James Infirmary. That one had the song “Take Down the Walls”. Care to tell me a bit more about it?

Yeah! The original “Take Down the Walls” was a lot more melodic and we had recorded the tune at one session or another but rick decided he wanted to change the music and made it a lot harder sounding , we used the original lyrics with the new music and the magazine “Paint it Red” which was a free “What’s On” mag for the Newcastle arts scene asked Stephen Lust to provide tracks from bands on the label to go on a Flexi to be given away free with the mag, they did a spread on us and we were on the cover, I think I’ve got a couple tucked away in the attic, funny enough it was one of our favourite recordings by the band although i still prefer the original tune, its on one of our early demos.

++ Did you gig a lot with the band? Any gigs you remember the most?

We toured all over the UK and supported some great bands ,The Wedding Present, Buffalo Tom, Swervedriver, Carter USM , but the best gig of all had to be Liverpool Uni. We were supporting the Wedding Present and they said we could go second on the bill for that gig much to the disgust of the solo acoustic performer and vocalist and bass player in the Chameleons Mark Burgess. He didn’t speak to us after that but we went down a storm with the crowd great memories.

++ Why did you call it a day? What did you all do after?

The Lavender Faction ‘as most bands of the time before the internet’ had to rely on the press (Sounds , N.M.E and Melody Maker) radio airplay, fanzines, and you had to be prepared to gig constantly Rick unfortunately had no stomach for this and decided to call it a day .

Andy and me decided to move on and we formed Montana Hood who released one single.

++ Are you still making music nowadays? What other hobbies does Geoff Suggett has?

I still record stuff at home on my 16 track, and recently got Together with my old friend Stephen Maughan and reformed Kosmonaut for one gig to support White Town in Newcastle . Steve has kindly offered to release a track of my solo stuff “Neon Man” with a future release of his fanzine.

I snowboard when I can ,I walk a lot in the lake district and still get out to see the odd band or two when I can, oh and Ive recently taken up oil painting .

++ Thanks again, anything else you’d like to add?

Yeah! I would like to take this chance to say thanks to anyone who was a fan of the Lavender Faction , Thanks to you Roque for your interest in the band and especially thanks to Stephen Maughan who’s good friendship gave us the chance to do what we did .
ps. keep off the Acid Steve.

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Listen
The Lavender Faction – Ride

Day 481

Croma Nueve: just discovered the label Sursum Tapes from Granada, Spain. Their latest release, the self-titled Croma Nueve tape is already sold out. But here I am checking it out. It was released last May and included 5 songs. You can check their lo-fi bedroom pop on Bandcamp.

A Days Wait: another nice discovery is this project from Hamilton, Canada. Just a week ago Adam Alfano, the person behind this band, published a punchy pop track called “Lost Anyway”. Previously he had released “Ties that Bind (B-Side)” and “Falling Forward iPhone Demo” on Soundcloud.

Fantasy Postcards: wow! a new song by my friends Johan and Mattias Jonsson from Uppsala, Sweden. This one is called “(Where there was) No Goodbye” and as usual is a superb slice of jangly pop!! Thumbs up! I heard a rumour somewhere that they are releasing something in the near future? I hope it is true!

Evergreen Days: remember I told you that My Secret Garden Recordings are releasing a compilation by the amazing Evergreen Days on November 25? Well, to promote this wonderful release a video has been made for the song “Until Then”. This is one release that is essential this year.

Frown Line: and we end this Monday recommendations with another Canadian band, Frown Line from Ottawa. I’ve been meaning to visit the capital for many years, but I haven’t yet. Would be nice. The one song on Bandcamp have reminded me of those plans. This song is called “September” and was recorded by a girl whose name we don’t know but that she is 19 and played everything on it. Nice!

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Back in 2014 the venerable Jigsaw Records that our friend Chris Mac runs released “Thank You for Nothing!” (PZL064) a retrospective compilation of the band formed by Andy Huscroft on bass, Malcolm (Mala) Reay on vocals and guitar and Steve Minto on drums, in the early 90s.

This compilation is available to listen in its entirety on Bandcamp. It includes a whopping 28 songs! These came from their three singles, one split flexi and many compilations, which we’ll look later on, and some from their never released album. The songs for you completists were “Make it Better”, “Why Does the Sun Fall from the Sky?”, “4 Walls”, “Salt in the Wound”, “Sacred Ground”, “Another Day”, “Wish You Luck”, “St. George’s Way”, “Worldly Wise”, “Come in from the Cold”, “Do You Really Know What’s Going On?”, “Money Talks”, “Make a Big Decision”, “Goodbye to Stephen”, “A World of your Own”, “Pull the Boat in”, “Close to Home”, “Think it Over… And Start Again”, “Happy Again”, “The Devil’s In your Shoes”, “This is Your Life”, “A Suit of Wood”, “Watch the Rain”, “You Live by the Sword… You Die by the Sword”, “Sad”, “Chocolate Rain”, “You Need a Heart of Stone” and “Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated?”. If you remember, once upon a time I named a Cloudberry 3″ compilation like the last song.

That last song, “Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated?” appeared on the split flexi I mentioned. This flexi, shared with The Lavender Faction, came alongside the This Almighty Pop fanzine, number 3. Catalog number for it was DR002, the label was Dolphin 7. The artwork features The Beatles.

On this flexi we learn too that the band hailed from Gateshead.

Gateshead is a large town in Tyne and Wear, England, on the southern bank of the River Tyne opposite Newcastle upon Tyne. Gateshead and Newcastle are joined by seven bridges across the Tyne, including the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. The town is known for its architecture, including the Sage Gateshead, the Angel of the North and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Residents of Gateshead, like the rest of Tyneside, are usually referred to as Geordies.

In 1991 the band released their first proper 7″, the “Make it Better” single (TURN 05). It came out on the German label A Turntable Friend and had three songs. “Make it Better” appears on the A side and “Pull the Boat In” and “Sad” on the B side. The songs had been recorded in June of that year and on the sleeve there seems to be a woman I should know perhaps, but I can’t tell who it is, looks like a movie actress. Who is she?

In 1992 the band releases a tape on Elefant Records called “Happy Hymns” (ER-014). This tape had 15 tracks, can it be considered an album? Maybe not, most probably a collection of demos: “All Fall Down”, “Money Talks”, “The Devils in Your Shoes”, “Chocolate Rain”, “Think it Over, Start Again”, “Good Luck” and “Happy Again” on the A side and “Come in from the Cold”, “Watch the Rain”, “This Could be Heaven”, “Sacred Ground”, “Goodbye Stephen” and “Do You Really Know What’s Going On?”. Impressive as many of these songs don’t appear on the Jigsaw compilation.

1993 sees the band release “St George’s Way” 7″ (TURN 13) again on A Turntable Friend. Two songs on this one, “St George’s Way” and “Why Does the Sun Fall from the Sky?” on the flipside. Again some interesting photos for the artwork, perhaps known images from TV or movies but I can’t pinpoint them. Not much more info other than who wrote the songs, Graham for “St Georges Way” and Huscroft and Reay for the B side. Now, who is Graham? Was he a new member?

Elefant would work again with the band and release “The Route of Evil – 4 Songs” 7″ (ER-128) in 1994. This EP had “Salt in the Wound” and “Another Day” on the A side and “Make a Big Decision” and “Worldly Wise” on the B side. Weirdly in Elefant’s website it says that the band hailed from Australia.

When it comes to compilations the band shines. They were very active during the 90s! I’ll try to do it quickly and chronologically.

On the 1990 legendary tape “Positively Teenage” released by Stephen Maughan’s Dolphin 7 label we find their songs “All Fall Down” and “Devil in Your Shoe”. In 1991 the song “Watch the Rain” is on the Red Roses for Me tape compilation “Honey at the Core”. That same year on the Spanish tapee “Film Fun ‘There’s No Stopping Her!'” released by El Vicio Secreto de Sister Mary to accompany the first number of thee eponymous  band contributed “Come in from the Cold” and “Sacred Ground”.  Lastly that same year the song “Sleep like a Dream” ended up in the tape “123456 Road Runner” by Glidge Records (Glidge001).

1992 was quite prolific as well. On the French Anorak Records tape “Teeny Poppers” (SHOUBIDOUWA 01) they included the songs “Worldly Wise” and “Everything Today”. On another French tape, “Garden Party” released by Aliénor Records (Alien alpha) they had the song “Happy Again”. Elefant included the song “Sad (Demo Version)” on “Positively Dolphin Friendly” (ER-007) tape. Lastly on the classic “C92” released by Rainbow the band had yet another two songs “Come in from the Cold” and “Why Does the Sun Fall from the Sky?”.

In 1993 the songs “Make a Big Decision” and “World of Your Own” ended up on Grapefruit’s “Lime Green” (Grapefruit Four) tape comp. Bliss Aquamarine would also have them on “Peacock Blue” (BLISS 002) compilation with the songs “Chocolate Rain” and “Watch the Rain”.

More recently the band had “Why Does the Sun Fall…” on the “Jigsaw Records 2015 Sampler” a CDR sampler by Jigsaw Records and in 2017 they appeared on “The Test of Time” (TURN50) a CD and vinyl compilation by A Turntable Friend that announced the comeback of the mighty label.

When it comes to other bands they have been involved with, well we know Malcolm Reay had worked with our friend Stephen in Kosmonaut. Very cool indeed. I don’t know much about the other two members. Did they play in any other indiepop bands? I believe Andy Huscroft was on The Hipflasks who I wrote about (but still haven’t been in touch with!)

I look for more info. I find a blog called “…Your Heart Out“. Here the author writes a nice post about Malcolm Reay. This piece dates from November 2010 and teells us that The Gravy Train had great t-shirts. Would love to see one. He mentions too that the Malcolm loved the band Hurrah!

The other blog that wrote about the band is the great 7pulgadas by my friend Alex from Spain. Not much info about the band but always lovely to read the passionate texts of this blog.

Not much info, but hopefully we’ll find out more details about the band soon! I hope the connections between bands that I am friendly with may help with contacting The Gravy Train members!

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Listen
The Gravy Train – Come from the Cold

Thanks so much to Jimmy and Gérôme for the interview! I discovered the Nantes band Nos Etés Trop Courts on the OVVK Archives Bandcamp that Jimmy runs and it was quite a surprise! I had interviewed Jimmy about his band Les Autres in the past and wasn’t aware he had been involved in this cool sounding band before Les Autres. So I immediately asked if he was up for a 2nd interview! He asked Gérôme to join too and now  thanks to them and this interview I have a better picture of the Nantes scene and the band! Hope you enjoy!

++ Hi Jimmy and Gérôme! Thanks so much for being for this interview! How are you? How is France at the moment? Have things relaxed a bit now? Are there any plans for this summer?

Gérôme: It is of course a strange period but it’s ok. Thank you interviewing us on Nos Etés Trop Courts. Some people were glad to see that our “Sunshine demo EP” from January 1992 was out, particularly Nantes indie pop underground people. We are honored to see that some people from other countries enjoy the music we made during the golden period of the shoegaze movement.

++ Last time I talked with Jimmy about Les Autres. I wasn’t aware then about this Nantes band that came before. Was wondering then if you both had been involved in other bands prior to Nos Etés Trop Courts?

Gérôme: It’s fascinating because I never talked about that with Jimmy.  l played in a few new wave/4AD style bands before Nos Etés Trop Courts. The first one, Ramsesghom that I began in 1989 (I was 19 years old) played some Joy Division, The Cure early albums and Sisters Of Mercy covers. The second, Abecurria, in 1990 was more into And Also The Trees and Cocteau Twins stuffs, the reason whythere was a loud bass played with a mediator (like the one I played in the second demo of Nos Etes Trop Courts) and some aerial guitars with delay. But Nos EtésTrop Courts which started in the first months of 1991 was my first real coherent and harmonious music experience.

Nos Etés Trop Courts was still playing when I started another band, Crash, in January 1992 which would be the more successful band I would be in (like Jimmy with Les Autres). Jimmy re-released the first (July 1992) demo of Crash in OVVK last year. When we originally released it, it was broadcasted on a national radio show, had been reviewed in Les Inrockuptibles, a national magazine dedicated to indie music. Tracks from this demo were also featured on various International indie pop cassette. compilations:  https://ovvkarchives.bandcamp.com/album/demo-1.

Between 1992 and 1996, Crash was more into Swervedriver, Dinosaur Jr or even Mudhoney pop core scene. Here is a German indie pop compilation from 1994 (Garage Flowers) with some tracks by Les Autres (with Jimmy) and Crash (with me): .

https://www.discogs.com/fr/Various-Garage-Flowers/release/4354533

In 1994, I started another band with Pascal and Pat’ (From San July), which was more into dissonant pop and post rock, Snowfan. And in 1996 I also made a side project, a hardcore skate band called Nosegrab.

Jimmy: Nos Etes Trop Courts was my first real experience in a band even if I made some rehearsals before with two girls under the moniker Chrysalide (there are no recordings from that band and believe me, only the name of the band was nice haha).

