Thanks so much to Chris Blunkell for the interview! It waas through The Leamington Spa series with their song “Sebastian” that I discovered The Black Cillas. I loved that song. Fast forward, Chris and me get in touch through Facebook as I had DJed one of his songs in London and  I had to ask if he would be up for an interview and tell the story of the great Black Cillas! Classic indiepop at it’s finest!

++ Hi Chris! Thanks so much for being up to be interviewed for the blog! How are you doing? Is there any Black Cillas’ news by any chance?

Hi Roque! I’m fine thanks, and hope you are too. Black Cillas are getting together next month in London, as we do pretty much every Autumn. We’re going to look at the Sarah Lucas exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery and then go for a curry in Brick Lane. We’ll probably have a few beers as well.

++ I want to talk about a lot of things, but let’s start from the beginning! Were you involved in any other bands prior to the Black Cillas?

++ So when and how did the Black Cillas start as a band? How was the recruitment process?

Ben and I moved on to do other things in other locations, but in the early 80s circumstances allowed us to do more music together, which was what we wanted. The group went through various incarnations as we wrote and played, and we settled on both the name and the line up in I think 1985. Ben and I had been at school with guitarist Nick Appleton, and Ben also recruited drummer Andrew Maltman, although I can’t really remember how. Andrew has published some of his diaries from that period on www.blackcillas.co.uk, so that may help. We were also surrounded by good people: Jim Warren who has worked with Radiohead since ever recorded us and often did live sound, as did Angus Cameron, and Matt Ambown, Maxine Kempster and Isabelle Crean were a huge part of the whole thing.

++ And even though is obvious I think, what’s the story behind the name of the band?

We were conscious of the need for something that worked with what we were trying to do, and (to me anyway) Black Cillas seemed nicely contemporary and tongue in cheek – I think it was Nick’s idea. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the under-employed in our circle spent for more time than was healthy watching a TV programme by the name of Blind Date hosted by Cilla Black that, at that time, seemed hell bent on further lowering the tone of public discourse.

++ Some days ago on the Cherry Red Youtube channel they had uploaded two live videos of you. What do you remember from that gig? And are there any other videos by the Black Cillas waiting to see the light of day?

I remember feeling nervous – it was a big crowd and a really good line up, and we’d never done recording for TV. I remember attempting a wink to camera that I deeply regret to this day.

++ So yeah, tell me about gigs. Did you play many? Which were your favourite gigs and why?

I think we played somewhere between 50 and 100 gigs – many in London, but elsewhere too. Playing The Marquee as support to heavy metal band Waysted was quite an experience – their fans had every reason to hate us, but actually were really lovely. Somebody shouted “60s disco!” after one song – it was probably meant as an insult, but we liked the idea.  My evening was rendered complete when Philty Animal Taylor – Motorhead’s drummer – called me a wanker.

++ What about your favourite venues to hang out or play? Were there any that you felt at “home”?

The Bull & Gate in Kentish Town – we played a lot there, and spent a fair amount of time watching other bands too. It was run by Jon Beast, who still takes his clothes off for the benefit of Carter USM fans. Mick Mercer, ex-Melody Maker, has produced some great stuff on the B&G – his photo collections are stunning, and available to buy.

++ In those late 80s there was an explosion of guitar pop bands in the UK. What do you think triggered that? And did it ever felt like there was a scene? Which other bands from that period did you like?

In London I think Jon Beast and the Bull & Gate were pivotal. You were never going to make a fortune there, but if you had something he would put you on, and it was a magnet for journalists willing to stray from the usual. It was very much its own scene.  Of course, there was lots going on musically at that time, and we’d had a period in which synthesised sounds and big production had come to the fore. I think the guitar thing was a bit of a backlash against that, but also people wanting to write ‘small’. Half Man Half Biscuit took this idea to absurd lengths, of course, with their lyrical focus on football, for example. Ben was very into New Order, Andrew Kraftwerk and Nick Echo and Bunnymen. We all adored The Smiths. I got very into early REM and the Go-Betweens. Of the bands that we played with, I really enjoyed a group called ‘The Doctor’s Children’ who used a Hammond organ and sang sweet harmonies.

++ You only released one single, already a classic for indiepop fans, “Sebastian”. Care telling me the story behind the song?

In those days songs would come to me quite quickly, which now seems extraordinary. Sebastian was one of those – inspired by somebody I thought rather self-regarding at that time, and with an ambiguous twist lobbed in for good measure. As tended to be the case, I just blocked the song out on guitar, and then it would start to walk (or not) in the rehearsal studio. I still think that one of the most exciting things you can do as a musician in a band is to play a new song together, properly, for the first time – with intro, proper ending, and all. With regard to songwriting more generally at that time, I think I wrote good lines or couplets more often than I wrote good songs. You need to know more, to have done more, and to have read more than I had at that time. Looking back, I can see that I was maybe working towards a songwriting voice – later I concentrated on character and situation driven songs, and the rather novelistic idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’.

++ What do you remember from the recording sessions of the single? Any anecdotes you could share?

We recorded at the Jumbo 16 track studio in west London over a weekend, with Jim Warren producing. Again, Andrew’s diaries will tell you more than I can recall, although I do remember nicking a guitar lick from Safe European Home by The Clash whilst we were in the process. It was all quite exciting – this was proper with high end gear, whilst we had been used to recording on a Portastudio in squats. We made the sleeves ourselves – designed by Nick and Neil Cowan, screenprinted, and cut by hand. We then handled all of the mastering and pressing, which was done on the Isle of Sheppey. The NME reviewed it twice – the first time it was panned, and the second time they liked it. Such is life…

++ There are a bunch of other Black Cillas recordings. So I have to ask, why didnt you get to release more records? And if ever you thought of putting together some sort of retrospective album?

++ Was there any interest from big labels by the way?

Go Discs were interested for a while, and we used to get record people come to see us from time to time. However, news of that used to make me feel very anxious and I used to drink too much before we went on stage.

++ I read on your page that you’d wished that you were a better vocalist. Why do you say that?

Listening to old live recordings I hear a really tight and powerful band let done by some rather approximate vocals. Ben, Nick and Andrew deserved better that I sometimes gave them. I got better in the recording context, however, and I’d like to think that I have got older and more experienced I’ve dealt with whatever needed dealing with it. Some of it is really simple stuff about knowing your range, writing in appropriate keys and writing words and phrases that are possible to sing: it’s about writing as well as singing, and possibly drinking less.

++ So then what happened to you guys? When and why did you call it a day?

++ And looking back in time, what would you say was the biggest moment, the highlight, of the band?

For me, the highlight was possibly being told by the Only Ones old road manager that we reminded him of Perrett and co. I’ve always loved the Only Ones. However, I think that ‘new song’ thrill is the enduring thing.

++ These days, you are still recording music. Tell me a bit about these new songs you are making.

At the moment I’m tied up with another project, and so music has been on hold for a while. I’ve been pretty active over the last 10 years, however, largely through my group Waspjuice. Songs don’t come to me so fast these days – in fact its all a bit torturous. I like what I’ve produced however – there’s some on Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/chris-blunkell), and I’ll put some more up. I’ve got more material in the pipeline, and I’ve added a few bits of kit to my rather odd little home studio so that I can hit the ground running when I come out of hibernation.

++ Aside from music, what other hobbies do you enjoy doing?

I’ve just had an exhibition of my paintings, which has been immensely gratifying.

++ Let’s wrap it here, thanks again Chris! Anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks so much to Tim Mortimer for the interview! Some time ago I wrote about his band The Mandelbrot Set in the blog and Tim was kind enough to get in touch and answer all these questions I have about his band. The Mandelbrot Set released two CDs, “A Place in Kansas” and “The Mandelbrot Set”, both on Ra Records, and then disappeared. They hailed from Adelaide, Australia, and should have made a bigger splash! Just listen to their songs! But now, sit back, read, and enjoy!

++ Hi Tim! Thanks a lot for being up for this interview!

Hi Roque. No problems. Happy that the “Kansas” EP sparked your curiousity to know more about the band.

I apologise however if you have wound up with more than you bargained for, this has ended up quite long….

I don’t get asked to talk about the band very often, so when I do it becomes something of an exorcism.

I hope you & your readers therefore enjoy the story, & hopefully a few people from the bands’ past will get the word that this information exists here, & can add their thoughts or comments.

++ What are you up to these days?

I’m doing a horticulture trade certificate this year while I “tread water” for a bit & think about my next move.

But prospects on the whole look fairly dire in terms of generating any income in this part of the world at present, unless you design military hardware or dig mines.

I guess the good news however is this might, hopefully, give me some more time next year to work on some music…

++ Is it true you haven’t been involved with music for a long time? When was the last time?

I haven’t played in bands for over 10 years, but I still work on music in my spare time, & am probably more passionate about it than ever.

The last 10 years or so I’ve been using the PC, in one way or another, to explore lots of different ideas & directions in my music making, that simply weren’t available to me before things like home PC recording & the internet arrived in my life.

Essentially, I am now trying to write instrumental music for as close to “full orchestral forces” as I can organise effectively, via my PC
using MIDI & samples.

I got to this point via a few years of exploring digital sound manipulation stuff (using things like Python, Max MSP, Csound programming – think Fennesz, 12k label etc, that kind of experimental digital aesthetic), but I think my songwriting roots saw me craving a way to engage with something more structured, & using tonality & “changes” to create that structure (as much as I am drawn to “stasis” & “wallpaper” in music). A lot of private study & research ensued, & this is where I have sort of wound up.

But I definitely was & am over writing songs for the most part. Apart from anything else, I always hated writing lyrics! ; ) Not to mention all the crap aspects of being in a band: booze, late nights, ringing ears, lugging amps…

It’s not something I am doing out of any sense of professional aspiration, but simply as a result of 20 years of accumulated interest & development in writing music, & an opportunity to indulge the more “academic” side of my tastes that were always there, but untapped, uncultivated, & without an outlet.

The dream would be a kind of hazy impressionism like Charles Koechlin or something, perhaps a bit more German, a bit more Bruckneresque, that sense of radiance & transcendence…

So all you indie kids reading this, go listen to a recording of Bruckner’s 8th symphony! (there are plenty on Youtube…) ; )

++ Was The Mandelbrot Set your first band? Or had you been playing with other bands already?

No, Mandies was my first band.

++ So how did The Mandelbrot Set start as a band? Who were the members, what did each of you play and how did you met each other?

Brian (guitar) & I were school friends, & the band really began with me “roping him in” to my dream of checking out of the reality of finding a shit job, & into super-stardom ; ).

Plus his brother had a guitar & an amp! & I knew he was passionate about music of course, but first & foremost, a good friend.

Adam (Bass) I met through a girl (Kylie Folvig, metal chick, Lita Ford etc. That’s kind of cool now really…) who shifted from my school to his.

He switched from guitar to bass to help us put the band together, hopefully based on the catchiness of some of my songs, & the fact that from the outset, unlike most other Adelaide bands of the late 80’s era, I had a vision that I wanted us to be “popular”., rather than “turgid with beer”, or worse, “clever”.

Mike the drummer I was jamming with when I joined another “practice room” band (concurrent to Mandies) as a bass player. Mandies had a drummer (Rob Davies), but Mike was far & away the best musician of any sort that I knew, so one day I took the opportunity to invite him to practice with us.

It was obvious to everyone in the room that all of a sudden our racket had a lot more going for it in terms of togetherness & appeal.

Christie was a part time member of the band essentially, & sister of a good friend of the band Nick. I had scratched my way through a small amount of violin on one of our first demos (got a lucky take essentially…) & she could play violin a little bit, so we got her on board. Plus it was nice to get a bit of gender equity into the band.

++ And where did the name of the band came from?

We had our first gig 6 weeks after Mike joined us on drums. We needed a name, & Mandelbrot Set was on my shortlist, in fact, it was probably the only one we had on the list to be honest.

We discussed it at practice, & reached our usual apathetic state of “no objections”.

I went home that night, flicked on the TV & there was a documentary on Benoit Mandelbrot screening, so I saw that as a bit of a “fate” thing at the time.

Fractal imagery was increasingly common as a pop “meme” at the time, & I chose the name in part because I wanted that sense of “pop”, much in the way that I believe Tom Verlaine selected the name “Television”, for the same reason.

Of course, this backfired a bit – whilst most people had seen images of Mandelbrot Set, they didn’t necessarily know what the name of it was. & 1 or 2 other bands of the same name have subsequently cropped up around the globe…

& of course, there was a general “psychedelic resurgence” happening at the time (late 80’s into early 90’s) which I was happy to associate with.

Aldous Huxley, “Doors of Perception” for the win! ; )

++ What were you listening back then? Who or what would you say influenced your sound?

