Archive for July, 2011

Stars in the making: Café Disco

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

Don’t you just love it when a new band sounds so promising that you feel compelled to tell them by email how wonderful they are and invite yourself along to film them at their next rehearsal?

I rarely devote a post to one band, not because I have an insatiable preference for writing idiosyncratic features about the Scottish music scene, but because approximately 0.05% of the new songs I listen to genuinely excite me. When I find that something special, though, sharing it with you is by far the most satisfying part of this blogging malarkey.

Two days ago, I was reading the brilliant The Daily Dose, who published a Q&A with a Scottish band I’d never heard of called Café Disco. They only started gigging last month after forming in March and, so far, the sum total of their recorded output is a 62-second clip on Facebook of their debut single Persona, due for release in October.

The members of the band are: bass-playing frontman Fraser Welsh, 26, from Irvine; 18-year-old Biggar twins Paul Swinton and Rachael Swinton on guitars; and drummer Clare Gallacher, 18, from Glasgow. Having spent a couple of hours with them, I can say they’re lovely folks too.

All four are enrolled at the Academy of Music & Sound in Glasgow, which is where they formed Café Disco (named after an episode of the American version of The Office) and where I stopped by today to film them playing Terra Nova, which contains the peachiest guitar riff I’ve heard in ages. Here it is:

The song reminds me of a cross between The Strokes and another American band (now defunct) called Hockey Night. Café Disco would be the first to admit they’re not the finished article, but they’ve got a bright future ahead of them so give them your support.

July 30, Box, Glasgow (free)
August 12, Box, Glasgow (free)
September 10, The Harbour Bar, Troon
September 16, The HAC, Irvine

Follow Café Disco on Facebook and Twitter

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The Cinematics (2003-2011) – “Basically everything we did had to be acceptable to American girls”

Monday, July 25th, 2011

When a band splits up, their reasons for doing so can vary wildly. Sometimes, however, a band makes no announcement whatsoever, instead choosing to cease all forms of communication and updates, drifting further and further out of public consciousness.

To those fans who had invested time, money and emotional attachment in something that came to an end at an undetermined juncture, such a stance can prove highly frustrating, if not disrespectful.

For most people, The Cinematics are missing rather than presumed dead. The Scottish band’s official homepage optimistically promises “New website coming soon!” and points readers in the direction of a MySpace page which hasn’t been updated since January 2011. At the time of writing, there have been no announcements on The Cinematics’ Twitter or Facebook page to say that they’ve split up, but they did just that several months ago.

When I discovered this by chance during a random conversation at GoNorth, I emailed guitarist and co-songwriter Larry Reid and invited him to meet up for an interview to provide some closure on The Cinematics story – it turned out to be a more intriguing story than I ever imagined.

Larry replaced founder member Ramsay Miller between the release of their debut album A Strange Education (2007) and its follow-up Love And Terror (2009). The rest of the band – Scott Rinning (vocals/guitar), Adam Goemans (bass) and Ross Bonney (drums) – are originally from Dingwall but moved to Glasgow in 2003.

While The Cinematics had a reasonable following in their native Scotland, they enjoyed far greater popularity in the United States and continental Europe which, in turn, was where they decided to do almost all of their touring, prompting the members to relocate to Berlin last year. It was there that the group set about recording the ill-fated third album that eventually killed them. It was to be called Kino, the German word for ‘cinema’, but it remains unreleased and unfinished. What proved to be their last ever gig was at Berlin’s Magnet Club on December 3, 2010.

“We’d been in Berlin for about six months recording our third album and I thought it was going very well,” recalls Larry. “I thought it was sounding like a great piece of art that would have blown people’s heads off when they heard it and they would have had to re-evaluate their perception of the band. Some of the band agreed with me, other members thought it wasn’t really what we were about and wanted to stop recording it. By that, I mean take a break from the band.

“In this day and age, music is so disposable that if you’re not giving your fanbase records or playing shows they’ll move on to someone else. That was my argument – what was the point in taking a break? There would have been no way back.

“We didn’t sit in a room and take a vote on whether we should split the band up – it was more organic than that. I don’t think we’re looking at a ‘Beatles in 1970′ situation. I don’t think there are going to be rooms full of crying girls everywhere.”

Would you say it was more a case of musical differences than personality differences?
“It was,” agrees Larry. “But when musical differences lead to bands splitting up and losing incomes, it becomes personality differences. Being in a band with somebody is very much like being in a relationship. You look back on it with fondness and bitterness in the same way that you look back on an ex-girlfriend.”

The bitterness is understandable. Scott announced that he wanted to scrap the third album on the same day that Larry arrived in Berlin after selling his house in Glasgow and driving his girlfriend and his possessions to the German capital. In that instant, an enviable lifestyle of travelling the world and earning a living from making music was no more.

“We were getting paid a lot of money for going on tour,” says Larry. “The Cinematics had a big fanbase. A small gig for us in Europe or America would have been 300 people. In the big cities like Berlin or Amsterdam we’d play to more than 1,000.

“After we cancelled our recording sessions, Kings Of Leon’s promoter got in contact with us – he wanted us to be the support on their European tour. To walk away from that, or to have to walk away from that… I was raging. A lot of bands get things because record companies pay a lot of money, but that wasn’t the case with this. We’d got that through sheer hard work.”

Larry readily admits he is disillusioned with the music business, with his old band being sued by two different parties for breach of contract.