A bit before Nos Etés Trop Courts I started to write songs on the  bass influenced by various bass players such as Simon Gallup of The Cure, Peter hook of New Order and most of all at that time Ian Masters of Pale Saints especially the bass chords. Some of those songs ended up being played by the band such as Nos Etés Trop Courts, Waiting (renamed Leaves Return To Dust after I left the band), Y’A Des Jours Sans and Only Of The Night. But on the 4 track recorder we recorded the first demo, I recorded more songs, some of which I had planned for Nos Etés Trop Courts before leaving the band and songs that I had recorded up to 1992-1993 when I joined Les Autres. I’ll release them soon on Ovvk Recordings under the moniker Diaphane which was the name I originally suggested for the band but it was rejected by some of the members. These demos are “rough” and unfinished versions. Diaphane was an indie pop project strongly influenced by The Cure, The Sundays, New Order, The Wedding Present, The Lavender Faction(…) and even The Field Mice in a certain way. I plan to call the demos Indie Pop Themes as they all are instrumentals.

++ I did ask Jimmy about this last time, but would love to hear from Gérôme. What are your first musical memories? What was the first instrument did you get and how?

Gérôme: I was born in may 1970. My first musical shock was when I was 14, the San Francisco Bay Area thrash metal guitar sound (Metallica, Slayer, Exodus…). But a few years later, the shoegaze scene was really fascinating because there was some loud noisy guitars with heavenly voices. Really chaotic noisy panorama landscapes with beautiful melodic voices. With Jim’ and other friends we saw Lush and Pale Saints in Nantes, January 1990. It was their first gig outside England. We loved that so much.  A revelation.

++ Who else was in Nos Etés Trop Courts? And how did the recruiting process work?

Gérôme: In February 1990, I saw an ad pinned on a wall notice board for student in the hall of the faculty of literature “noisy pop band seeks guitarist”. That’s how it worked back then, before the Internet. I called the phone number when I got home. The group had been founded a few months earlier by Pascal and Jimmy (who had met each other through classified ads), then Marielle began to sing, then Guillaume, the drummer joined them. We rehearsed in a school, Guillaume’s father was the supervisor so we had access to the premises. I arrived a week or two after Marielle started singing. This line up is the one on the first 4-track demo (recorded in June and July 1991) which was just released here: https://ovvkarchives.bandcamp.com/album/sunset-demo-ep

Then (for the 1991-1992 academic year) the group continued but Marielle went to study in Lille and was replaced by Fabrice (who later released records under the name of River). Jimmy also left at that time because he was starting university  in Rennes (where he will meet Les Autres). That’s why I play the bass on the second demo (in addition to the guitar).

++ How was Nantes back then? Were there any bands that you liked? What were the good record stores? Or what about the pubs or venues to go check out up and coming bands?

Gérôme: Nantes was starting to get really hyped in the early 1990s. There was an indie pop group that played a lot called The Little Rabbits. We saw them in Nantes in April 1991 opening for The Pastels and then in January 1992 with Lucie Vacarme and The Boo Radleys.

There was also a young woman who was probably around 17 or 18yrs old, she published some cool fanzines, released various cassette compilations from the Sarah indie pop scene (she knew Matt and Clare). She also released minimalist pop singers from Nantes like Katerine or Dominique A. and knew musicians from the Scottish pop scene (BMX Bandits, Teenage Fanclub, The Vaselines, Captain America…). Here you can read an interview (in French) I did with her more than 20 years ago: https://section-26.fr/les-anoraks-sages/.

In Nantes, some musicians started to play shoegaze a few months after Nos Etés Trop Courts, bands like 1000 Spirales, San July or RIP. There was also a cool club, “Le Floride”, the DJ, Laurent, was the manager of the “Little Rabbits” he also had a radio show and would launch a few years later the esteemed vinyl record store “Black & Noir”.

If readers want to know more on the local scene and hear local indie pop bands of that era, there’s na 8 hour radio program I made on Jet FM (a local station from Nantes).It’s a retrospective of indie pop bands from Nantes (1989-2012) :  http://jetfm.fr/site/Vendredi-25-mars-de-13h-a-18h-en.html

There’s a cassette compilation, “Biscuits Nantais”, featuring various bands from Nantes mid 90’s indie pop scene (featuring a track by me under the moniker Norb’urt) : https://www.discogs.com/fr/Various-Biscuits-Nantais/release/12190640

I also wrote in the fanzine “Les Jolies Melodies” edited in Nantes by Franck Vergeade, who is now music Editor in chief of the national magazine Les Inrockuptibles, but it was in 1993-1994 and Nos Etés Trop Courts had already split at that time.

++ What’s the story behind the band’s name? 

Gérôme: I realize I don’t know much about that. I joined the band, partied with the musicians of the band (Marielle, Jimmy Pascal with other friends), but I don’t know anything about the lyrics either. I wasn’t involved in the writing of the lyrics. However, I know that “Nos Etés Trop Courts” was taken from a poem by Charles Baudelaire called “Chant d’Automne”. A beautiful text, a bit sad and nostalgic, full of spleen, like the lyrics Marielle used to write.

++ How was the creative process for you? Where did you usually practice?

Gérôme: The first few months (early 1991) Jimmy would bring in basslines and we would build songs around it. Everyone did what they wanted, listening to the others. Guillaume had played in a funk band before coming with us,so we sometimes tried to ask him for baggy sound rhythms and patterns. Secondly, after a few months, I started to bring songs composed on my guitar, with a grid of chords and melodies. For example, on the second demo (Sunshine EP), late 1991, you can hear the difference between the first two tracks that Jimmy composed on the bass and the next two that I composed on the  guitar. Pascal had good ideas for arrangements. Then, especially the second year, Pascal also brought some songs.

++ And who would you say were influences in the sound of the band?

Gérôme: At that time,we were really into the shoegaze news. Each month we discovered new Eps (especially Pascal). We liked Slowdive, Ride or My Bloody Valentine of course, but also The Field Mice and other bands from Sarah records, Pale Saints, Lush, Chapterhouse, Teenage Fanclub, or even Swervedriver or Aspidistra. I remember Jimmy was very fond of The Wedding Present and Talk Talk. I also listened to Jesus & Mary Chain and discovered the old albums by the Velvet Underground (I first heard about the Velvet Underground with Joy Division’s “Sister Ray” cover on the live album Still).

We were also really into the New Order first albums and The Cure (especially Faith and Desintegration). You can hear the influence on my Y’A Des Jours Sans guitar melody.

At that time there was an incredible label in Nantes called Lithium Records. We liked its bands, especially Candle and Lucie Vacarme. We also appreciated the minimalist singers’ wave (mainly in Nantes), Dominique A., Katerine, M. de Foursaings or Yann Savel.

Jimmy: I think that the two main influences are Pale Saints for the bass style and The Field Mice for the way of balancing the drum machine with the bass line and guitar chords. There’s also a bit of early Ride influences on the track Nos Etés Trop Courts. I love the guitar parts that Gérôme plays on Only Of The Night, it reminds me of The Cure in their Faith period. And when I wrote the bass line of Waiting (aka Leaves Return To Dust) I remember being influenced by several bass lines by The Sundays:  Can’t Be Sure, Hideous Town, Skin & Bones…

++ I am only aware of the second demo of the band that is up on Bandcamp. Do tell me about the 1st demo. Do you plan uploading it? What songs were on it? Where and who recorded it?

Gérôme: The first demo was recorded in June 1991 by Jimmy with his 4 track cassette recorder and his old drum machine. Pascal was doing his national service. I think he was not here, so there is only my guitar.

On the first demo Jimmy’s bass is amazing, really huge.It’s a rough analogue sound but I love it. I try a lot of different things on the guitar. “Nos Etés Trop Courts” is orthodox shoegaze, but with a clear guitar sound for the chorus, “Y’A Des Jours Sans” is influenced by New Order and “Only of the Night” is more, mellow, eery, atmospheric.

It’s Marielle singing. Marielle had no singing experience in fact, her amateur performances (she sometimes sang out of tune) were precisely what we defended. We also liked (what we heard about) the texts of Marielle, very personal and fragile, like the ones of Y’A Des Jours Sans where she explains that some days, she is depressed and does not want to get up. Pascal said that was “authentic “ indie pop and at that time I was learning what were lo-fi, DiY attitude and underground subculture. I remember it was a revelation when  Pascal, Marielle and Jimmy saw the Pastels in concert. They were shy and friendly, with a rough sound. Pascal enjoyed their show a lot. At some stage I would always play a wrong note in the guitar chorus of Nos Etés Trop Courts, right at the end of the track. My friend Jérôme (the future lead singer of the band Crash) would make a point of telling us, but Pascal would then reply “We don’t care, we play what we want”. That always stayed with me.

Jimmy: Yes, they were recorded in my bedroom at my parents. There is a first demo version of Nos Etés Trop Courts, an instrumental rehearsal version of Leaves Return To Dust (working title: Waiting), Y’A Des Jours Sans and Only Of The Night (two unreleased songs). Marielle is on vocals and wrote the lyrics.

And so yes after you sent us the questions for the interview we released it here: https://ovvkarchives.bandcamp.com/album/sunset-demo-ep

++ The second demo is titled “Sunshine EP” and has two girls on the cover. I find them very familiar but can’t figure out who are they… do tell!

Gérôme: We all had 4 cassette tracks recorders and drum machines at the time. Pascal had just bought a new drum machine and had offered to manage the recording. I thought it was a good idea (besides he recorded other pop bands in the years that followed). He had a half-hollow guitar. We can hear the subtle feedback he made at the end of “Walk Of Nones”;-).

++ Was there any other demo tapes?

No. Only rehearsal recordings

++ And normally these demo tapes you released, were they mostly for promotion purposes, to send to radio and magazines? or did you perhaps sell them to fans?

Jimmy: I think we recorded the first demo for fun. At the time we recorded it we didn’t plan to find gigs or try to have a review in a fanzine or a magazine. Also, we didn’t have a manager, we were real beginners.

++ Are there more recordings by the band? Unreleased songs?

Jimmy:  The last unreleased songs are on Demo #1 and so there are some songs that I started when I was still in the band that I will release under the moniker Diaphane.

++ I think my favourite song of yours might as well be “Leaves Return to Dust”,  so what’s the story behind it?

Jimmy: I can’t tell you about the lyrics, we’d have to ask Fabrice but when I wrote it on the bass I was deeply influenced by The Sundays, listen to their first album, it’s obvious 😉

++ If you were to choose your favorite Nos Etés Trop Courts song, which one would that be and why?

Jimmy: Leaves Return To Dust is probably my fav too. I think that my second fav would be Only Of The Night. Probably because I didn’t even remember that one until Gérôme told me recently he had it on a cassette. Even though I always remembered the bass line, I forgot we demoed it and didn’t hear it in 28 years. I can tell you it’s fantastic to discover a song that you wrote almost 30 years earlier!

There’s something very touching on this first demo because it’s really naïve, you can hear clearly that we’re beginners. But still, you can feel that we got the hang of writing and I love this dark/melancholic mood hesitating between a light Indie Pop mood and a darker Post-Punk / Cold Wave one.

Gérôme: My favourite song is Nos Etés Trop Courts.

++ What about gigs? Did you play many?

Jimmy: When I was in the band, we played only one outdoor gig during the national French music day (Fête de La Musique), the 21st of June 1991. But as Gérôme said they played with the second line-up in the local Club called Melody Maker in 1992.

++ And what were the best gigs you remember? Any anecdotes you can share?

Jimmy: Sadly, I don’t have a good memory of that period. I think that the best anecdote is that we would almost all have amazing musical experiences with Les Autres and Crash a few years after that, opening for great bands such as The Wedding Present or The House Of Love.

++ And were there any bad ones?

Jimmy: Hopefully, no bad ones as far as I can remember 😉

++ Looking back in retrospective, what would you say was the biggest highlight for the band?

Jimmy: Probably to play in this small but hype local club, Melody Maker.

Gérôme: Or probably being an underground band, but in the popular music avant-garde of that time, playing shoegaze at the same time as Ride or Slowdive edited their first album.

++ Never visited Nantes but would love to go one day, maybe I can ask for some suggestions? Like what are the sights I shouldn’t miss? Or the traditional food or drinks I should try?

Jimmy:  In my last interview for Les Autres you were supposed to try crêpes in French Brittany, remember Roque? Did you try?

To be honest this part of the Atlantic coast is not the best place in France when it comes to landscapes.

But if you go a bit further north-west and you visit French Brittany, which I think you did in the past Roque, the coast is beautiful in many parts and there are really nice small islands.

You could also go to this village where Gauguin and other impressionists stayed at the end of the 19th century: Pont-Aven. There’s a nice little impressionists museum. Also in Carnac you could see what is probably the biggest site of menhirs (standing stone) in the world and which is contemporary to Stonehenge.

In Nantes the main thing is the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany. In Nantes, Anne de Bretagne was the last Duchess of the independent Brittany (connected to Great Britain) until she married the King of France (16th Century).

Gérôme: I Love Nantes and the people from Brittany. It deserves to be known!

++ Lastly one non-music question, one about football. Do you support Nantes or Rennes?

Jimmy:  Neither Nantes nor Rennes. I’m personally against professional sport which is in my opinion one of the strongest tools for mainstream-corporate culture to alienate people. Sorry to be that serious on that matter 😉

Gérôme: The only thing I like about football is to be with friends watching games. But you must be a connoisseur, because there is indeed the Breton derby Rennes vs Nantes.

++ Anything else you’d like to add?

Jimmy: Just thanks again for your support and what you do Roque to keep alive the spirit of independent music of those years !

Gérôme: I’d like to add 2 things:

The first one is that if Nos Etés Trop Courts has produced almost nothing, most of its musicians did a lot of things afterwards. Marielle worked in music. First at the Olympic, the main concert hall venue in Nantes, then she started a business of booking bands and managing others.