An enormous amount of stuff.

Primarily, being a miserable, bored teenager growing up in what you could probably reasonably accurately describe as “middle America”, but with kangaroos…

Musically, I grew up a big 80’s jangle head (Church, REM, Rain Parade etc…I taught myself guitar mainly by playing along to “Reckoning” & “Fables of the Reconstruction”) also Television & even some of the weird 80s Tom Verlaine solo stuff.

Adam was the one who brought a lot of the more British influenced sound to the band, & MBV & Ride, & the whole shoegaze thing impacted on the sound of the band quite heavily at this point.

But Adam & I in particular were rabid cultural consumers of any sort in those days. Which wasn’t always easy, from the arse-end of the world in the pre-internet age. I remember films like “Blue Velvet” & “Santa Sangre” being constant points of band discussion. “Twin Peaks” was big at the time. I remember dragging the band along to see the first screening of Pasolini’s “Salo” in 20+ years. Just to add insult to injury, I had glandular fever at the time…

My listening was of course also a bit broader. By the time the band kicked off, I’d kind of moved on into 70’s & 80’s minimalism, Philip Glass etc. The David Sylvian 80’s stuff, Wagner’s “Parsifal” was probably the start of me starting to take any sort of interest in classical music.

But once the band did take off, obviously I began listening to a lot more indie music again, largely under Adam’s guidance.

&, of course, Janet Jackson’s “1814 Rhythm Nation”! & I’m still a sucker for quality commercial RnB.

++ And how would you describe Adelaide during those days? Has it changed lots? Where there any other bands in town that you liked?

The Adelaide I grew up in was basically a proliferation of grunge bands in the mid 80’s. & I use the term quite deliberately, as I think & see a lot of the influences that led to the “grunge” explosion in the 90’s being bred & cultivated in the Adelaide (& probably Melbourne) pub scenes during the mid – late 80’s. Cosmic Psychos etc etc…

Of course the whole lineage is pretty much a continuum back through punk anyway, but there was a lot of kind of “post MC5” / heavy garage kind of stuff (some of it actually pretty good, like early “Nest of Vipers” era Exploding White Mice…) but also just a lot of general “beery sludge rock”.

I set out to start the band with some pretty clear objectives, & having absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with what I saw around me as an endless vomit stained carpet of alcohol fuelled musical self destruction was pretty high on the agenda.

Our mission was simple: be catchy, be cool, be popular. Reach out & try & speak to people directly, in a way that the music we grew up on reached out & spoke to us, & gave us some sense of hope, rather than despair.

A band that did pave the way for us however was an Adelaide band called The Artisans. Adam knew these guys, & we played some of our first gigs with them.

I notice that you have a different band called “Artisans” featured on your site. I recommend finding an EP “Love & Sleep” by the Adelaide band if you can – as with many records of this type from the era (including our own) it only hints at the glories of the band in full stride, but will give you a taste of what was essentially a heavily Wedding Present influenced “hit-machine” / “indie jukebox”…

The Artisans had a revival of late, & Adam (our bass player) did play guitar in The Artisans during various incarnations.

As for the rest of your question, well, I could probably write a book about Adelaide for you, if you have the budget. Only the first 4000 words come free …. ; )

++ What about gigs? Did you play a lot? Which other cities did you visit? What were your favourite venues to play?

Adelaide is a relatively small & isolated town, so we risked over-exposure if we played too frequently.

At our peak, probably only once a month. Again, this attitude completely flew in the face of Australia’s accepted “pub rock wisdom”.

& Australia is a big country. The closest town is 900 miles away, & flights were a lot more expensive back then, so touring was very difficult.

++ And if you could pick a gig as your best, which would that be?

Definitely any of the first 5 or 6 gigs we played.

We didn’t have a vocal PA in our practice room, so at our first gig there was a degree of nervousness as no one had ever heard me sing, nor any of the vocals to any of the songs. Fortunately, it went OK.

I was very blasé about it in the early days, more or less threatening to “chuck it in” if we didn’t start pulling a crowd after 5 or 6 gigs. As it turned out, things did take off for us pretty quickly, & within 6 months or so we had generated enough hype for me to start receiving telephone calls at work (at my day job) from record labels, despite
not having sent out a demo tape …

But basically, as soon as drug dealers started coming to our gigs, well, the crowds really took off. When drug dealers like your band, it’s a greater career boost than any form of critical approval can bring. Although the venue owners constantly complained about not selling any booze to our fans.

Once we had a bigger budget, we got into having heavy club style light shows & smoke machines & what-not. Again, largely as this just completely went against an established pub rock culture that we were walking into. ‘Audiences’ were obviously over it too, as eventually, they started turning up in sizeable numbers.

Playing for free wherever possible also helped, & again, flew in the face of conventional wisdom on the subject.

++ You released “A Place Called Kansas” in 1992. What do you remember of the recording sessions? Any anecdotes you could share?

I remember being disappointed with the guitar sound, as we were always striving for something a bit heavier.

It was also very typical of our experience, in that by the time we got to record that EP, the material was 2 years old & we weren’t even really playing any of it any more, & had moved into more “shoegazey” territory. There are quite a few phases of the band that went undocumented…

++ This CD included 7 songs. Which is your favourite and why?

It’s difficult to say. I have never really listened to the record after it was made. All I really hear is a lost opportunity to do something better.

“Lush” was a good song – I was going for the whole Television 2 guitar duel in the big out solo. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much lost in the mix on the record (a familiar complaint…)

++ Mine is of course “Landslide”, what a fantastic song! Should have been a classic. Any chance you can tell me the story behind this song?

Thanks for the kind words of appreciation.

All the songs on the EP were written in the second half of 1990. Adam wrote “Massive”, & I wrote the rest. I wanted to credit the whole band at the time because I felt it was important to present a “unified creative front” as it were.

Lyrically it’s all pretty much dissatisfied adolescent whining. Chris Martin & I therefore have something in common, virgins with record deals. Although thankfully, the band did eventually help me to find a girlfriend! At least briefly…

EDIT: Tim later recalled that Adam had originally written “I Swan” for the Artisans, but it was reworked with the new middle section & outro, & new lyrics & melodies for The Mandies…

++ Tell me about Ra Records. How did you end up signing to them? And how was your relationship with them?

Unfortunately, that really is kind of a long story.

We had been contacted by the label (the one demo we did send, after a tip off) & flew over to Sydney to meet them.

I was working in a mailroom with, co-incidentally, a guy Don Morrison who had previously had some success in the States & Australia with a blues / rockabilly type band called “The Bodgies”.

He gave me the number of a guy named Richard Ortner, as I was desperately at this point trying to find someone (anyone) who could help us deal with this new stage in our development (dealing with labels & what not) & we were in a position where we were getting on a plane to go to Sydney to record for them 24 hours later.

I rang him & he said “just tell them I’m your manager”.

It turns out that Richard, unbeknownst to me, was one of the original founders of the label, originally set up as a bit of a development (“tax dodge” probably) label by INXS management. So once Richard was involved, that kind of biased our future direction. He’d previously managed a couple of fairly mainstream, “MOR” female performing artists
in Australia.

But as it happens, from before we had even played our first gig I had identified this was probably the label I wanted to sign to. Unlike comparable Australian “mainstream indie” labels (like Mushroom) Roo Art only had a small roster of bands, & once you signed, you generally got some level of support. For a period at least….

The rest of this very long story cut short is that the label eventually completely changed management teams. We were signed by a guy named Craig Kamber, manager of an Australian band worth checking out (kids) called Underground Lovers.

Unfortunately, Craig went to Festival or some other label shortly afterwards, signed Underground Lovers there, & Roo Art was taken over by Todd Wagstaff & co, managers of You Am I (which, in retrospect, carries a rather unfortunate similarity to will.i.am…).

You Am I then became the label darlings effectively, were Sydney based, & were prepared to drag their arses up & down the east coast playing out the “Pub Rock Fantasy” the label expected them to. Unlike us, who would have rather sat in the studio & be packaged & waited to appear on the cover of “Smash Hits”. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite work like that in Australia…

There was a disintegration beginning within the band anyway probably around this time, but this certainly didn’t help or boost our already sapping confidence. I went into this adventure with a high degree of confidence & self belief, & probably my major regret, as it all unfolded, is that I didn’t have the faith to keep it.

Someone wrote a book about this period of OZ indie rock called “The Sell In” I believe. I’ve never read it, & don’t think we are directly mentioned in it at all, although we were silent extras in the portrayed drama, from what I understand about the book…

I remember being at the label & one day Ivo Watts from 4AD came in for a meeting re: Australian distribution. We desperately wanted to run into his meeting & plead “save us!”.

++ With them you also released your second EP. I have never heard to it, but I’ve read that you changed your sound into something more electronic. Is that so? If so, why the change of direction?

The sampler, initially, was Adam’s idea, (forever the progressive…)

An Adelaide muso by the name of Mike Gordon created the sample based intro to “Massive” on the “Kansas” EP for us, & we decided to blow a large slice of our publishing advance on a sampler (now dwarfed in capabilities by the average phone of course…), in the hope of expanding the musical avenues of the band, who, with stars in its eyes, had moved beyond any notions of wanting to remain “guitar purists”.

Obviously as indie kids in the 80’s, Adam & I had both grown up as New Order fans, so this was an obvious point of departure for us. More specifically, the first Electronic album had come out, & in a way this was more directly a template for where we saw that the band might head.

Hip Hop was also a bit of an elephant in the room for a lot of indie groups at this time (the MBV influence after Glider / Soon etc…) but the album that concretised this for me ironically was St Etienne’s “Foxbase Alpha”.

Let me say once & for all that the cultural abomination that is “Australian Hip Hop” is not something even we, in our naivety, remotely contemplated. But what “Foxbase Alpha” said to me was essentially (without wishing to too overtly play into dangerous “race card” territory) here was the production & aesthetic of De La Soul’s “3 Feet High & Rising” re-invented as a piece of quintessentially British 60’s kitchen sink nostalgia.

Listening back now, the album is nothing special, (the 1 or 2 singles aside…) but like all ideally fertile grounds for plagiarising ideas, the original did indeed, suggest possibilities way beyond that which it realised.

However the Pandora’s box was definitely opened once the sampler arrived, my girlfriend basically never saw me again, & I locked myself in the bedroom &, not for the last time, became a mad scientist.

The EP ended up a huge mush of possibilities, with the band then layered on top for good measure.

Originally, the label, having heard the demos & been impressed enough to give us the go ahead for the second EP (after a 3 hour phonecall from me where I ad-libbed them my mission statement…) wanted to put us in a warehouse for 3 weeks with newly emergent digital recording technology (remember the ADAT machine?) & let us record it all & sort out the mess & make a record out of it.

This would have been a MUCH more sensible option, but they eventually saw it as too risky, threw us into a conventional 5 day studio setup, with 2 days to mix.

There were times when the EP was partially recorded, where parts of what we were doing were sitting in a fairly sparse isolation (strings, drum loops, a few stabs etc) when I genuinely sat back & thought “This is it. We’ve cracked it. We sound like fucking Chic!”

However in the end, the band exhausted (&, to be honest, pretty wasted), the record was mixed down in a hurry by the production team, everything, including the kitchen sink just stayed in there, & we ended up with what essentially boils down to a big fat crappy electro mess.

Which is a shame, as fundamentally, there was a strong possibility of 1 or 2 singles there that I think could have opened us up to wider audiences…

I would like to take this opportunity however to thank anybody who was involved at the label for giving us the opportunity. (In a previous piece I wrote about the band, I did vent a little on the subject, but that was more to offer insights into some of what we were collectively feeling at the time, rather than any attempt to apportion blame or inject malice. For what it’s worth, I apologise if that was ever the case, & if anything bilious ever did reach any targets.)

++ And it was just after releasing it that you split up. What happened?

In a word, nothing.

The second EP sold about half as many as the first, & I think everyone (including the label, not sure I ever spoke to anyone there personally ever again) I think just really couldn’t be bothered anymore. & drink & drugs then started seeping in a bit more than they should have ideally.

That & the fact that the band was constantly developmentally about 2 years ahead of the rollout schedule, & got to the point where the production & performance ideas really became, for 1 reason or another, impossible to execute. There was no such thing as home PC recording in 1992/3 after all….

The band never really ‘split up’ as such. One day, we all just stopped turning up essentially. No one had to say anything really at this point.

I started going out & listening to a lot of House Music, & then drifted into doing an Architecture degree for a bit, but I dropped out & moved to London in ’97.

I kept getting like $20 royalty cheques for many years after from places like Eastern Europe. Rock & Roll baby!

++ Are you all still in touch? What are the rest doing these days?

Not really no.

