Archive for April, 2011

Hairy Area – Scotland’s new supergroup

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

HAIRY AREA is a new Scottish supergroup based in Edinburgh featuring members of We Were Promised Jetpacks, Endor, Sebastian Dangerfield and Lady North.

Having locked themselves away in rehearsals since the turn of the year, the band are finally ready to blitz audiences with their seven-minute epics.

All of the members have pseudonyms:

We Were Promised Jetpacks
Adam Thompson (vocals, guitar) = Milk
Sean Smith (bass) = Chocolate Charles
Darren Lackie (drums) = Peter Quiznose

Endor
David McGinty (keyboard, guitar, vocals) = Big Dave

Sebastian Dangerfield
Stuart McGachan (guitar, vocals) = The Hairy Man
Jason Irvine (drums) = J Baggs

Lady North
Scott Bullen (guitar) = Rouge

Hairy Area’s Chocolate Charles gave The Pop Cop the lowdown and an exclusive clip of one of their songs which will rock your socks off…

What’s this all about then?
Chocolate Charles: “Adam and I were wanting to keep things ticking over with playing and not just sit about doing nothing [the second We Were Promised Jetpacks album won't be released until the autumn], so at the start of the year we thought, ‘Let’s see if we can get everyone in the same band, practise and get a couple of gigs’.”

Seven members? Are you not getting a bit carried away?
Chocolate Charles: “These are our friends. We barely even speak about music considering how many of us play in bands. The plan is for everyone to be on stage at all times. It’s great for me personally to be playing with a bunch of other folk. I know Adam and Lackie are still there but I don’t think I’ve actually played bass with any other people other than Adam, Mike and Lackie.”

Why is Michael Palmer the only Jetpacks member not in the band?
Chocolate Charles: “He’s through in Glasgow staying with his girlfriend. He hasn’t been ditched!”

I heard that Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit might join Hairy Area…
Chocolate Charles: “It’s a big maybe, he’s a busy man. We sent him over the tracks and he said he’d love to get involved but he’s obviously got a lot of other stuff on. He hasn’t got a name yet.”

You’ve got two drummers – how does that work?
Chocolate Charles: “We’ve got an amazing drum set-up. We’ve got just one kick drum with them both sitting either side of it facing each other. I’m not sure how that will work for a gig, it might not be possible to mic that up. They’ve both got their own kick drum pedal, there’s two toms and there’s one facing each other.”

Did you not consider having two bass players?
Chocolate Charles: “If I’m managing this outfit there are no more bassists coming here!”

How many songs are in your set so far?
Chocolate Charles: “About four and a half. We’re also looking at doing a wee cover – I doubt it’s going to be Dancing In The Dark or anything like that.”

What do you sound like?
Chocolate Charles: “I don’t think we sound like the Jetpacks but I don’t think we sound like a whole other band either. We never thought we’d sound the way we do before we started. The way we went about it was, ‘Don’t think about it. Don’t say we can’t do that because it sounds too cheesy or too heavy or too much like something else – just do it’. The songs that we’ve got sound quite different. There’s a slow, more classic rock one that’s got a nice guitar solo going over the top of it, and there’s a faster indie one. There’s a decent variety in there.”

Are you looking forward to the gigs?
Chocolate Charles: “Yeah, although we just found out that the Edinburgh one is the same night as the Champions League final. I haven’t broken it to the other members of the band yet. Adam just texted me this morning and wrote, ‘Oh no!’.”

Do you have plans to release any material?
Chocolate Charles: “It would be nice to do a five-track EP but I’m not sure if it’s going to happen.”

Hairy Area taster (recorded from one mic balanced against a wall)

May 14, Stereo, Glasgow (tickets)
May 28, Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh (tickets)

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Emma’s Imagination: the ‘Must NOT Be The Music’ interview

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

Interview subject: Emma’s Imagination
Location: Waxy O’Connors, Glasgow
Background info: Emma Gillespie got her lucky break last September when she won the now-decommissioned TV talent contest Must Be The Music on Sky1, pocketing a cheque for £100,000 for her troubles. Using the stage name Emma’s Imagination, she released her debut album Stand Still less than four months later, which debuted at No.14 in the UK charts and No.2 in Scotland.