Pascal played in several bands (Crash, Snowfan, Hafner, Newell…) and started an indie record label, Cindie. He began with a cassette compilation titled Ces Chères Têtes Blondes :

https://www.discogs.com/fr/Various-Ces-Ch%C3%A8res-T%C3%AAtes-Blondes/release/2259390

Then he released singles and albums.

Jimmy played in Les Autres, and I played in Crash, then wrote in Magic RPM Magazine and became a sociologist studying music. Crash and Les Autres had a lot of press, made records and concert gigs.

Fabrice released several vinyl singles as River:

https://www.discogs.com/fr/artist/379522-River-5

The second one is that Nos Etés Trop Courts was a band that lasted a short time. Formed in January 1991, and died in June 1992. We have never been to a professional studio but spent very little time outside of rehearsals saving a few titles on 4 cassette tracks. These tapes were never shown outside of the band’s 20-plus fans until Jimmy released them on Ovvk Recordings. The first demo was recorded in June 1991 at Jimmy’s. The second demo, Sunshine EP” was recorded in October 1991 by Pascal and I. Jimmy and Marielle had just moved to other cities for their studies. We continued to hang out with them, but Fabrice came to sing after we met him. He put his voice on our music on January 1992. This second demo, Sunshine EP, was really in the wave I think.

https://ovvkarchives.bandcamp.com/track/nos-etes-trop-courts

It has the sound of the time. It is part of the history of indie pop. But we did not realise it counted at the time. Pascal didn’t like Fabrice’s way of singing that much, he thought his way of singing was too technical, too professional, too clean. For Fabrice, it was a revelation to play with us. He listened to things like Front 242 or Depeche Mode before he met us. He heard shoegazing music with us for the first time and was enthusiastic when he first heard that kind of sound. Because we did not realise the precursor dimension of compositions like Leaves return to dust or Nos Etés Trop Court. We did not broadcast these recordings at the time and  we did few concerts. We had not shown them on compilations even though people today tell us it was great. And your reaction confirms it to us. That’s life anyway.

Have a nice day and thank you for your support!

Thanks to Sonia Stewart for the English correction.

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Listen
Nos Etés Trop Courts – Leaves Return To Dust

Thanks so much to Jimmy Arfosea for the interview! Some weeks ago I was reviewing the OVVK Recordings Bandcamp as there were many releases available to stream by Les Autres. Then Jimmy got in touch and it was a superb opportunity to do an interview for the blog! Les Autres was one of the most important bands in the French indiepop scene of the 90s and released an album and a bunch of singles mostly on the label Cornflakes Zoo. It is then a good time to rediscover them, even more so as they do have a CD compilation with unreleased bits and bobs that is still available on Jigsaw Records.

++ Hi Jimmy! Thanks so much for getting in touch! How are you? You are not in Rennes anymore, right, but in Nantes, how come?

Hi Roque ! Pretty good thanks.
Oh actually i was the only member coming from Nantes. When i joined the band i was starting studies in Rennes. Rennes and Nantes are like twin cities only like 70 miles from each other.

++ I hear you are still making music these days with your band Ocean of Embers. Tell me a bit about this band? Have you released anything so far? Are there any similarities with Les Autres?

I started An Ocean Of Embers in september 2017 with Elsa Muller on vocals.
I lost myself in various projects during years from electronica to ambient post-rock but i wasn’t really satisfied with my productions apart of Extreme Shoegaze, the experimental project i made with my friends Pascal Riffaud and Camille Michel.
In 2012 i felt like coming back to shoegaze. I have a lot of demos that i’m now ready to finalyze.
There will be four digital singles before releasing an album. I self-released two of them on Ovvk Recordings and i’m looking for a real label to release the album on vinyl or CD.

The singles are available on Bandcamp : https://aooe.bandcamp.com/

And i’m currently working on a Moose cover to be released on The Blog That Celebrates Itself in August.

An Ocean Of Embers have probably similarities with Les Autres in the manner of building harmonic progressions. I have reflexes acquired during these years in the band.

++ Are you still in touch to this day with the rest of the band? What are you all up to?

Yes, specially with Olivier, the singer of the band. He released recently a very good indie rock album on Jigsaw Records with his new band Megrim.

https://jigsawrecords.bandcamp.com/album/pzl137-megrim-families

Morgan, the bassist, was in the excellent electronica/IDM band Mils in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. He also produced M83 who were fans of Les Autres in their teenage years. He has now an experimental electronic project named Bertùf, focusing on circuit bending recently.

David, the drummer, is a photographer now. I’m not sure if he’s still playing music.

++ I heard that Les Autres will be having exciting news very soon with a limited 7″ single coming out. Tell me about that! Which songs will appear on it? When was it recorded? When will it be available?

It’s out now ! It was released on Fissile, a label releasing only lathe cuts. Therefore it’s a very limited edition. The label is led by Stéphane from the band Acetate Zero, one of the best french bands in my opinion.
All tracks were the last ever recorded songs after our album in a period when we were including new influences in our music : slowcore, early post-rock, minimalism… The lead track sounds a lot like Slint’s Spiderland while the two other tracks sound a bit like Gastr Del Sol and Bark Psychosis. This last track is only available on the digital version of the single on Ovvk Recordings : https://ovvkrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/my-friend-henry

++ Let’s start from the beginning. Like what are your first musical memories? What was the first instrument did you get and how?

I can’t tell for the other members but the first vinyl i bought was Talk Talk’s It’s My Life in 1984 and the first indie vinyl i owned was McCarthy’s Keep An Open Mind Or Else. McCarthy is still one of my favorite band ever.
I bought a bass at the age of 17. I was working in a factory at that time and bought it as soon as i saved the money !

++ Had any of you been involved with other bands prior to Les Autres?

Actually the three other members met when they were only 16 or 17. They started to play under the moniker Stern. Their music was already very good in my opinion. Their style was Cold Wave but with a slight touch of Jangly Pop wich made their sound original and interesting. Some of their recordings are available on the band’s Bandcamp.

Meanwhile i was playing in a band in Nantes for which i wrote my first songs. After i moved to Rennes , three members of this band ended in a band called Crash who made an album and opened for House Of Love, BMX Bandits, The Frank & Walters…

++ Were all of you originally from Rennes?

All except me from Nantes.

++ How was Rennes back then? Were there any bands that you liked? What were the good record stores? Or what about the pubs or venues to go check out up and coming bands?

We were friends with the twee pop band Des Garçons Ordinaires and Guitare Boy who made a split flexi single with Stereolab. Also with In Sense, a band very Too Pure oriented musically who never released anything officially but whose members ended up with our bassist forming Mils.

Rennes was the city for indie pop in France in the early 90’s. A nice place to live with a lot of gigs in bars. The classical venue for indie gigs since the 70’s was Ubu and there was an indie record store, Rennes Musique, where local bands could sell their demos.

++ When and how did the band start? How did you all meet? How was the recruiting process?

The other members started when they were like 16-17 years old, a few years before i moved to Rennes for my studies. Two of them were in the same school if i remember well.

As soon as i was in Rennes, i pinned an ad at university. The drummer saw it and they called me. The funny thing is that they wanted to recruit a female singer playing guitar and i was a male bassist. But it worked so well between us that we decided that i would learn how to play guitar.
Five weeks after my first gig ever on guitar we were supposed to open for Blur at Ubu but hopefully for me it was cancelled a bit later 🙂

++ Why the name Les Autres?

Nobody remembers how it was really chosen but i think it was by opening a dictionnary randomly.

++ How was the creative process for you? Where did you usually practice?

During most of our career we had a rehearsal room where to play at least two nights per week.

Usually someone, most of the time Olivier the singer, would come with a basic chord grid and the song was built jamming around that base. That’s probably why our songs were known for having complex structures for a pop band.

++ And how did it happen that some songs were in French, some others in English? What came easiest to you?

On the studio demo the guys made before i joined the band (I’ve Lost Everything I Held) all the songs were in english. But Olivier was more cumfortable writing in french. After the first single we all agreed that english worked better on noisy pop. We all wrote lyrics for the band. In particular David, the drummer who was studying english. He would either write his own lyrics or translate Olivier’s ideas.

++ And who would you say were influences in the sound of the band?

At the beginning of the band we were often compared to Pale Saints and The Boo Radleys. But our sound evolved dramatically a bit before our second single Hoppy, progressively being more influenced by american bands. And i would say that on the album the main influence was Codeine but also Idaho, Sonic Youth, Swell, Pavement, Gastr Del Sol, Shellac… Even Don Caballero !

++ Just out of curiosity, what would be your favourite all-time French indie bands?

I don’t know if you know that one : Carmine. They were fantastic.
Acetate Zero are great too and they’re still playing !

++ Your first release was a 7″ on Cornflakes Zoo (Zoo 1). Do tell me how did you end up signing to this label and how was your relationship with them?

In spring 1992, when our sound was evolving to shoegaze, one of our demos came to the ears of Martial Solis who was running the fanzine Onion’s Soup. He was living in Bordeaux and knew Stéphane Teynie, the owner of Cornflakes Zoo based in the same city.
Living in Rennes, we didn’t have a close relationship but things were working well between the label and the band.

++ This first 7″ was “Belle Est Ta Journée” that had two songs. It was recorded at Studio Son Colombier. Was it your first experience at a proper recording? And how did that go?

The other members already had an experience in studio before when they recorded I’ve Lost Everything I Held, a recording that i like a lot.

On the opposite i think that the sound on the first single was awful and the engineer did a very bad work. I have master copies on cassette and i’ll remaster this single soon as i’m in the process of remastering chronollogically everything we’ve done.

That bad experience in studio is the reason why we decided to record everything by ourselves after that. The second single which sounds far better was recorded in Olivier’s kitchen on a 4 track cassette recorder.
For the album we bought a 8 track tape recorder and recorded in the caves of a castle.

++ And do tell, who is in that picture of the sleeve?

Nice sleeve isn’t it ? I think she was the little sister or cousin of the designer. The sleeve is nice. We loved dit. Disappointed with the sound but at least the design was nice, in the like of Sarah Records.

The funny thing is that for the album cover, Morgan, the bassist, had a crush on that photography in an exhibition. Well, the photographer, a girl our age, actually photographed her little sister too.

++ Your second 7″ came out again on Cornflakes Zoo. Wondering how was your relationship with the other bands on this label? Did you happen to play with them often? Was there some sort of scene?

Yes there was a label festival two succesive years in Bordeaux and a in Paris shortly before the recording of the album. We played with most of the french bands of the label. Olympia and Des Garçons Ordinaires were from Rennes too.

++ Afterwards you released your album, “Le Retour À La Lune”, in 1994. How was the album received? Was it much different recording an album than the singles?

The album was pressed in 1994 and released in january 1995. It was well received by most of the press but the sellings were poor because the label ended in 1995 just after the release (it started again in 1998 with the release of Shrink by The Notwist).

Yes, you’re right it was very different. We wanted to have a total control on the sound so we recorded and mixed the album ourselves on that 8 track tape recorder. We knew that a lot of great albums, like the first Swell, were recorded on that kind of recorder.

We took our time to record the album, two months to record nine songs.
We wanted to experiment. That’s why there are tape samples on the album. And we wanted the album to sound coherent like a concept album, like a soundtrack.
Most of the engineering was made by Olivier and Morgan but all of us were involved and would give ideas on the sound, on how to set a guitar amplifier, how to equalize etc…

++ I keep seeing a trend with the art for your records, some evocative photography. Who took care of the art/design? Was it you or the label?

On the first single the label did the job. But on the second single and the album we decided everything about the artwork and Morgan did the design.
With the remasters i release on Ovvk Recordings i try to create designs that work with the artworks our records had in the 90’s.

++ There is a split 7″ with two other bands, Antiseptic Beauty and Mosaic Eyes on the Contrast label. I’m quite curious about this label as it was based in Belgium, which is not that common I’d say. Anything you could tell me about them? How did they contact you? Did you ever meet ?

The label was led by Thierry Nollet and Nicolas Cendrowicz. They were also involved in a european indie radios network. Thanks to them everything started for us because they recommanded the band to Martial Solis from the fanzine Onion’s Soup and who later played one of our first demos to Stéphane Teynie of Cornflakes Zoo.
This demo was our first shoegaze demo recorded in spring 1992 in an attic on the 4 track cassette recorder of Des Garçons Ordinaires. If i remember well ! This 5 tracks demo will be the next remaster i’ll release after the summer. Three of these tracks were re-recorded later for our first single and this split single on Contrast International.
Sadly we never met the guys of the label. We owe them a lot ! We were very happy to be on this split single. Mosaic Eyes and Antiseptic Beauty were excellent bands and so was the label.

++ Your last proper release came out two years ago on Jigsaw Records. It was called “Backwards” and it was a collection of bits and pieces from different releases and recordings. This is still available and it may be a good introduction for people to your music. How did this release came about many years after the band’s demise and why decide for this sort of compilation instead of perhaps one that included all your previous releases?

I contacted Chris of Jigsaw when i was looking for a label for my new shoegaze project wich wasn’t named An Ocean Of Embers yet.
Chris is not that much into shoegaze and i think that my project wasn’t ready at that time anyway and i didn’t even have a singer.
But when Chris heard that i’m an ex-member of Les Autres he told me that he remembered well the band and that he was interested in releasing unreleased material if there was some.
It was cool to see a CD release of the band 21 years after our last one. The only thing i regret is that the remasters i made weren’t as good as the ones i’m technically able to make now as i’ve studied sound engineering meanwhile. That’s why i remaster step by step all the band’s material on Ovvk Recordings.