Sadly, Mike Bajer passed away in December 1999 (& I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I throw in the obvious Spinal Tap joke here about dearly departed drummers…). He was a good friend, & is very much missed by all who knew him.

Brian has a business that he has done quite well out of doing posters & promotions, visual merchandising stuff etc. for record labels.

Adam still plays but is something of a mystery man these days, but always immaculately dressed.

I believe he is in a band called Swimsuit I saw a few years ago, as well as playing with Artisans intermittently. He lived in London for a period, as did I (for 4 years…), but he more or less arrived the week I left…

Christie is married, has her own business & a couple of kids approaching their teens.

Nick (honourary member & Christie’s brother) lives in Sweden with his wife & child.

++ What about more songs? Are there any other recordings by The Mandelbrot Set that never saw the light of day?

Demos & stuff. Adam has a box somewhere. To be honest, I listened to some of it a few years back & a lot of it was rubbish. ; ) . I’d like to get our very first 3 track demo up & into circulation however.

I have a Soundcloud page, but Soundcloud reorganised their site, & for me it was a real pain, as it’s very difficult now for me to isolate my “pop” demos directly away from some of the other sketches & experiments, which are mostly a few years old now anyway.

None the less, this link should do the trick, if people are interested. But I’m not really active on the site & would like to find somewhere else to host my music in future.

https://soundcloud.com/timmortimer/sets/pop

1 or 2 of the tracks I think definitely represent a direction Mandies eventually could have gone in (“Ticket to Ride” in particular).

Some of it however is songs I wrote for the band that, if I were to put one together, would be the only type of thing I’d like to do now – a straight ahead, power pop trio or quartet, ideally situated somewhere between the Smithereens & the Bangles. (the choice of overtly commercial examples of the genre being, ideally, deliberate) It aint going to happen though.

As “once we were young & beautiful, but now we are old & withered”…

++ Looking back in retrospective. What would you say was the biggest highlight of The Mandelbrot Set?

Being young, & living with a sense of hope & opportunity that you might not have to spend your life as a paper shuffling debt-riddled wage slave.

Meeting people.

Playing music with my friends. Some of the early practices we had with Mike in the band we actually fell apart mid song laughing because we couldn’t believe how fucking good we sounded. This is not an experience I have ever relived in 20 years of music making since. Maybe, on a good night, some of the people who used to come & see us got a glimpse into that.

Free drinks.

Having your friends sister cut your picture out of the newspaper & stick it on her fridge…

Having people believe in you & what you are trying to do.

Having the arrogance & the audacity to rail against mediocrity from the middle of nowhere, even when doomed to failure.

++ A couple of last questions, just out of curiosity, what would you say is your favourite Australian band ever?

Easy. The Church – in the period from 81 – 87 .
“Tear it all Away” – youtube it now kids! – The perfection of indiedom.

Also a lot of time for the Go Betweens (“Liberty Belle”, “Before Hollywood”, “Spring Hill Fair”).

Stems / Someloves, early Died Pretty, first Hoodoo Gurus album, Sunnyboys (esp. “Individuals”).

A couple of EP’s & bands from the era you may not have heard of:

‘Ups & Downs’ were a really good band from the late 80’s. early stuff was very Church influenced, but very good. They made a shoegazey EP in the early 90’s, & then became “Big Heavy Stuff” with some kind of success….

& there was a Sydney band called ‘Jupiter’ who put out a full tilt Shoegaze 3 track EP in the early 90’s. You’ll never find it, but keep looking… I’ll have to dig it out & record it sometime.

Glide (Sydney) were a band we played with a lot, & stayed with in Sydney a few times, & are worth checking out if you’re a diehard indie person…

Hummingbirds were good, when they were good…

Falling Joys were another band who predated us slightly, but who we played with a few times.

++ Aside from music, do you have any other hobbies or passions?

Not especially.

My hope for the future is to have a little house away from the neighbours that won’t fall over in a strong wind, do some gardening & work on my music for at least a few hours a day…

I like to go on day bushwalks & stuff…

I watch a fair bit of NFL: it’s like this exotic alien fantasy world to me, but very entertaining. Go Colts!

++ And one last one, what’s the best thing to see, do and eat in Australia?

I don’t eat out much, I can’t really afford it.

But food here is generally very good. This is the country that produced “Masterchef” after all, which is simply to suggest that a large slice of “middle-Australia” is obsessed with food as an expression of their petit-bourgeouis credentials.

To see? I haven’t been there yet, but I hope to make it to the Tarkine forest in Tasmania soon. Flinders Ranges is awesome. Australia to me is all about the grandeur & expanse of the country.

After all, you can go see crappy globalised (sub)urban hipster culture anywhere…

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Mandelbrot Set – Landslide

If you are familiar with the blog, you might have noticed that there are like two or three album reviews. That’s not many. I don’t usually like to review albums. It requires me to become a bit more scientific when listening to music, use stupid words, and get myself in the same league as a lot of morons out there that write a lot of bullshit. I prefer to avoid that, I don’t want to be an album reviewer. But, sometimes, some albums come by, and they are just fascinating, and those times, which are few, I think, “most people” need to hear this. I’ll try then to convince you that Los Directivos only release ever is worth your time.

“Por amor y jerarquía” can be translated as “For love and class” or maybe as “Because of love and class”. Either or, it works. That’s how Los Directivos only album, and only release so far, is named. The terrible part is that it was released in 2010 and it has slipped from everyone’s best of lists since then.

Well, here I am, not trying to make justice, because the CD makes itself justice by painting the Spanish society with such honest music. I can’t remember the last time I felt a record expressed so clearly, so sincerely, the whole idiosyncrasy of a generation. A generation of Spanish people, that we know, are not having it easy in their own country. We read about that in the news all the time. But there’s something intrinsically interesting about it, about the Spanish culture, that even in the worst times they are able to laugh about their misery. And I think this is where the record excels, in their lyrics. And of course, it’s no surprise that that is the case. I’ll tell you why.

I wasn’t aware of this record until earlier this year. It all happened while I was visiting Madrid Popfest. One of the bands playing and that I was actually looking forward to see after a lot of correspondence and after working together, was Los Lagos de Hinault. Those who aren’t familiar with this fantastic Spanish band would know that they released a split mini-CD with Cloudberry, and then an album and a split 7″ with El Faro on Fikasound. As I’ve written before on the blog, their show was among the best of the festival. I love every bit of it. It was even great to see people singing along to some of their songs. Because their lyrics are fantastic as well.

Make the connection. Carlos Ynduráin, is part of both bands. But of course I haven’t heard of Los Directivos yet. I didn’t  have a clue they existed. I did know about Portonovo, Carlos’ previous band, who released a soon-to-be-classic album on Jabalina many years ago. That record I did buy on the time it came out. But as most of the times I find about things through friends, through recommendations. It’s funny though that some people say silly things that they can’t recommend me anything, that I will probably know it or that I would hate it. You can’t imagine how I love good recommendations and even better when they have people that make music with class and love. It was like that that I learned of the existence of Los Lagos de Hinault, through one of the most passionate fanzines in recent history, Aplasta tus Gafas de Pasta. How did I learn from Los Directivos? From the one and only, the incomparable, the most interesting (as well as the loudest!) person in the Madrid pop scene: Miguel Stamp.

Next year I admit I will miss seeing him at Madrid Popfest -because I’m not going, he most probably is- but the thing is if you meet Miguel you better listen carefully to everything he recommends. Because it will be a lot. Also, he will dislike every single band you have released on Cloudberry. Well not all. But a bunch. And also many of the ones playing at the festival. Fair enough. I’m the same. I like people that are not afraid of calling things by their name. And Miguel is like that. And Carlos is like that. I can tell. Funny thing, I was telling Miguel after Los Lagos de Hinault show that I really loved their show, and he immediately asked me: “Have you heard Los Directivos, Carlos’ other band? son la ostia“. I had no clue. He said that I had to listen to their album, that it was by far one of the best records released in Spain in the last decade. So, let’s find Carlos in the Sala Siroco and ask about it.

Sadly Carlos didn’t have any copies with him during the festival. But he promised me to mail me one soon. That was March and I still had some time left in Europe, visiting after Spain, Estonia and Sweden. Good times. Celebrating my birthday. So I kind of forgot for a bit. One day though, when I was already back in the big apple, I received a yellow envelope stamped by Correos de España, and it doesn’t require much effort to guess, it was Los Directivos album.

Of course on the album his name is not listed. On the band photo his face is covered. The same as his bandmate. Their names are listed as Claudio McKinsey and Iñaki Andersen. Clearly those are not their original names. I still don’t know the name of the other half of Los Directivos. There is some interesting facts on the credits. The album was recorded and mixed during the months of January and March in 2010 at three studios: GDM, Vilanova and La Geltrú, in Barcelona. It was produced by David Rodríguez. Mixed and mastered by Pere Serrano.

The credits are as follow:
Claudio McKinsey: vocals
Iñaki Andersen – bass, drums, keyboards, synths, and backing vocals
Ana Fernández Villaverde – backing vocals
David Rodríguez – guitars, backing vocals and some keyboards
Don Pimpón – drums and percussion

Of course, for those who follow the Spanish indie scene will find Ana Fernández Villaverde a familiar name, that’s because she is kind of famous under the moniker La Bien Querida, releasing a bunch of albums on the Elefant label.

From the day I received the album and on, for at least two weeks I listened to it non-stop on my cd player. Maybe for you two weeks is nothing. But for me, that I’m listening new albums ever single day, and changing the CD from the portable player after 3 days after it’s first play in average, two weeks is a very long time. I’m 100% sure that I haven’t listened a record this year more than this one. It would definitely go to the end of year list if it wouldn’t have been released 3 years ago!

It’s a big shame that a lot of people will get turned off because the album is in Spanish. Not understanding the lyrics is not the best situation, I agree. But for all the other people, that do get the charm and the intelligence behind them, well, we only can feel the awe for such great penmanship. It may also  have to do that it is a record done by 30 year old guys telling their experience as 30 year olds. And I’m reaching that age, and I feel it talks to me. I happen to identify myself with so many of the situations that appear as little vignettes on the 12 tracks of this album released by Islam Records.

I’m fast forwarding to song number 7, “La Tortura” (the torture). This song could be a hymn against the hipsters perhaps, claiming with a line that says “in my times, this didn’t happen, indie was indie and the rest was the rest”. This is the torture about bands like Beach Fossils or Craft Spells, who I would clearly put them in the “Rest” pile. But of course, not every one out there is wise enough.

Rewind to track 5, “Rojo y Nieve”. This is the straight jab to Spain’s face. With another fantastic line, “love in Spain doesn’t shine in red and yellow, it shines in reds (communists) and bitches” (of course in Spanish it rhymes with brilliance!), they claim a new decadence in Spanish society even mentioning that in places like Switzerland and Austria are civilized countries, unlike their own Spain.

For me, the beauty of the album is discovering and rediscovering the lyrics. They are captivating. They are smart.

You’ll ask me then, what about the music. The music is great! It’s a mix of guitars and drum machines. Some effects here and there. Nicely produced. It’s a beautiful marriage of brilliant songwriting and musicianship! There’s black humor, there’s bright ideas, there’s this thing that not many albums give you. It leaves you thinking. It leaves you trying to solve and understand what inspired the band to write it. You know this is just not play entertainment, this is not music to go out dancing. There’s a commentary here. This is deeper than your regular ukulele indiepop album. This has guts. It has passion of course too.

One can also wonder if this album is just full of cynicism . And the answer for many will be probably yes. There’s this defeatist sort of vibe in the songs. But for me it works in the opposite way. It points out what’s wrong, it makes fun of it, and tries to open our eyes to what’s happening out there. It doesn’t ask anyone to change, because that’s not what it is about, that’s not their job. It is for us to understand, to make the change.

If you want to laugh, if you want to wonder, if you want to have a record on repeat, I urge you to discover Los Directivos. I’m not sure where to buy their record, but they do have a Bandcamp. You can of course stream the album there, but way better is to really own it, don’t you agree?

This is the proper Spanish indiepop, the one that has taken the cue from the La Movida in the 80s, mixed with the C86 vibe. The real indiepop, the one that sadly Elefant has obscured with all their 60s happy-go-lucky stuff (aside from some exceptions of course!). I wish there were more bands like Los Directivos. In the meantime, we can look forward to Los Lagos de Hinault next album.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Los Directivos – Rojo y Nieve

How is the state of indiepop today? That’s the first question I ask myself every time I sit down to write a blog post. A lot of times, like today, I have absolutely no clue aside from some bits and pieces that I get from Facebook. Like the Berlin Popfest this past weekend. I would have loved to be there, but I couldn’t afford it nor I had any more vacations days to get myself to the German capital. I saw on Youtube, with the happiest smile, how Amanda from Alpaca Sports joined The Brilliant Corners to sing “Why Do You Have To Go Out With Him…”, what a treat the popfesters enjoyed!