I don’t profess to know Emma Gillespie, but on the odd occasion our paths have crossed in the scrubby bars of Glasgow she has struck me as a very fun, interesting and forthright individual.

However, whenever I’ve read an interview the 27-year-old has given, the line of questioning inevitably goes over the same old topics of her busking background, what she thinks of The X Factor and how often she speaks to Gary Barlow (he signed her to his label, Future Records).

Therefore, in an attempt to stop us from boring each other to tears, we agreed to have a conversation in which the only rule was that we were banned from mentioning music, which we managed heroically until precisely 7 minutes and 44 seconds when Emma cracked first. But it made for an entertaining experiment…

Emma: “I went to school in quite a few different places because my dad was in the army. We lived down south, in Newcastle, and we lived in Germany for a while, but my main school years were in Dumfries and Galloway, where I went to St Ninian’s Primary School and St Joseph’s College.

“Everyone thinks I’m 22 or 23. I think I get it from my mum, she looks very young for her age. My mum and dad split up when I was six years old. It was really tough but everything happens for a reason and we got on with things. Me and my brother went to live with my mum and we saw my dad at weekends. I’ve got a good relationship with both of them. It’s funny, they live in the same town now, just down the road from each other, but they’ve both remarried.

“I’m really thankful that my parents left me to make up my own mind about religion. I don’t follow religion at all. It’s not that I don’t believe in God, I just don’t feel like there’s anything missing from my life. I’m quite a spiritual person. I guess the religion I can see the most sense in is Buddhism, it’s really open-minded. Some religions have gone a bit corrupt. I hate to hear about people abusing high positions, there are quite a few dodgy folk.

“I have always been very free. I think it’s just my brain because I’ve got quite a creative mind. Things like politics, maths, anything that’s boring, I can’t absorb it. A lot of people will think, ‘That’s terrible, you should be having a say in what happens with the country’ but I don’t really know.

“I used to be a bit of a hippy. I had dreadlocks and I lived in a Mongolian yurt by the sea in south-west Scotland where I did random jobs and then went away travelling for months or a year at a time. It’s just the way I am. I spent six months in India, I went to Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Andaman Islands, New York, and I’ve been around Europe a little bit. New York is one of my favourite places ever, it just really inspired me, it was a turning point in my life. It opened my eyes and made me realise what I wanted to do.

“I got chatting to the lead singer from Arcade Fire at a party after the Brits. We were comparing our journeys – how they took a long time to refine their sound before they got signed, whereas I got swept up. I’ve not really had a chance as an artist to develop.

“I’m not famous by any means. I walk down the street in Glasgow and the odd person will say, ‘There’s Emma’s Imagination!’ – it’s not like I get mobbed or anything. To imagine, for example, if you were Lady Gaga and to reach that height of fame, it’s absolutely terrifying. I don’t think I could handle that. Being famous is something I’ve never aspired to be.

“It’s a crazy new world that I’ve stuck my head in and I’m looking around. There’s more pressure on women in this industry to look half-decent – I would get criticism if I turned up at a gig with no make-up on. Image is more of an issue for women than it is for guys. I like to look nice but not completely worry myself about how I look all the time. You’ll never find me in a tiny little mini-skirt, high heels and a boob tube and my hair all back-combed. If someone said, ‘Look Emma, we feel your next album cover should be you lying in a car and in a bikini’ then I wouldn’t do it.”

Emma’s Imagination – Faerie Lights

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“I have a problem with nationality” – Alexi Murdoch’s identity crisis

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

One of the questions in the recent UK census asked: “What do you feel is your national identity?” offering the options Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish, British and Other.

To most people, the answer would involve a straightforward and instinctive thought process, but not ALEXI MURDOCH.

The singer-songwriter spent much of his childhood and teenage years in Elgin and now owns a remote house on the west coast facing the Hebrides where he eats porridge for breakfast and wrote his latest album Towards The Sun in its entirety.