++ What is Ovvk Recordings? I notice you have the intention to rescue old recordings of Les Autres and some other side projects? Where do these recordings come from?

Ovvk Recordings is a digital label i started in 2010 with a friend who makes music under the moniker Triton, a nice ambient electronica project. When we started we wanted to release music mainly from various electronic styles (IDM, Glitch, Drones…). But when i started the band Extreme Shoegaze and when my friend had to leave the label, i decided to focus on everything wich is related to noisy and experimental guitars.

Ovvk Archives is a sub-label where to release things that were related to Les Autres in the 90’s, side and solo projects and friends projects.
One of the next releases will be an excellent Guitare Boy demo.

++ One of this releasas is a CDR called “Ubu 1991”. I notice that you, Jimmy, don’t appear on the band credits. You weren’t in the band yet in 91? And how was that gig? how was that venue?

I joined the band in november 1991. I think that this gig was good for the band to increase their fame locally. The soundboard recording is excellent. Sadly we don’t have many live recordings like that.

++ Another one is “I’ve Lost Everything I Held” and “Garden” from 1991. I’m quite curious, why weren’t none of this Ovvk releases out back in the 90s? Or maybe they were in different formats? Maybe on cassettes?

Yes exactly. I’ve Lost Everything I Held was a demo tape, recorded in good conditions in studio. One of the best recordings of the band in my opinion. The demo tape was sold locally only and sent to venues and labels.

++ Then there is the “Stern EP” which dates from 1990 and that also you have released as a CDR. This might be the earliest recordings by the band? Or not? Are there earlier ones?

There might have been earlier recordings but i think that everything was lost…

++ Back in the 90s you were very involved in the tape compilation scene. You appeared on so many of them. How did that work out? How would one end up on these tapes? How was the process?

The first we were involved in was released by In The Limelight a local cassette label. It was ran by Thomas Leyrie who saw us on stage. We owe a lot to him too ! This label did a good job for the indie french bands in the early 90’s.

After our first single, labels would simply contact us to have us on tape compilations. There was this international network of tape labels owners, fanzines writers. All these people would write to each other. There was this « pen pal » spirit you know, thanks to fanzines mostly that would put people in contact, by leaving an adress or a phone number. It was before the internet. It was a nice period. Most of the time mails themselves were little pieces of art. Mail art.

++ And from the many tapes that you appeared which one would be your favourite?

My favorite tapes we were involved in would be Bedroom Palace on Lo-Fi Recordings and Shattered Fragments on Fluff because Hood were on them long before their success.

Whirl-Wheels on CD was great too. It was the first ever release on ShelfLife Records ! A must-have. We were happy to be on CD with Boyracer, Penelope Trip, They Go Boom !! Bands that we liked a lot.

++ There are a few that I would love to know more, probably you don’t remember them, but if you do, what do you know of the “In the Limelight” tape? Who were behind it? Or the “Garage-Flowers” one?

I told about In The Limelight. About Garage Flowers i don’t know much apart that the guy was german and Baby Talk was basically a fanzine if i remember well.

++ Then there’s a curious compilation called “Shopping in Rennes”. Is that an all Rennes bands compilation perhaps?

Haha exactly ! Emmanuel, drummer of Des Garçons Ordinaires made a remix of our song Outside My Ken on that one. Long after the end of the band.

++ Are there more unreleased songs by the band?

There are some unfinished songs, unreleased versions and one live soundboard recording from a Cornflakes Zoo festival. But almost everything that was recorded on demo or in studio was released in some form. Some were removed by me from the band’s Bandcamp because i now wish to release them in better quality, better remasters.
The remaining unreleased songs are unfinished demos or rehearsals. There are rehearsals of songs we were working on for a second album when our sound was evolving to Post Rock. I’ll release them someday.

++ There are so many songs by Les Autres, so wondering if you had to pick a top five of favourite songs by the band, what would it be and why?

Hmm , i’d pick songs from different periods then…

« Si Ridicule Maintenant », a song from our first shoegaze demo that i’ll release after the summer.
« Leave Me Alone » a shoegaze song wich was unreleased until the Backwards compilation.
I love the end of « Pourquoi La fin ? » on the second single, it sounds so tragic, very intense.
« Letterboxes Symmetry » wich is one of the highlights of the album in my opinion.
I love the album version of « Hoppy ». Love the idea that it’s a completly different version from the single. And a nice tribute to Codeine’s sound in someways.

++ Was there any interest from other labels? Maybe abroad?

Yes. From David of Liechtenstein Girl who was running the label Fluff where there were Aspidistra, Hood, Boyracer and his own band.
He took one track on his compilation Shattered Fragments and said he was interested in releasing an EP.
In the same period we had the opportunity to record in a 24 track studio at the University of Brest where a friend of us, Damien Bertrand, was studying sound engineering. He later produced the full lengh of Des Garçons Ordinaires and Clair, Newell…
The tracks we recorded there where probably the most shoegaze we ever made with the songs of Hoppy EP. They are on Backwards.
I’ll remaster all these tracks someday and put them together to make a coherent shoegaze album. The one that i think we should have released in 1993 on Fluff or elsewhere instead of releasing Hoppy and leaving the other songs unreleased.

++ What about gigs? Any anecdotes that you can share?

Yes. In february 1993 when we opened for The Wedding Present in Bordeaux.
Our van broke down on the highway outside Bordeaux and one hour before playing we were at fifty miles from the venue.
When we came on stage there were already hundreds of people in the audience and we had to set everything on stage in front of them. Five minutes later we were playing without having done a proper soundcheck.
But everything went well and David Gedge told us kind words on our music after the show.

++ I see a very cool live video of you playing at a venue called Le Flore in Rennes, 1994. Here you cover the Lavender Faction, that is amazing really. It is not that common to see bands covering obscure bands. Were you big fans? What other covers did you use to do? And what are your memories of that gig?

No particular memory of that gig as it was only a small one in a bar in Rennes. But sadly, it’s the only video existing on the band.
We loved The Lavender Faction. Their Ride EP was fantastic. A good exemple of Noise Pop at a time when people weren’t using the word shoegaze. From My Bloody Valentine to Lavender Faction, everything that had noisy guitars was Noise Pop or Noisy Pop, an evolution of post punk through Anorak Pop etc…
Among the obscure bands we loved The Becketts, The Charlottes, The Nightblooms and many others.
During our career we only made three covers : Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix, Who Loves The Sun by The Velvet Undergroud and Ride by The Lavender Faction.
Sadly we never made a proper recording of this cover. There’s only an unfinished demo with no vocals.

++ And were there any bad gigs at all? Any anecdotes you could share?

Yes. A very good gig actually. The same month, in march 1994, we played at Arapaho in Paris for the Cornflakes Zoo Festival. I remember that we were reaching a very, very good level on stage as you can guess on this video in the bar. That gig in Arapaho was just perfect and we were very sober on stage. By sober, i mean like most of shoegaze bands we wouldn’t posture at all. The music alone would do the job. And our sound was perfect. In this period, the last year of the band, a soundcheck would last 10 minutes. We only had to play two or three chords and the sound was perfect. We had very good settings. I remember seing Codeine doing a soundcheck like that. John Engle playing two chords, Stephen Immerwahr singing La Vie En Rose a capella and it was done.

++ When and why did Les Autres stop making music? And what happened immediately after?

The album was released in January 1995 and in April Stéphane of Cornflakes Zoo told us he was cancelling the label. We were discouraged.
Morgan was already playing with Mils and David wasn’t satisfied with the way we were taking musically. He wanted to play something simplier, just something pop. Only Olivier and I wanted to carry on but we were so discouraged after putting so much energy in producing an album that we liked…

++ And have you been involved in any other bands after the demise of Les Autres?

Morgan made several albums with Mils, a band we became friends with.
And let’s say that Olivier and I are back with Megrim and An Ocean Of Embers. I’m very happy that it happens now in a period when people show interest for what we’ve done in the 1990’s.
In the 2000’s i lost myself trying to play IDM without any device, only softwares. It was a waste of time really.
But in 2010, everything started again when i started Extreme Shoegaze with my friends Camille Michel and Pascal Riffaud. It’s an experimental guitar band. I’m proud of this project. We’ve done good stuff.

++ Did you get much attention from the radio or press?

Not really. There was this magazine Les Inrockuptibles leading the french musical press. They hated french bands singing in english. So most of french indie bands were condemned to remain underground in France.

++ What about from fanzines?

Fanzines were cool. The exact opposite. They were a great support for bands like our. And they wouldn’t lose their time writing about bands they don’t like. They were positive, all the time.

++ And today, aside from music, what other hobbies do you have?

I have a passion for the golden age of cinema from the beginnings to the 70’s. I’m an absolute fan of Andreï Tarkovsky who is, i believe, one of the greatest artists of all times.

++ Looking back in retrospective, what would you say was the biggest highlight for the band?

Hard to say. We didn’t really have an highlight…

++ Never visited Rennes (though I did stop by the train station on the way to Mt. Saint Michel) but would love to go one day, maybe I can ask for some suggestions? Like what are the sights I shouldn’t miss? Or the traditional food or drinks I should try?

Haha, you should go to Brocéliande between Rennes and Vannes. It’s the forest of Merlin The Wizard ! And eat some crèpes 😉

++ Thanks again Jimmy! Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I only want to thank you too Roque ! Thanks for the invitation. And people, check out An Ocean Of Embers and Megrim ! And Les Autres re-releases of course 🙂

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Listen
Les Autres – Ce Moment​-​Là

This week, as it is quiet in indiepopnews, I have a long review of many bands I’ve heard for the first time in the past weeks. Hope you like some of them.

Astragal: they released a tape (yet another release I won’t get because of the format, shame) on Banana Tapes out of Nashville, TN, last September. I arrived to their Bandcamp thanks to the CD16 compilation. For that comp the band had contributed probably the best song out of the 3 on their tape EP, “Notations”. A lovely jangly and dreamy song. My second favourite song being the closing one, “Scenery”. The band is formed by Sam, David and Jimmy and they hail from Houston.

Traveling with Monika: yet another band I discovered thanks to the CD16 compilation. Now this one is quite a surprise as they hail from Bangkok! I haven’t heard of Thai indiepop bands in ages, in more than a decade. I was in Bangkok just some months ago, if only I had known, maybe I could have seen them live. They have 3 songs out and they are really nice. The band is formed by Nisarat, Thanapat and Samart. I think my favourite thing about the band are the vocals especially on the song “Traveling With Me”. Really cool!

The Whistling Possum: Only one song on their Bandcamp, the same as the one that they contributed to CD16: “Some Popkids are Even Worse”. In any case this is a very cool song coming all the way from Jakarta, Indonesia. The band is formed by Adi, Kaneko, Tio and Yenezkiel and they also seem to have a blog but I can’t understand a thing!

The Newsletters: from Melbourne comes this cool band that had a 7″ single out in 2015 and a three track digital single in March last year. I’m really enjoying the songs from this last digital effort. On CD16 the A side from the 7″ single, “Lucky Country”, was the one that was included. This 7″ was released by Butter Cup Records and seems to be still available.

Horsebeach: they have now “Beauty & Sadness”, the song that gives title to their new album streaming on Bandcamp. Sounds fantastic as everything they have put out. You can now pre-order the digipak album.

The Cottons: I think Kaneko and Yenezkiel from The Whistling Possum are involved in this band. I found two of their songs, “Yesterday’s Gone” and “It’s Only a Day” on the Dismantled label Bandcamp. They sound really promising! Lots of superb-sounding bands still coming from Indonesia!

Her’s: two digital singles for this band that will be debuting in Madrid Popfest very soon. The band is based in Liverpool and it is just a duo, Audun and Stephen. My favourite song being “Dorothy” out of their first single.

Pan Total: a fantastic discovery thanks to Madrid Popfest booking them. I feel very sad to have missed their limited edition CD that included 9 fab songs. I don’t know much about this band. They hail from Logroño and they seem to have been around at least since 2012! Where was I? How come I’ve only heard about them just a few days ago? It is embarrassing! Hopefully they re-release it? One can only hope.

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Was very surprised when I saw the song “Closer” opening the 4th CD in the “Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze: 1988-1985” released by Cherry Red last year. I don’t know how obscure the band was back in the day, but these days it is not a band that I feel everyone remembers. There is very little on the internet about them. I wonder if the label got in touch with the band, the small bio on the booklet says very little, almost uninteresting information:
“This Tynemouth band were initially touted as Newcastle’s answer to the Stone Roses. Their first release “Bubble Bus”. shared a Whoosh flexi free with fanzine Two Pint Take Home. Further singles followed on Sympathy For the Record Industry (“Teenage Death”) and Tea Time (“Daydream”) before they settled in 1991 on Clawfist for “It’s Only Everything” and “Closer”, an anthemic, swirling guitar-fest produced by That Petrol Emotion’s Steve Mack. Their final release was a split single that coupled up The Sunflowers version of Smashing Orange’s “Collide” with Smashing Orange’s rendition of The Sunflowers “Something You Said.”

 

Nothing new there. Of course it gets a bit on my nerve the misspelling of Woosh Records.