So I wasn’t there. I was in Providence, Rhode Island, this past weekend. I went on a road trip with three of my New York friends. It was quite a nice adventure, with almost perfect weather. I was impressed by how young this city feels. I barely saw people over 30 years old I think. The town revolved and was catered for the Brown University and Rhode Island School of design students. It must be great to have an education in a town like this. Party after party. Not surprisingly we ended up crashing a house party on Saturday night. That was fun. Sadly what matters the most in this world, record shopping (kidding!), was a total failure there. Visited two record stores and found perhaps 4 or 5 7″s I would have bought, indiepop records, if they weren’t over $5. Come on. The Hope flexi for $20? I got that one for like a pound in London.

Here in NYC we have CMJ around the corner too and some bands are coming to town. I know I will check out Joanna Gruesome, a band many of my hardcore indiepop friends don’t like, on Friday 18th’s night. I think they are alright! Not the bee’s knees probably or deserving too much hype, but quite a nice band, fun to listen and who have a bunch of catchy tunes. I missed them a year ago at Indietracks for a reason I don’t remember, probably watching another band, so will check them at 285 Kent, the venue with the worst restrooms in Brooklyn. Then on Saturday 19th I will see for the second time, after London Popfest 2011, The History of Apple Pie. To be 100% honest I haven’t followed them in the last couple of years. Especially because their records cost crazy money to purchase from the US. Anyhow, I just love their song “Mallory”, so that’s good enough for me to check them out this weekend. Hope they have more tunes like that!
Everyone is raving these days about The Proctors CD. I still haven’t gotten it, so I can’t rave about it. Hopefully I’ll get it from Ed the next time he visits NYC. What I have been planning though is a new European trip for next year. Around Easter I want to do this sort of trip, Paris-Oslo-Gothenburg-Uppsala-Stockholm. Though there’s a chance I do Barcelona instead of Paris. I’m still in early stages of planning. It doesn’t come out as a very expensive trip though to my surprise and I’ll get to see some new cities, meet friends I haven’t seen in years, and visit one of the places that always makes me happy, Stockholm.

That’s more or less where my state of indiepop is right now. Not that much happening but not totally dead like the revamped indiepop list seems now. I guess the excitement only lasted for a week or too. On the Cloudberry side of the spectrum things are very quiet after the two 7″ releases last month. These days it’s all about raising money for The Rileys CD. The art has been finished and approved so we are very ready. I should start working on a new fanzine too, for next year. What colour should it be? That’s always the interesting question.

—————————————————————

“Genius ! from 1987 the brilliant Fish Hildas single on Fish Disc Reputedly the worst selling single via Rough Trade/Cartel (that can’t be so!) …rumour has it The Stingrays may know more !”

That’s the legend on the Youtube link to The Fish Hildas’ “How I Itch To Stitch My Pitch” song. The A side of their one and only 7″.

A comment then appears on the Youtube link:

“I’m married to the drummer. She played it to me on our first date and it blew my head off completely. It sounded (and still does) to me like it should have come from around 1981. It’s got that lo-fi Postcard/early Teardrops vibe. Among a bunch of great lost 80s indiepop singles this is right on top of the pile. I’m glad I’ve got the drummer. Thanks for posting.”

And then the uploader replies:
“EXCELLENT NEWS ! Yes it certainly sounds more post-punk than proto-indie ! I was working for Rough Trade in the late 80s and a colleague flagged it up for me…blew my tiny mind wide open too ! It’s got a lot of fans around my friends. Give her my best wishes, Cheers !”

How I ended there, I can’t remember. It was a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky enough that a Dutch seller on Discogs had this record listed, and bought it immediately as it seemed the right thing to do. It wasn’t listed in any Popsike listings, or musicstack, or eBay. So perhaps it was really rare, so paying $11 for it plus postage didn’t hurt too much.

I liked the song. That is pretty obvious. It’s one of those indiepop tunes that sound like proto-indie (here I disagree with the uploader!). A tune that could have sat nicely in those Messthetics comps. It has those rough edges, with fun and poppy music, and dislocated vocals. It’s a rarity.

Where did they get their name from? That I don’t have a clue either. But it may have to do with this?
“The name Hilda (Pronounced: HIL-də) is originally a short form of names containing the Germanic element “hild” (battle). And the meaning of Hilda is “battle woman”. It was used for both English and continental Germanic names. The name became rare in England during the later Middle Ages, but was revived in the 19th century.”

I do know though that the record was released in 1987 on their own FishDisc label (catalog F1) and the B side for this 7″ was “Big Fat Gun”. And both songs are credited to a Felix.

I keep digging and I stumble with issue 13 of the Underground magazine that was published in April 1988. That one with The Flatmates on the cover. On this mag there is a small review of the record and I read it out loud:
“MYSTERIOUS FISH
So, who are The Fish Hildas, and where did their record come from? This mysterious seven incher, “How I Itch To Stitch My Pitch”, sounds like a wide-eyed Kerouac crooning over a Spike Jones jazz track. It’s strange  and no mistake and if seen should be grabbed and cherished.”

And then I suddenly find a worthy clue. I find Bongo Debbie’s old Myspace page. There she states that she was once part of this band. That’s the first name I see linked to the Fish Hildas. The cool thing is she has been involved in so so so so many bands during the years that I hope one day she might tell the story about this rare 7″! Among those bands you can definitely mention Creation’s own The X-Men, The Armitage Shanks, The Earls of Suave, The A-Lines, Baby Birkin, The Dutronc, Buffets, Thee Headcoatees, and MOST importantly my beloved Would-Be-Goods.

So there’s that. Who were the rest of The Fish Hildas? Was it really the worst selling 7″ in Rough Trade history? Did they record more songs? Did they play any gigs? So many questions then, waiting to be answered!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Fish Hildas – How I Itch to Stitch My Pitch

Last week I counted the amount of posts left for this year, not counting interviews. That’s 12 more posts including this one. I assume it will be 11 as I will be away for a week in November. So 10 more after this. I wonder then if this has been my most prolific year as a blogger. I ask myself too if people still consider themselves bloggers. Are there many blogs left? I feel many bloggers these day feel more like columnists, working for newspapers, magazines and such in their digital platforms. I saw though in the last couple of days the return of a favourite blog of mine though, 7 Pulgadas. When did his blog start? 2004? A long run from Alex, right? After a long standby as most of his records were in boxes thanks a very long move between houses in Madrid he is back. And it makes me happy that there are people who care about sharing their indiepop knowledge in the world, who respect bands and artists and who get involved in making this scene a better one. People who know Alex know that all of what I’m saying is true, not just because of his blog, that’s certain, but also from being part of the great Madrid Popfest, a regular indiepop festival attendee, and a good friend.

I started blogging in 2004 too. I had a Spanish language blog called Mira el Péndulo. The name came from a song by a Spanish band I was really in love then, El Niño Gusano. I still like them, but perhaps not as much. I started to blog inspired by the Indie-MP3 blog that was pretty popular then. That one was Tom’s blog. It closed some years ago and I wrote a big blog post about it I remember. As I was saying, I was inspired by it because they would offer an Mp3 from some new-ish band, or sometimes even an old classic band, with a link to their Myspace or to their website, and a little review. I thought that was the perfect format to introduce a band. And so I set up a blogspot, even with the same design and look as Indie-Mp3, and started blogging in Spanish because at that time there was nothing like it in my native language.

That’s the time when I discovered a couple of like-minded bloggers, all of them based in Spain. Their format varied, some wrote longer pieces, some shorter. Some wrote about old bands, some about gigs. Some preferred sharing many songs, some not even one song. But we all read each other, we all respected each other, and so a little community of indiepop bloggers was born. It’s funny that after many years I have actually met many of them, especially three that I always love to see at festivals together. That’s Alex of course, Manolo and Javi. Manolo had one of the best blogs in my opinion when it came to reviews of albums. His posts were long and he never shared an Mp3.  The blog was called 360 Grados de Separación. It is still online but he hasn’t updated much in recent times. He is missed. Javi in the other hand, the biggest Go-Betweens fan in the world, had his blog Lost and Found where he introduced to all his readers, this time in English, lots of obscure indiepop gems from the 80s. It was him, and of course the Leamington Spa series, that influenced me on what to recommend and showcase in this blog. Because, for new bands, there are TONS of other blogs and pages.

Then of course Mira el Péndulo was hacked by who knows who. The wordpress was hacked and there was no way to bring all posts back. Everything was lost. Not just what I wrote but also what my collaborators wrote. Because at some point I shared my blog with other friends that wanted to write some indiepop related posts. I remember Romina, from Argentina, that would correct my terrible grammar and write amazing posts about the sweetest sounding bands. Then there was JC, from Chile, who wrote smart posts that questioned the established taste of indiepop kids. One of my best friends José Emanuel, who I had a band with once and who was lately in Eva & John, wrote a bunch of posts about very weird and quirky indiepop bands. Then also Carlitos, from Peru and Eva & John, wrote a bunch of posts of the tweest kind. All those posts lots. I didn’t know what to tell them. I felt ashamed. I should have kept a backup, but I didn’t. I believe that’s the moment where I stopped believing in digital formats. That’s when I knew an MP3 collection was nothing, not even dust, it was nothing. Because all these things don’t really exist.

After a year without blogging I came back in 2008 with this blog, and then the rest is history. This is of course the longest blogging career I’ve had. As a Cloudberry cake chef. I didn’t think this was going to last this long. I came back because I was bored but what I was reading and because I couldn’t find any information about the bands I wanted to read about. Those days I was very close to my friend Emma. I thank her for pushing me to write again. She insisted I had to do it, and she even used to help me in writing interview questions. There’s one that is a favourite of mine, to the band Pink Noise. She wrote all the questions. It’s quite whack. She also answered all the questions a fanzine sent me as a Cloudberry interview. The questions were so boring, the usual questions people ask, so I let her be wild with her imagination. I think the Twee As Fuck crowd weren’t pleased with those answers about monkeys and razor-blade vinyl records. But well, that’s another story.

Anyhow, the thing is that I started blogging in Cloudberry Cake Proselytism in October 2008. It’s October 2013. That’s 5 years, right? Well, Happy Birthday to Me!!

—————————————————————

Have you ever heard The Candy Dates? Probably not. But they have an album that is a gem of indiepop. Fun, bright, smart, bouncy, and a treat to the ears. Sure, some of you might say they remind one to Throw That Beat in the Garbagecan!! And that might be true, these fellow Germans have that same taste for great pop music. But who cares, the Candy Dates are great in their own league and I recommend you getting their album Yep! that was released in both LP and CD. And trust me, it’s not that hard to track down!

The CD version was a sole release of Twang! Records (catalog TCD 5899) while the LP was a joint release between Twang! and Semaphore (catalog 27 777). I believe Semaphore was a Dutch label with an office in Germany also. Twang! was definitely a German label and had some nice releases.

The tracklist was:

1 Downtown Park
2 Six Tambourines
3 Big Big Kiss
4 Happy Hills
5 My Absolute Favourite Girl
6 Honey
7 Marlene
8 Top Ten Idol
9 Sophisticated
10 Brian On The Roof

The CD has an eleventh track, but it’s a 2 second one. So don’t worry about it! It’s a hidden track. Both the album and LP were separated in half, the first five songs were under the side called Cake One, and the last five songs were in Cake Two.

The album was produced by Andi Jezussek who was in a band called Breeder I believe.

The Candy Dates were formed by Gunnar Berndorf on vocals, drums and tambourines, Tobi Friedrich on vocals and guitar, Jockel Staron on vocals and guitar, and Lothi Berndorff on vocals and bass.

The band, as the label, were based in Berlin. The record was released in 1992 and the artwork reminiscing Roy Liechtenstein was made by the band themselves with help from Pat on Riesen for the layout. The photo of the band on the back cover was thanks to Frank Wegener.

There are some thank you notes on the CD. It says:

Thank You:
Robyn Wills, Andy, Frank, Pat, Manu & Uwe, Daniel Sprock, Herr Hanich, Hopek, Ralf Bieneck (DT 64), Antje Tiemeyer (RRB), Malum, Peter Perett, Raymond D. Davies, Joe Nolte.

Cool thing on the CD is something a lot of people are missing these days. All lyrics printed so one can sing along!

But let’s get back to that Thank You list. Is Uwe the Uwe from Firestation records? Probably but probably not. But Herr Hanich. That one we know. That’s Matthias Hanich who was also in Angry Flowers and later in the Groovy Cellar. But most importantly Matthias Hanich had been in a band with Gunnar Berndorf in the mid 80s. Yes! In 1984 they had been together in a band called The Artpress.