You wouldn’t be surprised to learn, therefore, that Murdoch is almost universally described in online articles as Scottish, but it’s a label that makes him decidedly uncomfortable.

“I don’t really regard myself as anything particularly,” he says. “I have a problem with nationality in general. I find it causes problems. It can limit people’s perception of what they’re hearing. I’ve always been rather suspicious of the very idea of geographical boundaries and representing identity that way.

“Patriotism seems all good and well but, in reality, the attachment to some idea of identity is based literally on these quite arbitrary – or, at the very least, historically arbitrary – boundaries that have been harboured usually by violence and aggression in the past.

“Obviously there are cultural differences between people but it just seems that placing importance on the very idea of being from one place probably does more harm than good.”

Murdoch’s refreshingly nonconformist attitude towards society’s deep-rooted presumption of allegiance probably derives from his multinational roots and nomadic upbringing.

Murdoch was born in London two days after Christmas in 1973 and initially raised just outside of Athens by his Greek dad and English mum.

It wasn’t until Murdoch was of school age that his family moved to Scotland, before the lure of the American dream saw him relocate to North Carolina to enrol at Duke University.

Murdoch freely acknowledges he doesn’t have a place he would call home.

“Not really,” he says. “I’ve moved around a lot. I have Scottish family and I live out on the west coast now and I love it there and don’t see myself leaving, but I’m pretty restless. I feel more at home on my boat out at sea. Maybe that’s because of the lack of any kind of flag or nationality. It’s not that I don’t feel I belong, because there are places I resonate with, but I spend a lot of time away.”

It has been during his many extended stays across the Atlantic that Murdoch has forged an incredibly successful career in music.

His sublime 2006 debut album Time Without Consequence, with its lights-out atmospherics and echoes of Nick Drake both vocally and in its hypnotic acoustic melodies, has shifted more than 100,000 copies, allowing Murdoch to easily sell out 500-capacity venues across the US.

Remarkably, he has managed to generate a large and devoted following without the support of a record label.

Even if his name isn’t familiar to you, there’s a strong chance you’ll have heard Murdoch’s music without realising, since his songs have popped up in the background of dozens of television shows (House, The O.C., Prison Break, Dawson’s Creek) and films (Garden State, Gone Baby Gone and Away We Go).

“It was a choice for me early on,” he explains. “Either I allowed the music to get out that way or you go with a record label, because one way or another you’ve got to figure out a way to finance making records and get your music out there.

“There’s no way that that’s not going to feel like a compromise to me, it definitely does. But having said that, it has become such an accepted form of discovering music. People watch so much crap on television that it seems like they have developed a capacity to be able to tune out, or at least separate, the music they might discover and the actual programming that it’s a part of.

“The worry would be that they’re so attached to the programme they discover it from that, for them, that becomes the meaning of the song. But I’ve found that, with the music I make, people don’t seem to be too bothered about where they first heard it.

“The collision of art and commerce has never been a comfortable one but at the end of the day it’s a real one. I hope the choice I’ve made is the lesser of two evils.”

This year, however, Murdoch is making a concerted effort to forgo preaching to the converted on North American tours and step outside his the comfort zone.

He has given respected German-based label City Slang permission to release his latest album Towards The Sun in Europe, and this month he has been playing in less-visited cities such as Amsterdam, London, Paris and Berlin, although sadly no Scottish dates have made it into his schedule as yet.

“I’ve been doing this independently since I started,” he says. “I just followed where the music took me and it took off in the States. However, I’ve always had this strange feeling that I need to get back home, whether it’s the UK or Europe.

“I feel that the music I make is part of some kind of tradition that is almost automatic. It’s subconsciously ingrained or genetically there or part of the landscape, and yet I don’t really know enough about it.

“People have lost touch with the real traditional music, their local traditional music. They have ideas about what traditional Scottish music is but it’s quite a narrow perspective. There’s probably some amazing music happening in these rural spots that I’d like to investigate.”

Alexi Murdoch’s new album Towards The Sun is out now on City Slang. The title track is available for free download via Bandcamp.

Alexi Murdoch – Something Beautiful

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