But yes, they did release their first song “Bubble Bus” on Woosh’s eight release (catalog WOOSH 008), a flexi they shared with St. James Infirmary (a band I’ve written about here before and waiting now for their interview to be completed). The Sunflowers song was the second song on this fold-over paper picture sleeve, with a photo of two eyes printed in green and blue. The flexi was not only available with the Two Pint Take Home (vol. 4 by the way) but also with the Waterbomb vol. 4 fanzine.

Their second single, from 1990, came out on Sympathy For The Record Industry (catalog SFTRI 64). This is quite interesting for me as this label was based in Olympia, Washington in the US. It wasn’t that common for these sort of British bands to end up on American labels. It seems the label had high hopes for the band, releasing the 7″ in a variety of different colour vinyl records: yellow, tangerine, orange transparent, dark blue and turquoise. The songs included were “Teenage Death” (a favourite of mine) on the A side, and “Twenty Fifteen (live)” on the B side. The A side was recorded in Chamber Studios in Edinburgh on February 1990. The B side was recorded live at Newcastle Riverside on January 31, 1990.  The photography on this record is credited to J.R. Hughes. He is also credited for recording the B side.

Their third single was to come out that same year, 1990, on the very well-regarded indiepop label Tea Time Records. “Daydream” (catalog TEA 08) was actually the B side even though it was the song giving the single its name. “Twenty Fifteen” was the A side. Artwork for this record is credited to P. Mann. Photography to  J.R. Hughes again. The producer for this record was Jamie Watson who was the one that set up Chamber Studios in Edinburgh in 1986. It is no surprise then that the band recorded this single there.

Then they were to move to Clawfist Records. It was 1991 and they released the “Closer” 7″. On the B side we got “Day Into Day”. This was the fifth Clawfist release (HUNKA 005). This label was set up by the Vinyl Solution record shop on Portobello Road in London. The record was mastered at The Exchange, a Camden based mastering studio. Other credits on the sleeve include Design by Jocky, Mastered by Mike, Photography by J.R. Hughes and Produced by Steve Mack.

The same label was to release another single the same year. On Clawfist’s 7th release (catalog HUNKA 007) The Sunflowers put out “It’s Only Everything” on the A side and “Too Far to Fall” on the B side. Credits are similar as the previous record, Design by Jocky, Photography by J.R. Hughes and Steve Mack as producer.

Their last release was part of the Clawfist Singles Club (this was number 18). As mentioned before The Sunflowers covered “Collide”, original by Smashing Orange, whereas “Smashing Orange was to cover “Something You Said”, a Sunflowers original. I wonder if The Sunflowers released anywhere “Something You Said”.

They were to appear on a legendary compilation in 1990. On the Positively Teenage tape they contributed two songs, “Sunflower Babies” and “Sunflowers Mum”. About this tape I believe I’ve covered many bands that appeared on it on the blog like The Lavender Faction, Love Parade, The Penny Candles or The Mayfields.

“Bubble Bus” also appeared two years ago, 2014, on the “Ten Little Records: The Woosh Collection” that Jigsaw Records put out that included most of the Woosh flexis.

Time to leave Discogs and 45cat. Time to dig online for more information. I reach the Cud website. The Sunflowers are mentioned on their gig diary, for October 6th 1992:
Newcastle University.Pals, the Sunflowers turn up to quaff all our rider. The gig’s a sell-out but we’re put in the smaller hall with a precarious stage where we fear the lights may topple onto Steve. The Dunphy clan turn up and we put on our best show so far.

Perhaps the best find on the web is this one, live footage of The Sunflowers. Here I could find them performing “Closer” at Newcastle’s The Broken Doll sometime in 1990. From this video’s small description we know The Sunflowers played high-profile supports with acts like That Petrol Emotion, Pale Saints and Slowdive. This is truly amazing! Wish I had been there! The music soars!

I read the video comments, maybe someone remembers anything about them. Someone named Mark Wilson says that the band fell out with their bassist and they never got over it. Was that the reason the band split?

From the Feral interview I did many months ago, there is a Sunflowers mention from Arlo:
Not long after the Feral single we became a 3 piece briefly. We then recruited Ian Nagel from The Acrylic Tones on guitar. He was a real 60s aficionado and Feral took on a more psych / jangly sound for a year or so. We then disbanded for a few weeks, Ian continued with the Acrylic Tones, and we recruited Paul Schofield from The Sunflowers on vocals and renamed the band Camp Freddie. Camp Freddie was a good little band. We holed-up in a barn in Felix’s auntie’s house near Morpeth in Northumberland.

This is the first name associated to The Sunflowers I can find, Paul Schofield!

Another mention of The Sunflowers on the blog comes from The Lavender Faction interview. When I ask about Stephen from Woosh, I’m told:
I think he said he was living with his partner, the girl from out of the Sunflowers and they have a child or children, and he works as a full time guitar tech, touring, ect, with major acts although I know he used to roady for My Bloody Valentine. I don’t know if he toured with them when they recently reformed.

I couldn’t find more information about the band.

It seems that during the last few weeks I’ve covered a lot of bands of the Newcastle area, I hope someone there remembers The Sunflowers, what happened with them? Why they never released an album? Why did they split? If they continued making music? If they were involved in any other bands? If they had more recordings?

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Listen
The Sunflowers – Closer

Last post of 2016, wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!

I still can’t remember what records came out this year. Sure I know the ones that I just got from Shelflife or Matinée, but I’m sure there were many earlier on, but you know, I barely remember them! Thing is, as many of you know I keep this Excel document where I have written down all my records and I kind of have it ordered by purchase date, at least the last year. Then after a year is over I organize them alphabetically, that way I know which were the records I bought in the last year and I can tell you some of my highlights of the year. No lists though, I find them unfair.

But see, as I told you before my computer broke down. And yes, there were good news that the hard drive was saved by my girlfriend’s cousin (a computer whiz) he left to Mexico for holidays before I could meet him to get my hard drive. So yeah, no Excel sheet yet to check the records. I haven’t even stored my latest records and they are piling on my desk, instead of finding a good home in my shelves, waiting to be catalogued. This is definitely nerve wracking for me, for my order, for my way of storing and collecting records, but what can I do? It is my fault in the end, should have had my collection on the cloud or have a backup file, something. But no… I didn’t.

So that’s changing, that’s a resolution for next year. Being more cautious, more careful with digital stuff. Once I got fried a hard drive and lost thousands and thousands of MP3s of indiepop. A lot of rare stuff. I guess since that time I have issues with digital releases and MP3s. Understandable, no?

So yeah, won’t tell you what records were my favourite this year until I have it more clear.

What can I tell you then? These last weeks of every year are usually very quiet. That’s always like that. I did see something on my email a couple days ago, Phil Sutton from Pale Lights promoting a new song under another name, The Holiday Scene. It is a free song on Bandcamp called “Eight Dates a Week (Song for Hannukkah)” and it sounds a lot like Pale Lights if you ask me. It is very nice, lyrics by Lisa Goldstein (Pale Lights) and Dora Lubin (The Soft City) and all music played by Phil and Kyle Forester (Crystal Stilts) and vocals by Suzanne Nienaber. The song is intended to raise funs for Planned Parenthood, so they are asking for donations if you like the song. A good thing indeed.

Another worthy release that just came out is a cassette tape by Barcelona band Son Bou. A favourite band that released some fantastic records many years ago. Now they are back after a long silence with 7 songs on a limited edition of 50 tapes. Shame I’m no fan of tapes, but I’m really enjoying the tracks on Bandcamp. As I said before, why do just 50 copies of a tape when you can do 100 CDRs and they are way easier to listen to them. Why tapes? I will never understand this trend. Bring back CDR! Anyhow, the record is out on Snap! Clap! Club a label that seems to be on fire lately.

A Texas indiepop band? That seems like something from the 90s, doesn’t it? Well there is this band The Crystal Furs that also have a very late release this year, expected to ship December 27 it says. This is their first full-length album and it includes 9 songs, though only one, “Weightless“, can be streamed from Bandcamp. It sounds pretty nice, quite a surprise for a band hailing from Forth Worth, a city I visited back in 1994 (!).

And what a nice surprise is Battery Point from Chula Vista, California. It makes me happy when I see Spanish last names in bands in the US, makes me feel less lonely in the indiepop community in a way. This four piece have 3 songs up on their Bandcamp, “Street Lights”, “Eternal” and “Violet Dream” and they all sounds really good! What a promising band, and I wonder who they are? have they been in bands before? and if they have any plans for the future? A very nice discovery and one to keep an eye in 2017.

And so this is how I end up 2017, reviewing some up and coming bands, hoping for a good year for indiepop, and more, MORE, releases. Around the corner we will have Pale Spectres and My Light Shines for You 7″s and the Some Other Day retrospective. The blog will continue, on it’s 9th year of existence, trying to do a blog post each week, with some band you might have forgotten and some news or some reviews or whatever. And when possible interviews to bands that I care.

Happy 2017!

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I wonder why today, coming out the 7 train, going to work on a Christmas day, St. James Infirmary came to mind. I was reading the fantastic Grant & I book (I’m halfway through) and started thinking of bands that I haven’t covered in the blog and that I barely know anything. I guess I do this exercise a lot, but I wonder what sort of connections brought me to a band that is very well regarded by me, that I keep in mind, that I have even uploaded a song to Youtube. But for some reason 8 years have had to pass on the blog for me to start writing some lines about them!

And I’m not the first one writing about them. I see that my good friend Alex in Madrid had already dedicated some lines to them, especially to their Angelikagool EP, back in 2007! So I’m quite late to the party even though I’m very sure I owned this EP and their flexi on Woosh already in 2007. I least that’s what I recall. My memory could be playing tricks on me though.

Alex raves a couple of the songs on the EP, especially “Terry Marriagehead” and the fabulous “Like a Boy Detective”.  I agree with him, those two are the best in this 4 song 7″. But lets start from the beginning.

There was a time once where fanzines were important and they brought the news of new up and coming bands. I still don’t know what would be the fanzines of our times. Blogs are dead (even if this isn’t). Well, with the fanzines “Two Pint Take Home -No. 4” and “Waterbomb No.4″ a flexi 7” came along. This was the flexi shared by The Sunflowers and St. James Infirmary, released by Woosh (which used to be a fanzine). The catalog was WOOSH 008 and it came out in 1989. Here in the blog I’ve celebrated Stephen’s Woosh label so many times and so it is no surprise this band would find home not only here on Woosh but also on Stephen’s second label, Lust. The song they included in the flexi was “The Boy Who Crossed the Street”. Keep in mind too that this song is also available on “The Woosh Collection” a CD released by Jigsaw in 2014 where all Woosh flexis are included!

Next record, going in order on Discogs, is the Altered Mixes 12″. I have never heard the songs in this record. They are just titled “Altered (Mix 1)” and “Altered (Mix 2)”. I’ve read not so good things about it, so I haven’t taken the risk before listening to it (not like me, huh?). This blue sleeve record came out in 1990 on Lust Records (catalogue LUST 6T).

Then another flexi, also from 1990, but this time on the Paint it Red label. This came out alongside the Paint it Red magazine No. 43 in November of that year. It figures. St. James Infirmary shares the flexi with The Lavender Faction and they contribute the song “Juicehead Ritual”.

And now the record I started the post with, “Angelkagool EP” on Lust Recordings. Catalogue LUST 2 (which means this actually came before the Altered Mixes 12″) and out in 1990. Four songs, on the A side, “Terry Marriagehead” and “The Shenanigans Begin Again” and on the B side “Her Voice Moves Me Thru Time” and “Like a Boy Detective”. 1000 copies made and a printing mistake seems to have put the back sleeve upside down.

On the back sleeve we find some information. First off some text titled “In Inventions, Waiting for Bill” credited to Jimmy Buxton, the produced of the record. The band line up is listed:
Tony Bennett – drums and vocals
G.W. Lang – vocals, guitars and organ
Michael Damain Hydes – vocals
Stephen Bennett – vocals

The songs were recorded by Tim Hartley. The drawing on the sleeve am I smart enough to guess that is the “Saint Klimt” by Skip Doncaster that is also credited on the back? We also find out that the band hailed from Ashington, Northumberland. Good clues for our detective work, just like a boy detective.

Ashington is a town and civil parish in Northumberland, England. With a population of around 27,000, measured at 27,764 at the 2011 Census; it was once a centre of the coal mining industry. The town is located some 15 miles (24 km) north of Newcastle upon Tyne. Many inhabitants have a distinctive accent and dialect known as Pitmatic. This varies from the regional dialect known as Geordie.

Discogs lists yet another 7″ but from a later time, from 1998. This means the band kept going even after the indiepop heydays. Released on a label called Sound Archive Recordings, St. James Infirmary’s 7″ included “Punk Rock (Saved My Best Friend’s Life)” and “Thanks a Bunch, Fat Boy”.

Let’s keep digging. Best bet that they took their name from:
“St. James Infirmary Blues”, sometimes known as “Gambler’s Blues,” is an American folksong of anonymous origin, though sometimes credited to the songwriter Joe Primrose (a pseudonym for Irving Mills). Louis Armstrong made it famous in his influential 1928 recording.

But that is just another guess. I do find a Bandcamp for St. James Infirmary and there I find an interesting bio.
St. James Infirmary, of Ashington, Northumberland, was formed in 1985 as the vehicle for singer, songwriter and multi– instrumentalist g.w.lang and has been continuously active ever since. g.w.l. is assisted in his work by an evolving and rotating cast of bandmates, and at last count, SJI has had something in the region of 40 members.