A little bio found on Facebook says:

The Artpress, whose melodic and beautifully constructed power pop made the band an instant success in Lower Saxony and other parts of Europe, released their one and only piece of vinyl under a long term deal with Worldcup Records in 1988(?). Due to management and distribution problems the single entitled “Mystery Girl“ c/w “Get Smart“ only reached 101 in the pop charts. Both numbers are up-tempo, guitar-fuelled with a wonderful 60s mod feel. This is your second chance – so don’t miss it.

They were based in Göttingen and the band members were: Harald Fischer, Matthias Hanich, Gunnar Berndorff, Ronald Kruschak
(Carsten Richter, Ralf Fricke, Jörg Waltje).

I also tracked down that Tobias Friedrich had a band afterwards called Viktoriapark who released an album in 2008 called “Was Ist Schon 1 Jahr?” and also another album called “In Teufels Küche”.

I also found out that Gunnar wrote a book along two other authors, Barbara Berndorff and Knut Eigler. This book is called Musikrecht and shame on me that I don’t know much German so I cant tell what it is about!

And that’s about all I could find about this fantastic band, that I don’t know much about, but did record this one fantastic album! I really recommend tracking it down if you can. And if you know anything else about them, if you ever saw them playing live, if you happen to have any more unreleased songs or anything, please share. There’s a nice comment section right here!

Edit: Andreas again comes to the rescue with some new insights:
Regarding your blog entry for The Candy Dates (and The Artpress), Gunnar Berndorff is also the drummer for The Groovy Cellar who’ll play Berlin Popfest on Saturday (and whom, along with Most Wanted Men, I’ve put on as supports both in Berlin and Hamburg in the past). He’s actually a colleague, i. e. a lawyer, and “Musikrecht” translates into “music law” (part of media law). A very nice guy, too.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Candy Dates – Six Tambourines

Almost October now. This year has gone so fast! There are no more festivals left for me, though I know some of you will be heading to Berlin Popfest, the last stop of indiepop vacations this year. How I wish I could join you!

Today I finished sending all pre-orders of the Boyish 7″, three days before the release date. Now onto emailing all the mailorders, tell them I have a fantastic new record out. I feel by next week things will get a bit calmer as I still need to order all the boxes, inserts and polybags, put them together and then store them. These things take time, especially as I have the new Pro Evolution Soccer, which is taking me quite some time at nights, after work.

Next weekend I’ll be heading to Providence, Rhode Island. I’ve never been, and I’m just going to check out. Seems like a nice, little, quaint town. What to do? I’m open for suggestions. I’ll just be there for Saturday and Sunday. Need to check if there are any good record stores. From the top of my head, Small Factory were from there, right?

Indiepop-wise New York is quiet. Aside from a future meeting with Shelflife boss who is visiting town, I feel the city doesn’t offer what London offers to indiepop people. I get terribly jealous all the time. I did buy tickets to see My Bloody Valentine, $70. Yes, plus all those crazy fees (one is called convenience fee) then it was like $80. I guess I convinced myself that I have to see them live once, at least. Before they die (?).

The indiepop-list is back, and after a few hiccups (like a silly issue with the illustration used on the website) it’s up and running smoothly. I even posted three replies to it in a single day. I don’t remember replying to threads so many times in the past. So that’s quite an achievement. Of course my friend Mr. Hyde Murphy was cheeky like always, and questions the $7 price for the 3″CDs at Cloudberry. Though explained over and over, and with facts, in this blog, breaking down the price, the guy is still clueless. But what to do, some people are not good at maths or the real world.

I do want to recommend a book this time on the blog. It’s been out for some years now but I only knew about it after Henrik from Twig recommended me the documentary about it. The book is called “Last Shop Standing” and it’s written by Graham Jones. It was such a refreshing read, with lots of anecdotes about the music industry. On top of it all there’s a chapter about The Cherry Boys, yes, the ones that wrote Kardomah Café. So Graham was their manager, so he tells the whole story about them and also some tidbits about the band that followed, Exhibit B. Both great bands, both great guitar pop bands that I always enjoyed. So that was quite a treat! Also in the book Graham discusses lots of issues about the “industry” like MP3s for example. I tend to agree with all his views. I love that these kind of views about how great physical records are actually get published. We do need to make a stand!

And the other discovery this past week was a compilation by Said Liquidator that I found on Discogs. I didn’t have a clue that it existed but it’s a 2 CD compilation with all their recordings, even live recordings. It seems it’s only a 200 copy release so better head there before it sells out. Really enjoying it as I only knew the fab “Third Man” and “Say What You Feel”. I especially love their “Liquidator Jingle” song. Maybe I should try to track them down for an interview!

Other good releases of late are the new Proctors album and the Go Violets EP. I don’t own these yet, but hopefully in the next couple of weeks I will. Today I’m listening once again to the Homecomings “Homecoming with Me?” album on Second Royal. It’s so ace. The Japanese seem to be making a stir in the indiepop scene now. Lots of great new young bands springing from out of nowhere in the streets of Tokyo and beyond!

And I know, you are wondering when The Rileys album will be out. Well next week I hope to tackle the artwork, it’s very close to be finished and after that I’ll send it to press. Sorry it’s taken a bit too long but you know it’s only me running the whole thing and with two new releases this month I’ve been swamped!

But hey! Let’s move onto our very obscure band of the week!

———————————————————————-

The Herbs. I’m sure you know The Raw Herbs. But The Herbs? I didn’t use to know them until many months ago I found them through that great blog that is From a Northern Place. A blog that though lacking writeups (wish they had some!) offers a track from an obscure record, and drives me into hours and hours of indiepop investigation!

With The Herbs though I hit a wall quite fast. I couldn’t find anything really. Even Rupert at Turntable Revolution wonders about them back in 2010.

So I’ll tell you what I gather from my little detective work.

The 7″ EP was released by a label called Andy Harper Records. Did Andy Harper had a big ego? Or maybe he was one of the nicest patrons? Or even perhaps he was part of the band? We don’t know. There is no catalog number though so it’s fair to assume this was the one and only release in the label.

The record included four songs. On the A side we had “New York Nightmare” and “U Boat”, whereas on the B side “Strum City” and “One Down and 2 To Go, This City Sure has Sold It’s Soul”. That last one has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

I live in New York, so I’m pretty curious about the first track. So if anyone could share it with me?

The record was recorded in 1990 at Tony’s during the month of March and April. The cover photograph was taken by Graham Buckerfield. With all those palm trees and the 4×4 on the street I would dare to guess it’s been taken in Los Angeles. Definitely not New York.

You might think this record was American with all these nods, but this sounds totally British. The three first songs are credited to someone with a last name Healey. The last song is credited to Healey/Russell.

And that’s it. I hit a wall. Sure, 45rpm is the speed of the record if you care much for that. I do. Sometimes.

I don’t own this 7″ and it seems it hasn’t popped up much on eBay. It’s not even listed on Discogs. But I would love to have it, or at least listen to it in it’s entirety! I also wonder if they had more songs. If they fitted 4 songs on a 7″ something tells me they did have many more songs recorded.  Also, where were they from? Did they play many gigs? I would love to know more about them! If anyone out there knows more let me know!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Herbs – Strum City

Thanks to much to Ros, Dani, Ochi and Sonia for this fantastic interview! I translated a bunch of questions from Spanish, I hope I haven’t lost the energy or the charm of these answers! If anyone wants I can always share the original answers! Anyhow, Las Pulpas were a fantastic short-lived band from Madrid that released just one CDR demo with three songs. I loved these three songs for so many years and wrote about them some time ago on the blog. I was happy that they got in touch with me and were up to telling me their story as a band, so I’m sharing that with you all. Enjoy!

++ Hey all! Thanks so much for being up for the interview. So Las Pulpas are no more, so let’s start from there. Whereabouts in the world are you? And are you still making music?

ROS: I’m in Manchester now, but about to move to London. Ochi and I have a band called Wachi Wachi here in Manchester, and I’m also playing in Trash kit in London and Electrelane.

Dani: I’m still in Madrid and I sing to myself. It helps a lot these days.

Ochi: I’m in transition from Manchester to London right now. I tried to learn instruments all my life but thought I didn’t have any talent until recently I realised that I have a natural talent for drumming and I am now the drummer of Wachi Wachi.

Sonia: Not right now.

++ In the past all of you have been involved in many other bands. Mind telling me a bit about some of your favourites projects you’ve been in?

ROS: I’ve been in quite a few bands but my favourite was definitely Las Pulpas. We never got anything done, just drank and ate all the time and never bothered to book any gigs or tours but it was great anyway. Also my other favourite band I was in was The Battys, a very short lived queer band in London. We recorded a live CDR which we put out as part of the Homocrime 3″ CDR club.

Dani: The coolest group I’ve been in has been Las Pulpas. It was a party every time as our friends would always show up and join as at our practice space. And after the party we would end up having tapas, of course. (By the way Ros I still have The Battys CDR)

Ochi: My favourite one is still Las Pulpas because it was so much fun, every time we met for a rehearsal it was a party. It was a great time.

Sonia: I had a band when I was in university in Alicante with which we won a band contest and we recorded a CD (it was the 90s). Now I’ve found out that the “leader” has formed another band but with the same name with young girls and without telling any of us that were part of it back in the day. If he thinks we had a NAME, that’s great. So funny. So yeah, definitely Las Pulpas.

++ Let’s go back in time then. When and how did you all meet? And how did Las Pulpas start as a band?

ROS: For me it was all down to Hello Cuca who I was totally obsessed with. I met them at Ladyfest Glasgow 2001, and then I moved to Madrid in 2004 and I met Ochi who Lidia (the singer from Hello Cuca) introduced me to, and then I met everyone else.

Dani: Oh, what a mess. I remember clearly that in the beginning we used to meet for playing, eating and drinking at Sonia’s house, with no real drum kit. And also that Alexis used to join us. Soon after we had to find a practice space so we could be noisier.

Ochi: I slept with them all one by one, even Dani, and then we made a band.

Sonia: (I thought that that myth about sleeping with everyone was about Rosa, our “manager”, but it seems I was wrong). Some of us met before, some met later, and eventually we were together in a band. When we started Las Pulpas we were already friends.

++ And tell me, when was the first time ever did you pick up an instrument? How did you learn to play it? And do you still own that first instrument you ever bought?

ROS: I’ve been playing stuff all my life I think. I still have my first guitar, it was a samick, an imitation strat, I saved up for it working at a sandwich shop on weekends when I was 15. it cost me £60. I tried to replace it for a more expensive one when I was about 22, but it wasn’t as nice to play.

Dani: I bought the guitar just after watching The Subsonics playing live. I then learned four basic chords on an internet tutorial. It’s red. Sometimes I think that I would have liked best the black one.

Ochi: I tried to learn bass and guitar and keyboards but I couldn’t do it so I sat at the drum kit last March and realised I could play it. I don’t have a drum kit though yet.

Sonia: When I was little, around 8 years old, I started piano classes and also my  grandpa taught me a bit of clarinet.

++ What about the name of the band? Who came up with it? And why?

ROS: I can’t remember but it may have came out of the tapas we were eating, as mostly our rehearsals consisted of drinking cañas and having tapas in the Galician bar just round the corner from the practice room. that was probably it. We ate a lot of octopus. for me it also made me think of Pulp, who I love.

Dani: I would love to know why. But it sticks, right?

Ochi: I don’t remember how it happened but as the others said it was brainstorming names in a bar over tapas.

++ When you were around there were many exciting bands in Spain that were releasing mostly CDR demos like you, or publishing songs on Myspace. Which other bands from that period did you like? And did you ever felt part of some scene in Madrid?

ROS: The first thing I did when I went to Madrid, before I met any of Las Pulpas, was to go round to this guy Murky’s house. He runs Alehop! records, which is one of my favourite labels. I bought a whole load of records off him for a distro I was involved in back in London. he had some really great compilations. I loved Solex, Nananas, Hello Cuca. There was also a connection with some of the bands I knew from London, Wet Dog and Reverend Pike I think? Country Teasers were on some of the compilations and would play gigs with Solex. I was going to a lot of gigs then, it was the time when Gsssh Gsssh record shop was still open and they had a great label. then soon after we formed Las Pulpas there was a Ladyfest Madrid, so we were involved with that. But I don’t know how much we were part of a scene. there was this really great band called Kaken who were our friends. And Hello Cuca of course.

Dani: I believe Hello Cuca was a big influence for all of us. Around that time we were very into Bananas, Los Incrucificables, Los Muebles, Sibyl Vane… That year, as Ros reminisces, was the year when the first Ladyfest Madrid happened. It was really inspiring.

Ochi: I agree with Dani. Hello Cuca are the band in Spain.

++ Talking about Madrid and Spanish pop. How influential was to you the music from La Movida? If you were to picky up your five favourite Spanish bands ever, who would they be?

ROS: Really influential I think, although I don’t want to talk for anyone else cause I’m not Spanish, but I discovered all that stuff (Alaska, Kaka de Luxe, Paralisis permanente, Los Nikis) through Las Pulpas, mostly through Ochi who listened to those bands a lot at the time, and Carlos Berlanga too. My five favourite Spanish bands are probably Hello Cuca, Bananas, Solex, Los Incrucificables and Kaken. I would also highly recommend the soundtrack to the film ‘Animals’ that just came out, it’s all Spanish bands and is really really good. You can get it here:
http://www.tiendabang.com/magento/index.php/vv-aa-banda-sonora-de-animals.html

Dani: Parálisis Permanente, TCR, Crono, Los Nikis, Hidrogenesse.

Ochi: The movida was and has been and will be an influence for all pop bands in Spain because there was an explosion of freshness and creativity and revolution at that time. I don’t have favourite things but I love Alaska y Los Pegamoides and the Radio Futura first record, from la movida. And then Los Fresones Rebeldes are my favourite band of all time.

Sonia: Golpes Bajos, Carlos Berlanga, Hello Cuca, Parálisis Permanente, Bananas. The soundtrack that Ros mentions is really good, in it you can see what’s happening in Barcelona.

++ And what about your favourite places to hang out in the city? I’ve been a couple of times, and mostly for Madrid Popfest, but I’ve been around a bit. It’s a lot of fun! If you can give me some tips where to go next time, that’d be great!

Dani: As The Specials used to sing, “this town is coming like a ghost town”.

Ochi: I haven’t been in Madrid for 7 years so probably everything has changed. I’m sure the others could say something

Sonia: Now I mostly go to friend’s bars where you eat really well. And when we feel like listening to music or dancing we hang out at someone’s house. I’m not sure what’s going on out there.

++ Tell me about the CDR you released? How many copies did you do? Who made the artwork? And how well did it sell? Did you get many reviews?

ROS: It was Marina, our friend and sort of honorary member of the band. there were often about 15 people at our rehearsals, just hanging out. the image is of her eating pulpo! I don’t think we made very many at all, and it didn’t reallly sell because we hardly ever played and we weren’t really trying to sell it, except to our friends. I don’t think we got any reviews really (but I can’t remember).

Dani: We recorded in a studio in the same practice space we used to rent, during a weekend. I think that the person in charge of the studio didn’t take us seriously because we were a ‘girl group’. Marina was the designer and also the model for the cover art.

Sonia: I think that the CD was a demo that we presented it nicely because we’d like to show it off and also to sell it. We didn’t end up very happy with the recordings, we weren’t ready yet when we went to record and the engineer didn’t want to get too involved. He wasn’t our producer but someone who we just paid for the space. But I’m really glad that we did it!

++ What about the songs on it? Care telling me the story behind them?

ROS: “Me estoy cansando” is a song Ochi wrote about our relationship – a bit embarrassing! It means ‘I’m fed up’ (as in i’ve had enough). “Vaya momento” is about her photography teacher who she had a massive crush on and who looks exactly like her. “Angels on TV” is about a spanish tv presenter.

Dani: “Felices fiestas del mañana”  is about when you invite a lot of people to your house and then later there’s no way for them to leave.

Ochi: Me estoy cansando is about the clash of culture between Britain and Spain, the coldness of British people against the warmth of the Spanish as played out in my relationship with Ros. Vaya momento was initially recorded with my first band Ochiqueochenta, but it was a sort of rap song, and with Las Pulpas it became a pop song and it is about or for my mentor, a very important person in my life. I guess you could call it a crush.

++ Why, after that fantastic demo CDR, didn’t you get to release anything else? Was there any interest from labels at some point?

ROS: I don’t think we had any label interest and we just never got around to doing anything. and then people moved away.

++ And do you happen to have more proper recordings other than those three songs?

ROS: No, we have some live recordings though.

Sonia: There’s only some audios recorded live from practices and videos from a concert.

++ What about gigs? Did you play often? What would you say were your favourite shows and why?

ROS: I think we played less than 10 times. my favourite was a couple of years ago at our friend rosa’s wedding. she was our ‘manager’, although that didn’t involve anything except getting really drunk at our gigs. we were really terrible, and afterwards emma told me off for playing badly, we were pretty drunk though so I don’t think it mattered. we also played a great gig with kaken in a bar in madrid. and we played at a slaughterhouse that had been turned into a cultural centre, that was odd.

Dani:  The first gig, at the Ladyfest, was lots of fun because we only had a handful of songs but it was the perfect time for playing our debut show, so we made a lot of noise.

Ochi: My favourite shows were the rehearsals, we always had an audience.

Sonia: The practices with our friends were the best, no doubt. And the Ladyfest was really special.

++ Because some of you live in UK, I wonder how do you feel about the scene in Spain compared to the one in UK. Where do you think it’s easier to play? Or to be successful? What differences do you see?

ROS: It’s different. I feel like in Madrid there is a bigger difference between bands that come from abroad and bands that come from spain – there’s this weird hierarchy. It also exists in the UK with bands from the US but not as much. And gigs with bands from abroad tend to be really expensive. I guess the best example of that is when you go to big festivals like Primavera sound and all the Spanish bands are playing on a separate stage during the day, as if it was like a showcase or something, and then the bands from abroad get the ‘proper’ slots. Then there is the DIY scene that is not so much like that. but when I was in Madrid there was definitely more of a bar culture than a gig culture, I think there were less DIY venues than in london at the time. In england we don’t really have bars so much, it’s pubs, and they’re mostly owned by big breweries, they tend to be bigger so you get venues in pubs, in Spain there are bars with live music but the bars are much smaller so venues tend to be elsewhere. but there is a really amazing pop scene of course in Madrid – that’s what people in the UK know, most people that are into spanish bands are into the pop bands that play at indie tracks.

Ochi: I think the scene in the UK is more prolific and it’s not about being successful or not because that doesn’t matter, people just do music for the sake of it and then things happen. British culture is very musical, there are gigs everywhere, every night all the time.

++ Why did Las Pulpas split up? And what happened to you all right after?

ROS: I can’t remember! we are all still friends, I think it was maybe when ochi and I went to london, and then the others formed Las Olivas, who are really great.

Dani: I suppose it’s because it’s really difficult to combine a life of rock n’ roll with a very disciplined and successful life.

++ And these days aside from music, what other activities or hobbies do you enjoy doing aside from music?

ROS: Listening to records, does that count?

Dani: Lately the ones that don’t cost money.

Ochi: I am a photographer so most of my time I spend preparing for projects, reading about other artists and reading theory.

++ Now just some questions because I’m always curious about these things. Do you still buy music? And what’s the favourite record store you’ve ever visited?

ROS: I buy records all the time. the last one I bought was Los Cripis 7″. also I bought cleaners from venus, and a karen dalton record. and tapes of all the bands I see in manchester, like dinner party, sex hands, the comfortable on a tightrope cassette club. I buy most of my records from norman records in leeds, but also sometimes picadilly in manchester. my favourite record shops are probably the ones you don’t expect, in small towns. I went to a really great one in hull once, and found some great cheap stuff but I can’t remember what it was called.

Dani: I buy less music than I would want to. The record store that I remember the most is the one Ochi and me, as teenagers, used to visit in Alcalá de Henaras. On the front it was a jewelry shop but on the back of the shop they had the records. You couldn’t tell from outside, from the street, that they sold records. I agree with what Ros says, that the best record stores are in smaller town.s

Ochi: Ros is the one who buys music at home so I mainly listen to what she brings home apart from a record that I don’t have yet but I’m going to buy, the mantles new LP. I listened to it yesterday in my friend Alex’s car.

Sonia: I really buy little music lately. When I do, they are usually vinyl records and mostly when they happen to be from friend’s bands.

++ And what’s your favourite Spanish dish that you can cook? And your favourite Spanish dish just overall?

ROS: I like them all! I make good tortilla, and gazpacho. I really like arroz con pollo that ochi makes. and Sonia’s paella is the best. I was vegetarian before I lived in spain but it all went out of the window when I met ochi.

Dani: The paella that Sonia makes was a fundamental element in the existence of Las Pulpas. I love eating animals with tentacle.s

Ochi: I don’t have favourite things but the other day for my birthday my friend javi cooked a whole octopus (pulpo) for me and I loved it.

Sonia: Creo que el arroz es mi especialidad porque también es lo que más me gusta. I love eating and cooking. And the most important part of food os the social element of it. I believe that rice is my specialty because it’s what I like the best.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Las Pulpas – Me Estoy Cansando

Welcome to another exciting blog post at the most amazing indiepop blog of the galaxy. What do we offer you? The latest reviews of the latest MP3s of the coolest labels that will link us to their facebook page. Some years ago we used to receive some free physical records from labels but these days we are so content with an MP3 and a mention. We’ll copy/paste some press release. In a best case scenario, if we are feeling terribly excited about your music we’ll write some lines about your band telling how original you are but at the same time mentioning four or five influences we think you have so it’s easier for people to try and download you and them at the torrents and p2p secret networks. Why not, that’s the future isn’t it?

What’s new? We have two new releases for you. Because Cloudberry living now at the city that never sleeps, well, we don’t sleep either. This month we come with two new 7″s, one by Greek, by way of Edinburgh-Scotland, band The Occasional Flickers and Tokyo’s Boyish. I’ve talked a bunch about both bands and both records in the blog so I’ll spare you about that this time. The important news is that you can order them both right now and I’ll ship them to you immediately. The official release date for the Flickers was the 15th and for Boyish the 30th, but they are already at home waiting to be sent to a new home.

This week I received the last Kill People You Like fanzine. You can see some photos of how gorgeous it is here. Not much on it written, but design-wise, passion-wise, and craftmanship-wise, this is a must have. Included two is a unmissable CD with lots of great tracks, many of them exclusive to this release. Among my favourites on the CD are the Flowers and Eva & John songs. Also there’s a mini-zine I wrote for them that for some reason I wrote in Spanish. I thought as the people behind the fanzine were Mexican, well I better write it in Spanish. They were so kind though to save me the trouble and they translated the whole thing for me before publishing! At the time I’m writing this the zine might be already sold out but I believe some mailorders may have some copies (?).

New York now is a bit quieter after the demise of Dominican indiepop stalwarts Franny & Zooey. It’s been a bunch of months that I’ve had a share of indiepop in the city, going to many venues just following this quintet. Yesterday JJ, the guitar player, left for Santo Domingo until probably next year, so no indiepop for us in the city for a while. Their last show happened on Wednesday and it was quite a success even though the venue, The Flat, behaved really like assholes. And not only was their lack of help but their crazy prices for beers. I’ve never seen a place selling a Bud for $6. Not even in Manhattan. The good news about this gig was that it was the American debut of Astrid’s Northern Spies. If you read the blog now and then you’d know that she comes from Sweden and played at one of the train shows at Indietracks. This time she was a little less talkative (fair enough there were less people as she was opening at 8:00pm), but again she dazzled us with her amazing voice. It’s always a treat to listen to her songs. I was very happy to have skipped everything I had to do this day just to be able to be on time.

But before I stop writing this “short” post in a very busy week, I want to salute team Indietracks for announcing that the festival will be back next year!! Yes! So July 25 to the 27. Have you marked your calendars? I hope so. I plan going for my fifth year in a row. This time I will go back to the Alfreton Travelodge, like the first two years! Back to that seedy Little Chef for breakfast, to that picnic table at the entrance to share wine with Andreas and Nana, to have beers there with the French and the Swedes. Exciting times ahead! Book your hotels soon because it seems all prices are going up! I got a double room for 96 pounds. These days it seems they are going for 130 pounds or so. The Premier Inns are going crazy and charging almost 300 pounds for their Ripley location. What will you do? I hope you don’t end up camping!

The important thing is, you better come! And which bands will play? No announcements yet, but if I’m allow to guess the obvious, I think The Flatmates will play, don’t you think?

—————————————————————————

Today I fly all the way to Australia. Where exactly? I don’t know. Or to be more exact, I don’t remember as I was once in touch with Kieren Fitzpatrick from the band but those were the days of Myspace and well, all that correspondence between us is lost in the midst of a Myspace inbox.