So G.W. Lang is really the main force behind the band. Was it like that always? Seems like it. Here on the Bandcamp there are a lot of recent-ish releases, none from the 80s. But here you can listen to the 7″ on Sound Archive Recordings. And that was 1998. Then the next release is titled “Abdicate” and it dates from 2002.

Then there are these releases titled Almanac. They go from Almanac 3.01 to Almanac 4.12. All in all there are 23 of these Almanacs, lots to listen. Also there is another release titled “Annex B to Planet X” that is mostly electronic tracks.

For the completists of websites, I could also find a Soundcloud page. Here there are a couple of the 80s songs, the ones that make me so happy! Do check some of the songs at the bottom, like “She’s Off Her Head” for example, proper indiepop! Wonder when was this one written and recorded.

Back to Discogs for a bit. I need to check if they appeared on compilations. Of course they did. I can see they appeared on the Mind The Gap tape in 1990. On this legendary tape compiled by the one and only Peter Hahndorf they included the song “Martha & Terry”. That same year on another classic tape, on the “Positively Teenage” compilation they contributed the song “The Sun Don’t Shine”.

Then another gap, 8 years. In 1998 they contribute the song “Heavy Handed Down” on the CD compilation “Pickle Patch Compilatio 1” released by Din Mak Records.

I know Discogs is missing something! One of my favourite songs by the band is “How Many Times” and that was included on the 2nd volume of the legendary “You Can’t Be Loved Forever” tape compilation series.

The boy detective has to keep going. And now perhaps the grail, on a St James Infirmary Facebook page (that has no profile photo!) I’m to find a lot of goodies. First off a band lineup that seems correct: G.W. Lang, Mark Oliver and Tony Bennett with Simon Foster, Bing Bongo, Bob Wire, Andrea Woodyer. I remember seeing the Bing Bongo name on the back sleeve of the “Angelkagool EP”, wonder what did he do in that record then.

There are a bunch of videos in the page, but for me the cherry on the cake is a video titled “Hey ho, see you down the discotheque, when I get my giro cheque”. It is a video from the 80s definitely. It sounds glorious to me. Jingle Jangly! Please check it out! Was it a promo video?!

From this Facebook page we know they are still playing. They even have a gig just around the corner, January 12 at the Prohibition Bar in Gateshead. So that’s good news! Maybe we’ll get in touch with the band and learn more about them, maybe an interview? That’d be nice.

And what you weren’t expecting, St. James Infirmary has a website. True the URL is not very helpful and Google wouldn’t give me this website by just searching their name. But doesn’t matter. I found it and it is time to dig on this sort of blog structured site. There’s so much here but it seems like a blog chronicling the band singe August 2011. I know, I’m more interested in the 80s stuff, and that’s kind of mean of me perhaps, and I go through the posts looking for something about those years. I especially want to know if they have more unreleased songs from that time. If they appeared on more tape compilations back then (I did find out that they were on a tape compilation just lately, on the “The Rough With the Smooth – A Glimpse of Paradise Vol 1” on Neen Records where the very hip Molly Nilsson also appears).

I wonder if you remember them. Many of you probably do as they are still going strong. I wonder about their indiepop days, if they played as many gigs as they do now. As I asked before, if they had more songs recorded. If they released demo tapes or participated on more compilations. Or even, if there are more jingle jangly videos for me to love.

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Listen
St. James Infirmary – Like a Boy Detective

Thanks so much to Arlo and Felix for this great interview! Back in October I wrote a small piece about Feral on the blog, and through Facebook Arlo got in touch with me. Happily he was keen to tell the story of this great band from England that only released one 7″, but what a great 7″ it is!

++ Hi guys! Thanks so much for being up for this interview. Tell me, are you still based in Crawcrook or Newcastle? And how was Crawcrook back in the days of Feral? Has it changed much?

Arlo: Hiya Roque. Happy New Year! No problem at all for doing the interview. It’s not often we get a chance to talk about Feral these days, so we’re happy to be given the chance. Crawcrook was (as you’d mentioned in your piece about our single) a small coal-mining town from about 1850 up to about 1960. It’s on the banks of the River Tyne, which runs through Newcastle 5 miles further downstream. The pits had all closed before we were born, so it was pretty much a rural ‘commuter town’ for Newcastle. A pretty good place to grow up. Close enough to the city to be able to stay attached to civilisation, but with a touch of the weird pagan shit that still goes on in abundance further inland, in the hills of Northumberland. There are little villages not far from us, with names like Twice Brewed and Scroggwood, where they spend their Saturday nights dancing round swords and singing accordian tunes to the moon. We all moved into Newcastle in our late teens and twenties and got more involved in the music scene. We ran Newcastle’s top ‘indie’ night, The Palace, through the 1990s at the legendary Riverside venue (now no more). It was a good mix of music. Classic indie, Manchester stuff, Britpop, dance, 60s psych and northern soul and a bit of hip-hop thrown in. It was run mainly as a club for us and our friends, with the guest-list running to over a hundred people most weeks. It was class! 500 or so people getting together in a great venue every Friday. Good live bands, good music and a great atmosphere. Me and Steve have moved back out to Crawcrook and neighbouring Ryton now, and still see each regularly. Felix landed a class job designing toy cars for Hot Wheels, and has ended up in LA. He was (until just a few weeks ago) Vice President of Hot Wheels, and has been spending the last few years project managing mad, life-sized loop-the-loops for suped-up cars in the deserts of America. We still keep in close touch, swapping music files we’re working on. I was over there visiting him about 6 weeks ago. Stu Lowey, our guitarist, died aged 28 in 2001. He developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human form of Mad-Cow disease) in his mid 20s, probably caused by bovine growth hormones he’d been given as a child.

++ Arlo was telling me that he likes the photo on the cover of the 7″ because you looked all covered in coal dust after a hard days shift down the pit. Is that so? Did you work in a coal mine?

Arlo: It was taken after a hard day’s photo-shoot with Yozzer Hughes, a deranged Scouse maverick who also produced Change You Even. Bit of a Fagin type character. He took pride in taunting all the other Newcastle bands that Feral were the only ones who were gonna get anywhere ‘cos they’re fookin seventeen’! He had us dug into a fox-hole, covered in bracken and fallen branches. We’d been hunched in there for about three hours by the time he actually got the shot he wanted.

Felix: Real lateral thought displayed there by Yozza…..”I know,….. they’re called feral so I’ll drive them out to the woods and stick them in a ditch”. From memory he spent quite a bit of time telling us how long it had taken him to scout for the location….in hindsight we should have asked him what he was doing wandering around in the woods looking for a ditch to put seventeen year old boys in…

++ Tell me then how did you all meet? And have you been in bands before Feral?

Arlo: We all met at school and lived within about a mile of each other as kids. Me, Felix and Steve met aged 4 in primary school, and met Stu at Ryton Comprehensive school aged 11. We hung around together for years before we started playing music. We’d been a pretty tight gang through our teenage years, skateboarding, graffiti art-ing, listening to music and generally hanging around street corners. Feral took a little while to properly coalesce from various mates going round each other’s garages and bedrooms and making a racket.

Felix: From memory the idea of a band started forming when we were about fifteen. Me and Stu used to dream about it and eventually figured if we were going to be in a band we’d better get somebody in it who could actually play an instrument….so we subtly courted Arlo. I picked up the bass because I figured four strings would be easier to learn than six. Steve had had drum lessons when we were seven so we pretty much told him he was the drummer.

++ What are your first musical memories? And what inspired you to make music?

Arlo: I’ve been indoctrinated from birth. My Grandad was a miner in County Durham who had a massive record collection dating back to the invention of the gramaphone. They had nothing else of value in the house, but he had full rooms which were literally floor to ceiling with records! He used to play old novelty records for me as a kid, along with the classical and opera stuff he was into, and bought me my first 7” singles when I was 3, On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by Laurel and Hardy and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. (I used to think the first line was ‘Is this the real life or is this just Plasticine?’ Much better lyrics, in my opinion.) My Mam and Dad were both well into their music too. Massive fans of The Beatles, Dylan, Paul Simon, The Incredible String Band etc. I can remember days at home with my Mam, pre-school (so aged 4 or less), sitting using her washing basket as a boat and listening to Cripple Creek Ferry by Neil Young and The Hedgehog Song by The Incredibles. I took a shine to Jimi Hendrix when I was about 8 after seeing a documentary on the BBC that my Dad had recorded. My folks weren’t particularly into Hendrix. They’d seen him at the Isle of White Festival in 1970 (where they also saw Arlo Guthrie, hence my name). But I was smitten. I badgered them for a guitar for Christmas, and got a real cheap nylon – stringed acoustic. One of my Dad’s mates gave me a couple of lessons and persuaded my Dad that I needed a better guitar, so I got a Hondo Les Paul copy the next Christmas. Much easier to play behind my head. Me, Felix, Steve and Stu went through our early teens sharing tapes of New Order, Bomb The Bass, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim and skate videos with tunes by The Descendents, Firehose, Sonic Youth etc. But it was really the first time we heard The Stone Roses that the idea of being a band crystalised. Me and Steve had been to RPM records in Newcastle the day She Bangs The Drums came out. I bought the album, and Steve bought the 12”, along with a batch of other bands’ records. We both went home and had a listen through the day’s new purchases, and were both just floored when we put the Roses on. Straight on the phone to each other, raving about them. And they were immediately put onto tape for that evening, racing round the country lanes of Northumberland in Felix’s VW Passat with Waterfall and Resurrection blasting at top volume. I don’t know about the rest of the band, but for me that was the day it all changed. We’d been playing around with guitars and writing a few songs together before The Roses, but that was when I decided we could be a ‘proper band’.

++ And where does the name of the band come from? Is there a story behind it?

Arlo: Feral was a character in a story in 2000AD (Strontium Dogs, I think). Steve had picked up on it as a cool word/band-name. It was like every band, hunting around for a name. It was just the least ridiculous one we came up with!

Felix: I think we settled on it in the car on our way to our first Deckham music collective gig.

++ What would you say were your influences at the time of Feral? What were you listening to?

Arlo: We were coming back round to guitars after having been into hip-hop for a few years. The skate videos I mentioned played a big part in that to begin with. We were into stuff by Dinosaur Jr, Ultra Vivid Scene, Sonic Youth etc. The Manchester scene was starting to kick off, led by the Roses, Mondays and Carpets and that was when we started going out to gigs. Most of the venues in Newcastle were ‘over 18’. We’d been reluctant to travel into town just to get turned away from gigs at the door for being under-age. So we missed out on the Roses at Newcastle Riverside. We went down a few weeks after for The Charlatans’ first Newcastle gig, and got in no-bother. Then realised that half the kids in there were younger than us! After that, we were out every week to see bands at The Riverside and Newcastle’s grottiest little indie venue, The Broken Doll. Stephen Joyce used to put The Whoosh Club on at The Broken Doll. Usually three bands, two of them local, for £1.50. We went to see Ride’s first Newcastle gig at a Whoosh night. They’d been signed to Creation Records and started attracting a lot of attention between Stephen booking them and the actual gig. There must have been over 300 people crammed into a room that was a bit of a squeeze for 100! Whoosh nights got us into Creation Records stuff, particularly My Bloody Valentine, which influenced how we used the guitars, noise and distortion to create textures. And introduced us to a load of new guitar music, Five Thirty, Boo Radleys, Swervedriver etc etc.

Felix: As the band progressed we started going to Raves, what started out as a very jingle jangle band progressed into something quite rich with looped patterns later on.

++ There were plenty of guitar bands in the late 80s, early 90s, the now so called C86 sound. So I wonder if you felt part of a scene then?

Arlo: Nah, not really. We were into the Manchester bands, but didn’t come from Manchester, so were exempt from that. We were into the shoegazey bands I’ve mentioned above, but not really part of any ‘scene’ with them either. There was a good scene in Newcastle at the time. We did a load of gigs with The Lavender Faction, The Sunflowers, Crane, Goose, Deep, The Acrylic Tones, Razorblade Smile, Unexplained Laughter. And a lot of those bands made up the crowd who used to get along to the Palace club over the next few years.

++ Did you play many gigs? Any favourites? Any not so favourite?

Arlo: We did loads of gigs. Mostly in the North East of England, but we did a few round the country. We got some offers to go to mainland Europe but just never got it sorted. We were pretty hapless on the organisation side! Scotland gigs were always good fun. Better licensing laws meant the bands didn’t start til later in the night, by which time the drink was usually flowing and the crowds were always up for a laugh. Probably my best memory of a gig was the second one we played, at the school we all went. We persuaded them to let us have the main hall for the night, filled it with a couple of hundred school mates and just had a proper celebratory party. It was where we and our friends all There was a good one where we were supporting another local band, Razorblade Smile. I think there’d been some wrangling about who was going to headline. We went on before them and played covers of their entire set. We hadn’t told them beforehand, so they were a bit put out that they had nothing left rehearsed to play that we hadn’t just done. We did loads of shite little gigs at the start, especially when we were in that Deckham Collective. Each band had half a dozen people there to see them, and none of the bands liked each other’s music. They were pretty soul-destroying, but they were a means to an end, securing us the use of cheap practice rooms.

Felix: One thing I remember about the shite little gigs was how loud we were compared to the other bands. We were this little four piece band made up of scraggly teenagers pushing AMPS on stage that were bigger than us. A favourite early gig of mine was a Lust records Christmas party where we had ten people on stage with us doing Kylie Minogue’s ‘better the devil you Know’. I think Steve finished that set by throwing his high hats through the window….upstairs at the Broken Doll.

++ You released just the one 7″ on Lust Recordings. How did this relationship came to be?

Arlo: We sent Stephen Joyce a tape of some demos after we’d been to one of the Whoosh nights he put on. We were just looking for gigs really. He put us on at the Whoosh a few times and we went down well. He’d already released a few singles on the Whoosh label, but was starting up again under the name Lust Recordings. I think the first Lust Record was a Lavender Faction 12”, and we were the second. We were planning more, but Stephen was busy working as Kevin Shields’ (MBV) guitar technician. When Loveless came out, and during the tour that followed it, he was away. We were refusing to even answer the calls we were getting from other record labels, cos we were happy on Lust Recordings. By the time we realised that Stephen wasn’t going to be around to manage us or sort out getting the next single recorded, we’d lost all momentum.

++ So the A side has the name of the song wrong. What was the song’s original name? What happened?

Arlo: That was Stephen Joyce’s bad hearing. Too many MBV gigs! It was called Change You Even (from the chorus lyrics: I’d never change you even though I’ll never want you as you are). He just misheard me, and we’d purposely put the vocal low in the mix. We only realised the day the records came back from the pressing plant, by which point it was too late to put right.

++ And in a sentence or two, could you tell me the story behind each song on the single?

Arlo: Change You Even was us messing about with a guitar tuning I came up with. DADAAD for anyone who’s interested. Loads of drone! We got three new songs in a week just out of that tuning. It turned out to be about 8 minutes long, which we didn’t notice til we started recording it. The lyrics are just teenage, heart-on-sleeve, here’s what I’m thinking about today sort of stuff. Bridge is a song to a mate of ours, Rob Quick, who committed suicide that year. His was one of the garages we used to go round to and make a noise. I came up with the song while I was at the Tin Bridge over the River Tyne at Wylam. It was a disused, derelict railway bridge we used to hang around at, and where I’d had a pretty in-depth discussion with Rob not long before he died. Away came out of us getting our hands on a 4-track cassette portastudio for the first time. It was originally layers of swirling guitar noise over a lullaby-strum. Then flipping the cassette over to record layers of backwards guitar. The version on the single was an attempt to make a ‘releasable song’ out of that idea. I prefer the rough-as-fuck original sketch to the version we put out on the single.

++ What do you remember of the recording sessions at Hi Level in Newcastle? Any fun anecdotes to share?

Arlo: It was produced by John ‘Yozzer’ Hughes, veteran record shop owner in Newcastle, and all-round knob. He’s the bloke who had us hiding in muddy holes for the cover photo. He had worked with The Dickies, and reckoned he used to hang out with Robert Calvert from Hawkwind. He claimed to have Calvert’s one-stringed Ukrainian fiddle (not a euphemism!) mounted on his wall at home.

Felix: Ironically I spent a large chunk of my childhood travelling round various pagan sites with my crazy hippie aunt in a battered Bedford van listening to Hawkwind and Zappa so I thought the eukranian fiddle and his tales of Brock and Calvert were quite impressive

Arlo: He was trying to force-feed us some terrible 70s prog, groups like Tractor and stuff no-one has ever heard of. Trying to influence the sound in a new direction which none of us bought into in any way. He dismantled the studio’s monitoring system and wired in some knackered car-speakers. Mixed the single through them, claiming that if it sounds good through them, it’ll sound good through anything. It just ended up sounding shit through anything! We did some good stuff there though. It was on the top floor of an old 5 storey building. We used the bare brick stairwell as an echo chamber, with about 100 ft of guitar lead draped down the stairs, an amp at the bottom, and mics set up on each landing. It gave a massive sound to some of the layered guitars at the end of Change You Even. It was an all-night session, cos we got the place cheap through the night, and I can remember going out onto the roof-top overlooking Newcastle city centre as the sun was coming up and the final tweaks were being made to Yozzer’s mix through his crappy speakers.

++ And how come the B side wasn’t recorded there but instead in a home portostudio?

Arlo: That was just a lie! It was recorded at a ‘community studio’ in a place called Consett in the middle of nowhere. The place was set up to record primary-school music workshops, local radio advert voice-overs and that sort of carry-on. The engineer nearly shat himself when we switched our amps on. He had no idea what we were after, and the results weren’t much better than what we’d managed ourselves on the portastudio. So we just said that’s how they were recorded so it didn’t seem like we’d wasted good money on shit mixes.

++ Did you participate perhaps in some compilations?

Arlo: We were members of the Deckham Music Collective in Gateshead for a few months. You’ve never met a more unlikely ‘collective’ in your life. None of the bands had anything in common. The attraction to us was that they had practice rooms and a studio. We recorded some stuff in their studio, literally ran away with the tapes and have still never paid them to this day. The guy chased after us for a couple of years but I think we’ve got away with it now. I think they might have put one of the tunes we recorded that day on a compilation album of seminal Deckham artists such as the mighty ‘Nell Mangle vs The Robinsons’, one of the most hard-hitting satirical double acts to come out of Britain in the 1980s. Check them out if you get a chance.

++ Are there any more Feral recordings? Perhaps on tapes and such?

Arlo: Yeah, I’ll send you them. There was a four song follow up single / EP recorded and ready to go. Unfortunately we only kept masters on cassette (not sure where the DATs went) so the sound quality is a bit ropey. I’ve got some of the multitrack reel-to-reels, but I’m having trouble finding anywhere which has still got their analogue tape machines to go and run off some decent mixes.

++ Then what happened? When did you call it a day? And why?

Arlo: I’ve not called it a day! I still play music and mess around with sound. Feral just dissolved / evolved. Me, Felix and Steve have stayed close friends and collaborators to this day.

++ Were you involved with other bands after Feral? Tell me a bit about each if you can!

Arlo: Not long after the Feral single we became a 3 piece briefly. We then recruited Ian Nagel from The Acrylic Tones on guitar. He was a real 60s aficionado and Feral took on a more psych / jangly sound for a year or so. We then disbanded for a few weeks, Ian continued with the Acrylic Tones, and we recruited Paul Schofield from The Sunflowers on vocals and renamed the band Camp Freddie. Camp Freddie was a good little band. We holed-up in a barn in Felix’s auntie’s house near Morpeth in Northumberland. Hired a sixteen track tape machine and borrowed a mixing desk and some mics and set about writing a new batch of songs. I’ll send you what I can of those home-made recordings. We only did a handful of gigs, but they were good ones. We took a coach load of us down to Sunderland to play at their Saturday night indie club (The Independent, I think), and had a great night. Good gig, loads of friends on an away-day, everyone mashed and a good night’s dancing afterwards! I can’t really remember why we stopped doing Camp Freddie. After a year or two of just running the club-night, and learning how to use a sampler and Cubase on an Atari ST, I got together with a Sunderland lad who’d been on the scene for years, Kristian Atkinson. Me and him cooked up the idea for the next band, The Kustom Built. We were going to work without a drummer, using samples and drum machines, with live guitars and keyboards. The Kustom Built ethos was to take bits and pieces of music from anywhere and bolt them all together into a suped-up mash of punk, funk and psychedelia. F-Punk! Felix was lured back to Newcastle from his job with Mattel to play bass. Stu Craig was poached from Stax Connection on guitar and we had Cam (an old Sunderland mate of Kristian’s) on vocals. Kustom Built put out three EPs on Atomic Records, toured with Clint Boon, played Reading and Leeds festivals and did the first Radio One live session of the millennium. We never really split up, just sort of fizzled out and went our separate ways around 2002.

++ What about today? Do you still play?

Arlo: The Kustom Built been invited to play a festival in Minehead later this year with The Happy Mondays and The Inspiral Carpets and a load others. It’s been a while since we all played together. Felix is coming back from L.A. and Stu from London to do it. Me and Kristian are working on a few new tunes to put out some time soon.

++ And do you have any other hobbies aside from music?

Arlo: I do Judo, playing and coaching. Felix is as into cars as he’s ever been, and is currently working on some cool stuff with stunt drivers The Bandito Brothers. Steve runs a sound system and does a bit of DJing.

++ One last question, looking back to those days, what would you say was Feral’s biggest highlight as a band?

Arlo: Spending the night at Colm (My Bloody Valentine’s drummer)’s house on a London trip. It was the day they’d finished the mixing of Loveless. We spent the night absolutely off our faces listening to the album the whole indie world was dying to hear. We were in an absolute mess the next morning, trying to do an interview with the NME. We got a panning off the journalist for not having much to say, but we were all on a come-down and had just had our efforts put firmly into perspective after hearing one of the greatest records ever made.

++ Thanks again so much! Anything else you’d like to add?

Arlo: Thank you! Sorry it’s taken a few weeks to get back to you. Thanks for showing an interest in our obscure little outfit from the coal-field backwaters of England!

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Listen
Feral – Bridge

2014 has been the quietest year for Cloudberry. That’s a fact. We’ve put out only a handful of releases this year and I think that by the end of the year there might be one or two more. Long are the days when I could put out 4 little CDs every month.

It has to do of course with a couple of things. Definitely sales have been down in general, for all indiepop labels. Also the bands I have a commitment to put something out have been slower than usual in getting ready all the elements needed. But in any case, in the pipeline, hopefully, we have the Shine! CD, the Pale Spectres 7″, the Don’t Cry Shopgirl 7″, a new fanzine, and the Parcel Post 7″ co-release with Kingfisher Bluez. Aside from that I’m working on another two Cloudberry Cake Kitchen CDs for next year. So please keep supporting the label because these are fantastic releases that need to see the light of day!

On a small note, on my trip to Germany I picked some copies of the new Secret Shine 7″ released on the new label Dreams Never End of my friend Andi. This is a superb release, something you expect from Secret Shine. I’m selling copies only to domestic (US) fans. This brings me so many memories, of the second time I was in Berlin and went to Secret Shine there. Even went backstage and met the band. That was such a good night.

Speaking of my trip, it was a great. I got such a good haul of records this time around mostly thanks to Uwe from Firestation who I visited the same day I arrived. I stopped by his place, as it has been the case in every trip I’ve done to Germany, and he already had a bunch of obscures 7″s that he had selected for me. Of course I had no clue what they sounded like but I trusted his taste. I will go through some of them here on my blog in the weeks to come. In Hamburg I got some records, very classy records that I thought I would never ever have, from my friend Andreas, and also dear Johanna took me to a couple of record stores were I bought some second-hand records for a good price. And again I bought some records I already have. My memory is starting to fail.

Then of course the best “indiepop” moment was the Throw That Beat in the Garbagecan! show. Oh dear, how could I explain it it?! I was there, almost at the front, next to the pogo, singing along and recording many of my favourite songs. They played so so many of them. 20 years after their last gig, one special night, and I went all the way to Germany to hear “Lotsi Go Go” or “Little Red Go-Cart” live. I wish I understood German, I wish I had understood whatever the band was saying in between songs. Everyone was laughing, they must have been great jokes. I will learn German though. I’ve decided it. Though I doubt I’ll get to see them play again, unless they come to NYC, which if a very very difficult thing, even impossible, to happen.

Afterwards there was a bit of dancing too. At night, at some sort of disco that looked illegal, in between abandoned buildings. How cool, Berlin knows how to play it cool. Jule, one of the girls that used to do Pop Kombinat Berlin and was part of Indiepop Days festival, was DJing that night. Many other friends that I haven’t seen for years were in the club as well. It was really lovely to meet them and catch up, even with all the high volume of the music. The club of course doesn’t play indiepop. Sadly for me. But I guess they need to keep it running, and the indiepop scene in Berlin is really tiny. So it was mostly post-punk, some 80s hits, some coldwave. It was fine. They threw some Belle & Sebastian and The Smiths here and there. I danced, the beer was really cheap. Jule was super kind though for playing a request of mine, The Names’ “Calcutta”. I danced this one with Silke, another great friends who was also part of the Pop Kombinat and Indie Pop Days. Damn. Feels like yesterday. Wish NYC had a night like this.

I must got home around 5 or so. I was supposed to wake up at 8 to catch an early train to Stettin, in Poland. But I didn’t wake up till 9:30. At 9:30 the train I was planning to take had left already. I had to take the next one. In the end it all worked fine. But that’s a story for another day.

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Feral: of, relating to, or resembling a wild beast—used to describe an animal (such as a cat or dog) that has escaped and become wild.

What do you know about an early 90s band called Feral from the semi-rural Crawcrook in Tyne and Wear?

I didn’t even know the existence of a place called Crawcrook.  A little story from wikipedia:
At the turn of the twentieth century, and in common with the nearby areas of Greenside, Clara Vale and Stargate, Crawcrook was a village with a vibrant coal industry. With major pits such as Emma and Clara, as well as several smaller pits, Crawcrook became a major coal mining centre. However the coal industry collapsed in the village during the 1950s and 1960s. As has happened to a number of other northern English villages employment in tertiary industries has replaced the coal industry. However, Crawcrook’s coal mining heritage is still evident; a number of the old miners’ homes still exist in the surrounding area, including Clifford Terrace and Morgy Hill near to Crawcrook’s main street, and the Simpson Memorial Home in nearby Barmoor. Old wagonways used to transport coal are also still present, although they are now maintained as footpaths. During the 1970s and 1980s, with the creation of the Kepier Chare and Westburn private housing estates, Crawcrook grew significantly in size and became largely suburbanised and is being used increasingly as a commuter village for the conurbation of Tyneside.