It was back in 2009 when I contacted him trying to find more information about his old band Love Minus Zero. It was the days when I wanted to do that sort of Australian “Sound of Leamington Spa” series. As I’ve said many times it didn’t happen because Egg Records wanted to do it and I didn’t want to clash with anyone. I can be very diplomatic. In any case I did ask Kieren to do an interview for the blog, I wrote some questions but sadly I never got any answers. What I did get were a bunch of unreleased songs that sounded amazing.  The songs were:

– Whose Side are You On (demo 1988)
– Then It’s Gone (demo 1988)
– Porcelain (demo 1988)
– That Brings Me Down (unreleased single 1989)
– No Tomorrow (unreleased single 1989)
– Mary (unreleased single 1989)

If there were more unreleased recorded songs by Love Minus Zero I wouldn’t know. But these sounded great.

The first time I ever head them was through the song “Fade Away” that was included in a Waterfront Records compilation called On The Waterfront (catalog DAMP 31). On that compilation it was the A3 track, and the A4 track was also theirs, it was “Into the Night”. The credits for these songs according to Discogs are:

Bass: Gregory Kasch
Drums: Je Genua
Guitar, Vocals: Kieren Fitzpatrick
Guitar: Michael Royce

I sadly don’t own either this compilation or the one record they released. It seems not too difficult to track their 12″ and I should try to get it on my next paycheck. It was an eponymous EP released in 1988 on the Green Fez label (catalog FEZ 308). Credits as follow:

Artwork By – Jane Cameron
Bass, Vocals – Gregory Kasch
Engineer – Tom Colley
Guitar [Guest Musician] – Brad Fitzpatrick, Michael Royce
Piano, Organ [Hammond] [Guest Musician] – Damon Giles
Producer – Love Minus Zero, Tom Colley
Trumpet [Guest Musician] – Peter Dudman
Vocals, Drums – Joe Genua*
Vocals, Guitar, Twelve-string Guitar – Kieren Fitzpatrick
Written-By – Love Minus Zero

From the guest musicians we gather:
– Brad Fitzpatrick seems to have been involved in The Bam Balams too. I assume he is Kieren’s brother (?). If so, they were based in Sydney and so can it be safe to assume Love Minus Zero hailed from that same town? I think so.
– Damon Gilles is better known for have been part of The Moffs who recorded many records under their 60s sound being my favourite “Another Day in the Sun”

And the tracklist was:
A1 Wondering Why
A2 I Am Your Friend
A3 I Believe
B1 Beware
B2 Come On

All different songs from the Waterfront Records compilation. That’s why perhaps Kieren wanted to release some sort of album when I was in touch with him.

There’s also another Love Minus Zero track on yet another Waterfront compilation. On Waterfront catalog DAMP 43, on the “On the Waterfront Volume 3” compilation the song ‘Wondering Why’ was included. But this is just the same as the one in the EP.

And that’s all there is about them. Now that Myspace disappeared I don’t know where to contact Kieren. I wonder if he will find this, and maybe perhaps remember the interview! Would be great to know the story of the band. But if anyone out there know anything about this obscure Aussie band, don’t doubt to share!

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Love Minus Zero – Fade Away

Thanks so much to Andy, Tim and Paul for this fantastic and very thorough interview! I wrote about Shine not so long ago on the blog, and thanks to my friend Andreas I was finally in touch with them. One of my favourite “obscure” bands from the 80s, they released one flexi and a 12″ split with The Bardots. The important thing about Shine! is that all of their songs are really good! So you better rediscover them now! Hopefully there will be exciting news about them in the future, so keep an eye on this blog!

++ Hi Andy, Tim and Paul! Thanks so much for being up for this interview! I see Andy dedicates his time to photography these days. So what exactly do you do in this field? And how rewarding this is for you?

Andy: I actually work on a nature reserve, by shear fluke my bird watching hobby has become my living. I enjoy taking photographs and do a little teaching of this on the side, enough to fund some occasional birding around the world.

++ And what about music? Do you still pick up your guitar some days?

Andy: I’m still heavily into music. Ive always had fairly broad tastes and recently Ive been producing more studio based electronic tracks, more just for fun than anything else, although a remix I did last year did get released. I just bought a ‘new’ guitar a few weeks ago from friends who run a carboot stall, it’s a first generation USA made Fender Bullet and it sound ace!

Tim: No, I’m afraid not. I’m more of a listener than player these days.

Paul: I’ve still got the guitar I had then but I don’t play it much now though I’d like to given the right opportunity

++ Had you been involved in any other bands prior to Shine!? When did you learn to play guitar?

Andy: Yes a few, a basic punk band, a Joy Division influenced post punk outfit then The Mysterons from which Shine! rose from the ashes. Difficult to put a date on learning to play, still a bit shaky now! but probably 1980/81.

Tim: I’ve been in several bands prior to Shine! All with Paul and with influences from glam rock to punk. I learned to play bass by myself and I borrowed heavily from Peter Hook and Jean Jaques Burnel.

Paul: I started off on keyboards. The band started in about 1975, it went through various name changes and ended up as ‘Stranger Still’. Tim was also in the band (on bass), as was my brother who played guitar. When he left to go to university in 1981 I took up the guitar, trying my best to rip off Bauhaus.

++ Tell me how did Shine! start as a band? How did you all knew each other?

Tim: Andy, Paul & I were in an indie band called The Mysterons which folded when the singer went to college. The three of us decided to carry on with Mark (the drummer) and take it in turns to sing. Paul & I had been friends since school and we met Andy when he joined The Mysterons.

Andy: It was spring 1987 and the singer from The Mysterons knocked on my door (he lived about 20 doors down the road) and asked if I’d like to play with them. This first time I’d properly met Tim, Paul and Mark apart from seeing them out occasionally in King’s Lynn pubs. The singer of the Mysterons left for university in September so that band had reached an end. The Mysterons songs were quite complex in parts so Shine! was a breath of pop fresh air and we hit the ground running. We played our first gig at the West Lynn Community Centre 21st November, so we’d written a load of songs in a couple of months.

Paul: Tim and I were in a band called The Mysterons with Mark (drums) and Andy joined later on when our other guitarist left. When The Mysterons split we decided to carry on and this because Shine! I can still remember our first rehearsal and how it all instantly fell into place.

++ And who came up with the name of the band? And does it have any meaning at all?

Tim: I believe Andy came up with the name and he’ll furnish you with the details.

Paul: Andy will have the definitive answer as it was his idea, but I seem to remember him saying he heard some kids by the side of the road chanting ‘We will Shine!’ Who they were and quite why they would do so may never be known….The exclamation mark may have been my idea, but I think I originally wanted it to be ‘Shine!!’

Any: I actually was cycling home from work and heard a group of children chanting ‘we will shine’ at least that’s what I thought they were saying? I think we wanted to avoid having ‘the’ in front of name too so Shine! stuck. I can’t remember how the exclamation mark came about? No meaning at all.

++ How was Norfolk back then? Where there any other good bands in town? What were the best venues to play and hang out?

Andy: King’s Lynn was to some extent quite cut off. You realyl did have to make an effort to travel to see bands, normally in Norwich, Cambridge or London. The scene around King’s Lynn was quite good with bands like The Chancers and The Boatmen. Our hang out was most definitely The Wenns which is a pub on the Saturday Market Place in King’s Lynn. A huge amount of time was spent in there! We played many local gigs at the West Lynn Community Centre but the Norwich Arts Centre provided us with some of the best gigs.

Tim: Norfolk had a rather healthy music scene, lots of bands, though there were few places to play unless you headed for Norwich or Cambridge. There were quite a few bands that drank in the same pub and most were friendly. For some reason we always supported a heavy metal band called Passion Flower Hotel (God knows why!). The best local venues were Norwich Arts Centre & The Junction in Cambridge.

Paul: Well we were based in King’s Lynn and there was a good local scene there, and we would socialise with many of the other bands, usually in Wenn’s, a pub on the Saturday market place. Live venues locally tended to be village halls which we would hire, along with other bands so we could share the cost.

++ Talking about playing, did you play many gigs? Which were your favourites and why?

Andy: Somewhere I have a list of all the gigs we did that Tim compiled, I’ll dig it out and send you a copy. Personally I used to get very nervous before playing and the adrenaline rush from playing always left me slightly unsettled, I think the point was ‘does this make us more attractive to women?’, which it probably did:) Best gigs? I have a hazy memory but supporting the The Darling Buds with the Norwich Arts Centre full to capacity was particularly good.

Tim: We played 50 gigs in a 3 year period which doesn’t sound a lot but most other local bands didn’t play nearly as many. We always ended up playing the Wilde Club at the Arts Centre as Barry got us support slots with bands like My Bloody Valentine, Darling Buds, The Wolfhounds etc. Barry financed the flexi disc & 12 inch.

Paul: Tim can probably tell you how many as he tended to document these things, but we did gig regularly, playing in pubs in Cambridge, Peterborough and Norwich. It’s difficult to pick out a favourite but I think The Oxcart in Peterborough was our first gig outside of King’s Lynn. It was a new-ish pub on a housing estate and a very unlikely venue but we went down surprisingly well with the regulars

++ What about the aesthetics of the band? I see you always wrote your band name with a particular font, and also the artwork for the both the flexi and the 12″ split is very similar. Was this on purpose? Who took care of the looks of the band?

Andy: Ah the joy of letraset! The posters of our gigs and the flexi and 12″ came from b&w images cut from some charity shop books I’d collected. A lot of them came from the Photography Year Book 1967. Tim put it all together and I used my work place photocopier. Although we provided the art work for the cover of the 12″ sleeve, it was botched together by somebody else, well I didn’t like how it had turned out. The black and white images suited our photocopied poster campaigns and gave an overall look to our ‘publicity’.

Tim: We liked to stand out from the other bands and we had a particular style. Most of the artwork was done by myself though I plundered a book of sixties photographs for interesting pictures. There wasn’t a fashion style within the band but we all tended to wear the same sort of thing.

Paul: Tim and Andy looked after the artwork. I had nothing to do with it. I was always very impressed with what they came up with.

++ It seems you always worked with Barry Newman. How did you meet and how close was your relationship with him?

Andy: Yes Barry Newman is a good man. He put in a lot of effort in establishing his Wilde Club nights at the Norwich Arts Centre. I think we must have sent him a demo tape angling for gigs. He obviously liked what we did and had us play there quite a few times and that lead to him releasing the Millions and Millions flexi disc on his Baz McHat label before it became Wilde Club Records.

Tim: As mentioned Barry financed the singles and got us most of our gigs in Norwich. I believe we just sent him a tape and he invited us to play the Wilde Club one night. He seemed to like us and asked us back for more gigs. The relationship was not that close but he really did help us quite a lot looking back. He did invite us to do a reunion gig (20 years) but the band are all living in different parts of the UK now and would have been a nightmare to organise.

Paul: He used to put on gigs at the Norwich Arts Centre and he often booked us to play there. I can’t remember who approached who though.

++ My favourite song of yours, and possibly one of my favourite songs all-time is “Bite the Apple”. Is it much to ask the story behind this fantastic song?

Tim: Over to Andy. I think you’ll find the bass line makes the song…….!

Paul: Better ask Andy as he came up with the song in the first place. The rest of us added bits to the arrangement after he’d brought it to the band, including the vocal harmonies. Andy had the opening guitar riff and I came up with the riff at the start of the verse.

Andy: Wow thanks I’m glad you like it so much. Tim, Paul and myself would write the basic songs structures and lyrics and present them to the rest of the band for approval. If you wrote the song then you would be singing the main vocal. It all worked well and provided an element of competition. I wrote Bite The Apple, Tim provided the bass line and Paul the guitar flourish. Bite The Apple (an adam and eve reference) is about the madness and delight of love with just a tiny element of doubt thrown in at the end.

++ Who would you call your influences, especially for those fast guitars?!

Paul: Has to be the Wedding Present! They were bringing an excitement to guitar music which had been missing in the mid 80’s.

Andy: I think we all loved a good pop song, still do. I guess the C86 bands gave us a sonic template to work on. Most obviously The Wedding Present. I heard Go Out And Get ‘Em Boy on John Peel and it struck a chord (pardon the pun). The Smiths, Joy Division and New Order to some extent and certainly The Velvet Underground.

Tim: My own influences at the time were That Petrol Emotion, The Smiths, June Brides, Mighty Lemon Drops, House Of Love and we can’t really deny it……The Wedding Present.

++ You contributed songs, as far as I know, to two compilations, “Everlasting Happiness” and “Everlasting”. Do you remember at all how you ended in them with “I Just Can’t Celebrate Today” and “The Art of Lying Low”?

Paul: Not sure how that came about. Rubbish answer. Sorry.

Tim: Not sure how these tracks got put on the compilations. If it is Andreas who compiled them then I guess he is the man to ask. Both these tracks were on ‘Numbrained…’.