Wonder if I’ll ever pass by that area. I kind of doubt it. In that area I’d like to visit Newcastle of course. I would assume the band would play mostly there, and hang around in this much bigger city. It’s no surprise then that they signed to a Newcastle label, Lust Recordings. This was home of other bands we’ve been happy to showcase in the blog like the Lavender Faction or Aspidistra, as well of St. James Infirmary or The Keatons. Their one and only record came out in 1991, and it included three songs, “Change You Leaving”, as the sole A side, and “Bridge” and “Away” on the B side. The record had that shoegazy feeling of the early 90s. The catalog number was Lust 009.

The A side was produced by John Hughes and engineered by Dave Mander. The cover photography was also taken by John Hughes.

There is an insert included in the record that gives us a bit more information about this obscure band:
“Change You Leaving” was recorded at Hi Level, in Newcastle in July 1991. The other two tracks were bedroom recordings done in a portostudio, in their home in Crawcrook, Ryton, in June 1991.

On it we get the band members first names. Sadly no last names making it impossible to track them down on Google. We know that Arlo played guitars and vocals, Stu played guitars, Felix played the bass and Steve the drums.

And here again I hit a wall. There’s no more info whatsoever of this really nice but obscure single. But I’m sure some people out there might know a thing of two about them. Did they have any more recordings? Did they play many gigs? Were they involved with any other bands?

What else do you know about them?

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Listen
Feral – Bridge

Thanks so much to Stephen and Marc for the interview!

++ Bulldozer Crash had a drummer on the first single, right? How did the band start and how did it end up being a duo?

Stephen: The drummer was Lee (Patrick) Skelly from the Prescriptions and who is now in the Peas. Patrick also designed the Sarah Said sleeve. The band was originally called Bulldozer Clarts and that was me and Geoff Suggett, but he left and found fame with the Lavender Faction. We would later record together again as Kosmonaut, Geoff also took the photos of the fish on the cover of Imperfection. I carried on by myself and asked Patrick if he would help me record some of my songs, he said yes. We went into the studio and recorded three songs but my voice was rubbish, so I left the studio gutted. Graeme Elston who at the time was in in the Love Parade (and it was he who suggested Crash instead of Clarts) put his brother Marc’s name forward for vocal duties, we returned to the studio and Marc added his vocals to those first three songs. I smiled for a week after I left the studio that day.

Marc: I was at a loose end after university and missed making music, the student bands I was in  had done a bit of recording but I was always a sideman, Bulldozer Crash gave me the opportunity to boost my ego as a singer plus I was able to work with Stephen whose enthusiasm always impressed me.

++ Your first release came out on Sunday Records, the best American indiepop label (I think that’s a fact). Also two later singles came out in the Rolling Meadows label. How did you end up releasing there? Usually British band at the time would release in British labels, you know.

Stephen: Albert who ran the label had heard the Bulldozer Clarts song “Walks Away” on my Positively Teenage compilation tape and wrote and asked us if we would be interested in releasing a single with his soon to be started label. I have a feeling he believed the little fib I told on the back of the PT fanzine that we had just toured the UK with the Pale Saints. We did send the first demo tape “Meek” which had the two songs from the first Sunday 7″ and “Recollections” to lots of UK labels but none of them were interested, I still have all the reject letters.

++ That first single was Sarah Said. It included “Changing”, one of your most upbeat tracks, as the B side. Was “Sarah” a nod to Sarah Records? Which bands were you listening at the time? I can see that you were very influenced by the jangly guitars, but also with some noisier bands as you did a “Changing” version with lots of feedback!

Stephen: Most of the original lyrics to Sarah Said were quotes from Matt’s AYSTGH fanzine, but I had to change  them, maybe a few did get left in though. I was listening to all sorts of bands at the time, The Byrds, The Beatles, The Jam, Stone Roses, East Village, Razorcuts, Choo Choo Train, Springfields, I still listen to them now. Changing was my Dinosaur Jr. song, well I thought it was.

Marc: I always loved jangly guitars from The Byrds to the first Primal Scream album, I think it’s a Celtic folk thing. I felt more comfortable with our jangly side, I could never rock as hard as Stephen.

++ Automatic Smile was your second single and on this one you worked with Jyoti Mishra from White Town. He added keyboards and also produced the single. How did that happen and go? Where you a fan of White Town at the moment?

Stephen: Jyoti recorded and produced everything else we did after the first single. I was already a White Town fan, having wrote about them/him in my Fresh Air fanzine and we used to write letters to each other. We ended up working with him after a chance meeting in the Derby branch of Vision Express. Marc was working in there during his summer holidays and Jyoti came in to get his glasses fixed, they got talking and our first recording session at Satya Studios was booked.

Marc: The recording sessions with Jyoti were a breeze and he ironed out our musical creases an absolute treat. Weekends of creativity and talking nonsense about music…pure joy!

Stephen: I loved everything about my visits to Derby , I remember catching the train down before I learnt to drive and then shitting myself the first time I drove down. I thought I was the bees knees, carrying a guitar on the train, it was what I always wanted to be, in a band, recording songs and there was even someone daft enough to release them! I couldn’t have been happier at the time. I loved it in Jyoti’s bedroom studio , we would say “can you make the guitar sound like the one on the new Dinosaur Jr. record” and he would. The time he started muting the guitars at the start of Only Baby Heads Smiling, I can still remember thinking at the time this sounds fucking amazing, to my ears we had turned into Kraftwerk. Or when Jyoti added the strings and horns to Marc’s song Upwardly Mobile Friend it suddenly it was a soul song. The moment was later spoilt by Marc by mentioning Swing Out Sister!

++ Third single is in a label I really love: Heaven Records. You can’t have enough of those little Heaven zines! But something that does surprise me is that there is barely nothing written about Bulldozer Crash in these zines. Do you have any idea why was that? Why did your only British release was on this label?

Stephen: It was actually our second single, those were the first songs we recorded with Jyoti. It just became our third because Albert worked faster than Heaven. I’m not sure why we never featured in any of the Heaven fanzines, maybe they didn’t like us? They wanted us to sign a publishing deal with them, we didn’t want to and we didn’t hear much from them again. They only ever sent us one copy of the single each and that was it, at the time I thought it was a mite stingy of them. I’m sure they must have boxes of unsold copies tucked under their beds. Years later I read an interview with a Fat Tulip and they said they  released our single because Albert Sunday had asked them to.

Marc: My best Bulldozer song was on this release, I must find the demo, it was one of those Eureka moments.

++ To close your discography you released a fourth single, Headfirst and then a mini-album, Imperfection, on Sunday Records. Was it any different to record for this format than doing it for the singles?

Stephen: It didn’t feel any different because I’m sure we were supposed to be recording a 6 track 12″ and  a couple of songs for a compilation LP Ulrich from A Turntable Friend was putting out called “Calling At Duke Street”. When Ulrich told us he didn’t want to use them, Albert suggested putting all eight onto a mini album.

++ Which release of yours is the one you came up happier with the end result and why?

Stephen: I like them all for different reasons, I wouldn’t be able to pick just one, sorry.

Marc: I love Mrs Robinson’s Daughter, it has funkiness, brevity and a story…a proper pop song.

++ There was also a couple of songs on different compilations, do you remember where did they appear? There’s two on a Japanese one called “Behave Yourself”, there was the cover of Po’s Fay on the Sunday flexi…

Stephen: We had quite a few songs songs released on a few of the Sunday compilations CD’s (Sunny Sunday Smile,(I took the photo on the cover of that one) A Different Side of Sunday, Rollling Meadows – Songs about Our Past) and two songs on Behave Yourself which was on a label called Behaviour Saviour . The original version of Changing with a ton of feedback was included on numerous compilation tapes at the time, I’m afraid I don’t remember the names of them all.

Marc: The version of Fay was recorded before I  was aware of the wonderful device called a Capo…very difficult for me to listen to now!

++ I guess it’s a silly question, but why Bulldozer Clarts on the Positively Teenage tape?

Stephen: See the answer to question 1, it was just the original name. Clarts is a northern term for mud!

++ Why did you name the band Bulldozer Crash?

Stephen: We thought it sounded good.

++ What about gigs, did you play often? What were your favourite bands in Durham?

Stephen: We only played two gigs, one in Derby at the Victoria Inn  supporting Pure or Eva Luna, not sure which and the Heaven/Sunday gig in Nottingham both in 1991. The Love Parade will always be my favourite band from Durham.

Marc: I thought The Crimson Mints were like Pretenders and Graeme reckoned Final Kick from The Liberty Ship album was pure Crimson Mints… I was going for a Pretenders guitar style so it makes sense. I wish we’d played live more often, in some ways The Liberty Ship were a full band version of the ideas I had in Bulldozer Crash.

++ How big and exciting was having the Woosh club so near? What did it bring to people like you?

Stephen: The Woosh club was excellent, it used to be on nearly every friday night upstairs in a a pub called The Broken Doll in Newcastle, it was run by Stephen Joyce and he put on all the great indie bands of the time, I saw so many of my favourites, seeing them inspired me to write about them in my fanzine. Jesse Garon and the Desperadoes , 14 Iced Bears, The Siddleys, The Driscolls, The Pastels, Vaselines, (although those last two weren’t at the Broken Doll), I also discovered lots of great local bands like The Gravy Train, The Sunflowers,The Nivens, The Crimson Mints and the Love Parade. They knocked the pub down years later. I used to record most of the gigs on a really crappy tape recorder stuffed in my pocket, I recently listened to a Jesse Garon gig and the sound quality is atrocious, much worse than I remember. Looking back we were quite lucky to have such a club.

++ I know you kept doing music after (should be another interview!) but why and when did you call it a day as Bulldozer Crash?

Stephen: I don’t think we ever did call it a day. Although it’s now ten years since we did any recording together. We are always threatening to do something again but we never do. Maybe one day.

Marc: Distance and real life ended B Crash, I wanted to play in a full time rehearsing band. I never consider us split up…where’s that Rickenbacker?

++ I know you Stephen did one of the BEST fanzines ever “This Almighty Pop!” (should be another interview as well!), but did Marc was involved at all with the fanzine culture?

Marc: I dabbled but never for fanzines, I did a bit of blogging on music more recently. I found the indie-purism hard to understand as I have broad musical tastes.

++ You are still involved in indiepop till this day. What differences and similarities do you see between those days and the scene today? Do you have any particular stance on MP3 releases?

Stephen: I don’t ever remember the music I wrote about in my fanzine being called indiepop back then, not sure when that started? It was just indie music to me and that’s what Bulldozer Crash music was, I think? Today everything seems to get done a lot faster. The internet is great for that, the instant communication is certainly something I like, even though I do miss real letters. Blogs are great too for finding out about new bands, I just wish there was more paper fanzines. I don’t like MP3 only releases, I much prefer something to hold, vinyl or CD. I do still rip my cd’s to my computer and I like the fact that I can take lots of my favourite songs with me wherever I go on my ipod.

++ Anything else you’d like to add?

Stephen: Thanks for asking the questions, it’s nice someone remembered us. If any one wants to have a listen  I’ve put all the songs we had released and a few unreleased ones too up here maybe someone will enjoy them. http://www.box.net/shared/tar4nsm3n0

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Listen
Bulldozer Crash – Automatic Smile

I find Sunday nights the best time to listen to music, especially vinyl. I rip them to mp3s, clean them a bit, there are no hurries. I have a beer. I have some pizza. I turn off the cell phone. A chess game against Emma, which for unknown reasons ends up as a draw. Around 7:30 p.m. I have my senses bright and acute. And when I play this song, it comes drilling through my brain. What a wonderful noise I say.

Today being noisy is the status quo. Especially if you come from the Pitchfork confetti-plumped Brooklyn. I wonder if the hipsters would rejoice if they listen this wonderful ramshackling, noisy and dreamy band. Most probably they won’t. This is too pure for them, they need some music critic filtering, they need some artsy haircut, they need some comfort zone, tell them that it is the RIGHT thing to like.

I wonder what happened to this band. Their first 7″ was Grip / Frances and was released on the Fluff label. If my memory doesn’t play tricks on me, the Leicester label released the first Boyracer 7″. Also they released Hood and a band I haven’t heard but always been curious about, Liechtenstein Girls. I’m pretty sure there was a split flexi with Boyracer and Hula Hoop also. More info, of course, would be appreciated. The insert of the single doesn’t give that much information either:

honey one is grip and frances. the players are stuart on skins, neil on strings and gogs on a fuzzy lump of wood. seagate studios housed the noise, stuart and chris processed it, we re-invented it. thanks to the foreman, paedo strangetrouser and the ones who haven’t loved or loved us. this vice will not release until I release myself and as soon as I can do that you’ll be free as well. you forgot you were an atheist. stay beautiful norm. bee.

Their second single appeared on Lust Recordings (home of the Lavender Faction and St. James Infirmary). It was a 7″ with a giraffe on the cover. It was a four track EP that included the songs Sunrise, Stunned, Happy Sunday Stories and Ignite. I still haven’t got around to get or listen this one.

Twee.net doesn’t list their third release. It was another 7″ and it was released on Fluff Records again. This one included the songs Demand Better Protection and Cradle. This release seems to be the rarest one to find. And they also contributed, with a cover version of James’ “Come Home”, on the tape compilation Bobby Stokes Salutes The Fall Of Manchester. This was released on  the exquisite Ambition Records.

And I believe this is it. I ask to the whole wide web, is there anyone out there?

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Listen

Aspidistra – Grip