Andy: Both of those songs were ‘properly’ produced. The Art Of Lying Low was recorded at Lifetime Sounds in Duke Street, Norwich for the Millions and Millions flexi and I Just Can’t Celebrate Today was recorded at Raven Studios at the Bite The Apple session. Ive no idea how they ended up on the compilations. I think Andreas wrote us a nice letter and we gave him the recordings to use.

++ Which would you say was your favourite songs? You know, those that you always had to play at gigs, and why?

Andy: Well we didn’t have that many to play. I really love playing She Looks So Good, Out Of Touch, Million and Millions and Bite The Apple mainly because they were simple:)

Tim: My personal favourites were Millions & Millions, Bite the apple & No way I’d much rather be. We tended to write new stuff then play it live with a few old favourites as encores but we were never precious about doing certain songs as far as I can remember.

Paul: I don’t think there were any particular favourites. Everything we’d written got played live at some point. With three of us writing there was usually an even split between us in the setlist

++ Also, how come you didn’t release any more records?!

Paul: Lack of money!

Andy: We really just spilt up before any further plans or expressed interest in us took hold. We didn’t play any further a field than East Anglia. We received a tiny amount of interest from Food Records, I think they signed Seymour instead, what became of them?

Tim: We drifted apart in 1990. We were into different sounds around this time and it co-incided with Paul getting married and moving away.

++ There are two tape albums by Shine! These are very obscure to most indiepop fans, so do you mind telling a bit about them? How many copies were made? And if possible the full tracklist for the nerdiest of fans? 🙂

Paul: I’ll have to find the tapes first!

Tim: They were 4 track recordings produced by Paul. The first tape was our live set at the time and the second was a bit more sophisticated as Paul got into production more. No doubt he can tell you the details. We made a few hundred copies of each I believe.

Andy: They were self produced and recorded over many months using Paul’s portastudio four track. Lots of bouncing down and over dubbing of vocals and guitar parts. Pretty rough and ready indie pop, a fair representation of our craft.

The first tape – ‘Shine!’ (I don’t think we considered an actual proper title for it) was made between January and June of 1988. It came with a free Shine! badge.

You Can’t Help Yourself
THe Art Of Lying Low
Empty Heads Ring Hollow
Out Of Touch
It’s Nice To Be Loved
She Looks So Good
It Could Never Happen To Us
Stop Looking Back
Millions And Millions
The City Can Wait
Heaven

The second tape – Numbrainedeadumbrain was recorded in 1989/90(?) certainly released in 1990. The production is slightly slicker, with perhaps a dash of psychedelia thrown in.

Tim hand painted most of the covers so they are all originals.

20 Days Away
I Just Can’t Celebrate Today
Ladybird
Give Me Soul
Jerk
All Fall Down
Open Up Yourself
Dangerous Day
The One That Stops You

++ The split 12″ was released by Wilde Club Records. I haven’t seen much written about this label/club online. I’m more curious about the club. Did you go often? What was the best about it? And how important was it for your town?

Paul: That was run by Barry Numan. He was quite a big figure in the Norwich scene at the time.

Andy: http://norwichmusic.wikia.com/wiki/The_Wilde_Club

This was Barry Newman’s baby. It was based in Norwich at the Arts Centre which was a converted church, the acoustics didn’t suit everything but the list of gigs Barry put on is enviable. We supported My Bloody Valetine, The Inspiral Carpets and McCarthy among others. As well as travelling across from King’s Lynn to see Mud Honey, Bob and one of the best gigs Ive every been to, The Four Brothers.

++ So, what happened in the end? When and why did you decide to call it a day?

Andy: Circumstance took over. In a moment of clarity I decided I need to go to university and signed up for a access course in september 90 in order to again entry the following year. Paul got married and moved to Norwich at the same time and somehow practicing and gigging became untenable. Myself and Tim hooked up with a keyboard player and wrote some songs with a drum machine driving the beat, but we never gigged.

Paul: Well I moved to Norwich in 1990 but the others did continue for a while. It wasn’t an acrimonious split or anything like that, but I think we had done all we could with our 2 guitar / bass / drums lineup in the face of the burgeoning dance music scene.

Tim: It ended amicably in 1990. We still speak to each other though Mark is not in touch anymore.

++ Are you all still in touch? What did you do after Shine!?

Andy: Yes, thou I live ‘up north’ so not as often as I should. I went to the University of Manchester in 1991, played quite a few gigs in a band called Dooba based in Leeds in the mid 90’s and since then a lot of birding.

Tim: Andy & I carried on for a while with a keyboard player/programmer but it didn’t last. I played in one or two bands after, one with Paul again but this folded soon after also.

Paul: Not as much as we should be! Shine! was more than just the music. It was three glorious years of my life which no one can take away from me. After Shine! I played in Norwich based Ivy with a CD release ‘The absence of angels’, and got to tour with the Wedding Present’. I am now involved in the rather less rock and roll musical activity of barbershop singing!

++ And these days, aside from music, and photography in your case, in what other hobbies and interests you spend your time?

Andy: Well birding used to be my hobby and now it’s sort of my job. So now music has become my hobby. I have some good monitors, Ableton Live 9, assorted instruments and software. It fills the waking hours very nicely indeed.

Tim: I listen to music all the time and still do some artwork in my spare time.

++ Thanks again! Looking forward for more Shine! news in the near future! Anything else you’d like to add?

Andy: Roque, your email was shot out of the blue, it’s nice to know we aren’t forgotten:) and it’s given us an opportunity to reminisce.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Shine! – Bite the Apple

How was I supposed to feel the past weekend? I did travel upstate to Beacon, a charming and quaint little town, to visit their one and only attractive, dia:Beacon. A fantastic museum with pieces by renowned artists like Stella or Flavin, names that I remember like yesterday from my days in university. Everything was huge in the museum. Every piece. Every installation. Even the museum was huge. High ceilings. Stairs. Basements. Even the parking lot. I love traveling by train. That’s one thing I love about Europe, though there I end up going to a castle, or to a cathedral. But better not compare, it’s all different here. I traveled in good company this time around, and on top of that had cheap and tasty dim sum. True, I never had cheap and tasty dim sum in any of my European train travels.

I did have Chinese food once on a train travel in Europe. We were in Swansea a year and change ago. I was still in love, and I believe she was too. I hear these days she moves in with her new-ish boyfriend. Moving fast and big steps  my lucky mittens. How things change in so little time and how easy it is for some people. Anyhow, she taught me that time what was a water chestnut. I didn’t know it’s name before even though I had had it many times before. I think I thought it was some sort of crunchy potato kind of. If you are Peruvian you might be familiar with ‘olluco’. I thought it was something similar to that. That’s why I remember that day having Chinese food at around 6:00 pm, like a proper American because we had to burn time until the next Swansea-Cardiff train at 7:00pm. It was empty the restaurant. And there was no fortune cookie.

At the Beacon Dim Sum place it was different. When leaving there was a big bowl with tons of fortune cookies for one to take. How much fortune one can get?! I asked myself. I looked around. No one was checking. I grabbed a handful of fortune cookies and put them in my tote bag. To my surprise many of my friends that day did the same when leaving the restaurant. I guess, a lot of fortune is always a promising thing.

But the fact is there was no fortune. On Friday I headed to Erik’s to watch the game with a bunch of Peruvian friends. The game that we had all been waiting. Peru-Uruguay in Lima. At the Estadio Nacional. We had no injured players, most of our players starting in their clubs and giving fine performances. Only Zambrano from Eintracht Frankfurt was suspended, but it wasn’t much of a worry. We were supposed to win this game and be very close to qualifying. But, if we tied or lose our chances were going to disappear. Guess what. We lost. 1-2. Unbelievable. A game that we had in our pocket for the first 42 minutes when Uruguay barely crossed the midfield. When we created chances. When there was a penalty the referee didnt give us. When Pizarro once again failed to deliver an easy goal opportunity against Muslera. The fact is, we Peruvians are not made for clutch time.

When we need to win, when we need to make the kill. We don’t.

And that’s how I felt the whole weekend. The whole week. Heartbroken. Not by a girl like a year ago but by my national team. A team who got nervous, who kicked the table before it’s time. Who got exasperated and got red carded. When things were so close, when things needed cold blood, and good decisions, and to think with the head and not with the heart, that’s when we lost the game.  Some people in the many forums I read, blame it to a lack of world-class quality in our players, but I don’t believe that’s it. I don’t want our players be like Luis Suarez acting like everyone is breaking his leg after a little foul or provoking every opponent. That’s not fair play. Or Lugano jumping with his elbow on the opponents head to every loose ball. I don’t want that. That’s not class. That’s dirty. That’ not good. But I do want them to keep calm, and not break into desperation when everything is against us including referees and the mafia driven Conmebol. I hope this lesson is learned by the younger kids that will take on qualifying to Russia 2018. Because I’m very sure we will make it. We have a good generation coming up and we don’t need a effing visa to go to Russia unlike the EU who treats us a little less than terrorists. So we’ll make it, just keep the hope and don’t despair.

Of course my certainty and hope for the next qualifiers don’t take away my disappointment right now. We were close once again like in 1997 when we were eliminated by goal difference in favor of the arrogant little strip of land called Chile and I cried in front of the the TV alone when we lost that game in Santiago. Again a clutch game. And we lost it. The TV showing how the Chilean police hit our players at the airport. The Chileans attacking our players with racist chants and holding little black plush monkeys. You see European friends, you ban and disqualify teams like that. In South America no one cares. It’s all about money. And yeah, Chileans believe sometimes they are descended from those Aryan gods the third reich went looking in the Himalayas. The world a lot of times doesn’t make sense. I know.

That’s how I feel at 29. Happysad and very hopeful. 2018 will be the year when I’ll see Peru again in a World Cup. I may just as well skip traveling next year to Brazil and instead save that money and go to UK for Indietracks, for Indiepop, my other passion. Footie and girls are not all in this life you know.

————————————————-

cantel : The raised section of the medieval war-saddle, high to keep the knight in the saddle.

Interesting, I love the medieval times, the crusades, castles and all that. But I doubt their name comes from there. Let’s check if as a last name it makes more sense.

Cantel: This very interesting name is early medieval and job descriptive, and refers to a bellman, one who rang the ‘Chanterelles’ – the trebles, or who sang the treble in a choir. The derivation is from the Olde French, the word being introduced by the Normans after 1066. There are at least five modern alternative spellings including Chantrell, Chantrill, Cantrell, Cantrill and Cantwell, sometimes the name is a diminutive meaning ‘Son of Cant or Chant’. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Philip Canterel which was dated 1203, in the “Staffordshire Assize Court” during the reign of King John, known as “Lackland”, 1199 – 1216.

I wonder if any of these entries shed some meaning about the band The Cantels. The truth is that we know a bit about them already because I wrote about their previous incarnation, The Capitols, some time ago.

One of my interesting ideas about their band name comes from the A side of The Capitols single. The name of the song was “Who Can Tell?”. So if you get ‘Can Tell’ you get Cantell. That’s almost as Cantels, right? Just an idea.

The only member I’m sure that was on both The Capitols and The Cantels was Sue Emilon.  But maybe there were more. I still don’t know who was Jimbo on The Capitols 7″.

The Cantels only released one 12″. It wasn’t an album but a max single. The A side had “I Want to Be Alone” and “Emily”. The B side had “Poor Misguided Fool” and “Pictures in Your Mind”. On the capitols we know Sue wrote all the songs. Here she wrote 1 and 4 and co-wrote 2 and 3 along with Simon Vincent (though on Discogs it credits it to a S. Maragah).

We do have names for the band mates on the back cover, but not last names. All of them start with an S. Coincidences? Sue played guitars and sung. She also played the piano on “Emily”. Steev drummed. Simon played guitar. Spencer bass. And Simon Vincent played organ.

There are some nice liner notes, some thank you notes, that read like this:
Thanks to Jane, Simon V, Rob and Anna, Phil Savage, Trevor, Simon Romer
Love and Thanks to Jane for giving me the Words to Emily

The record was released by Bubble Records in 1988, catalog Bubble 001, so I assume it was self-released.

The only other sort of clue is that they hailed from Moseley in Birmingham. I’ve never been there but I’ve read both The Rotter’s Club and The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe, so it is kind of familiar to me.

And that’s really all I could find about them. I often ask myself if these names were fake names or not. On The Capitols I got to know that Tank was really Pete Byrchmore. Here in the Cantels it’s already puzzling that all have names starting with S. Also Sue Emilon was already using this same name when she was in The Capitols when everyone was using fake names.  Emilon being more of a French saint name.

Do anyone out there know anything else by this enigmatic band that? Did they record more songs? Did anyone catch them live? Whatever happened to them? I don’t want to leave them alone!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Cantels – I Want to Be Alone