“You hear stories about how everybody in the music industry is corrupt and how it’s a dirty business, yet when you do get screwed, you’re surprised,” says Larry, shaking his head at his own apparent naivety.

“Since music was made a commodity and people started selling it, artists have been getting ripped off. If we as a band got 10% of every record that we sold, we’d be loaded. But we don’t. iTunes give you pennies. Spotify give you the square root of nothing. People think they’re doing you a favour by legally downloading your music, but the difference between them downloading my music from iTunes and downloading from a torrent is irrelevant to me.”

Quite why The Cinematics’ popularity in Europe and America wasn’t matched in their home country has puzzled many. Larry’s theory is that it has more to do with how the group’s image was originally moulded and their subsequent rapid ascent – a rags to riches tale which he believes doesn’t sit well with the Scottish mindset.

“I can understand it,” says Larry. “The manager found them and told them, ‘The clothes you’re wearing are terrible, get your hair cut and your name’s crap, change that’. He basically created the band, got them endorsement deals with All Saints so they were walking around in trendy clobber, got them accounts at Rainbow Room for trendy haircuts, gave them a stack of records and told them, ‘This is what you’ve got to start listening to’.

“They played a few gigs in Glasgow then went to In The City where TVT Records were desperate to sign a Scottish band in the post-Franz era. They signed them even though they didn’t have a set of their own songs, whisked them off to America and put them in one of the most expensive studios in the world to record an album which cost £100,000. That’s not really the kind of story that Scotland is into.

“I’m making it sound something it’s not. This is not the bitter rant of somebody after a band breaks up. They were a brilliant band. Scott is a better singer than any other Scottish singer I can think of and he’s got a star quality. Ross and Adam, the rhythm section, were phenomenal, which was why we were such a brilliant live band. They got where they got because they were talented, but I sometimes think the Scottish music scene is inversely snobby about natural talent. They like people with beards who don’t know that many guitar chords. I’m a bit like that myself so I understand that.”

Larry has stepped into the role of frontman for his new project, Laurence And The Slab Boys, a more shoegazing proposition than his old band, with dark, restless atmospherics.

“A lot of labels have been in contact and are really interested in it but I don’t anticipate playing to over 1,000 people with Laurence And The Slab Boys any time soon,” he admits. “I wouldn’t call it a vanity project – I’m not really in a position to do that – but it’s closer to the music I like.

“It was strange, there wasn’t a whole lot that united The Cinematics musically. The only band all four of us were into was Radiohead, and even then we were into different periods of Radiohead. When I was writing for The Cinematics, our record company insisted the songs sounded good on the radio, so it was like, ‘I might need to take that line out, I might need to change this, we might need to put a third chorus in’. Basically everything we did had to be acceptable to American girls.”

The Cinematics – Chase

Laurence And The Slab Boys – Space Dream #1

Laurence And The Slab Boys are on Soundcloud, Facebook and Twitter

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Fest of times, worst of times

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

The past decade is cluttered with Scottish festivals which have arrived on the scene to much fanfare then disappeared without so much as a goodbye, inevitably due to poor ticket sales or lack of funding – Gig On The Green, Connect, Outsider, Big In Falkirk and Live At Loch Lomond to name but five. Poor Northern Lights didn’t even get the opportunity to open its gates before it became the latest casualty in late June.

Given the logistical and financial outlay involved in putting a festival together, when one folds it tends to do so with eye-watering losses, so never understimate just how much nerve and courage it takes to set one up.

The Pop Cop spoke to one ambitious/demented (delete as appropriate) young man who is about to launch a new, all-day outdoor music event in the west of Scotland. He asked me to keep the specifics under wraps until it is officially unveiled, but he lifted the lid on some of the behind-the-scenes difficulties he has faced just getting it off the ground.

“It has become a bit nightmarish. I seem to be slowly drowning in a sea of red tape. Sometimes it’s as if Big Brother is watching my every move, waiting for me to need another licence or permit for something or other. I have four different 100+ page documents containing regulations on ‘demountable structures’ – tents to you and me.

“I met with council representatives recently and decided it was best to move the date from August to early September. Annoying as this is, it is definitely better than waiting until the week before the event and finding that the licences were not in place. This was very likely to be the case if I continued with the original date.

“I’ll probably lose some of the bands that were originally booked because of it, but there is many a hoop to jump through and the council moves at a pace that snails would be ashamed of. I’m painting a very black picture, I do apologise. But as a wise man once said, ‘If you book them, they will come’.”

Another festival, Doune The Rabbit Hole, did book them and sure enough they came, but The Pop Cop has learnt that a large number of the acts who played the Stirlingshire shindig on June 10-12 have still not been paid their agreed fees.

The three-day festival hosted around 125 acts, but only 600 punters attended, with ticket sales badly affected by the forecast of heavy rain and thunderstorms.

When I contacted festival director Jamie Murray, he was decent enough to answer several questions about the unfortunate situation with brutal honesty and appealed for donations to help him and his team of volunteers settle their debts.

How much of a loss did Doune The Rabbit Hole make this year?
“A big one.”

How many artists are still waiting to be paid?
“A lot. However, the amount we still owe to artists is considerably less than the amount we owe to the other infrastructural services that were employed. Importantly, we are still working towards being able to pay artists and all our other debtors in full.

“This is not something we’re running away from or considering as ‘game over’. It’s a setback, for sure, and a regrettable and horrible one to be in, but it’s a hurdle we will clamber over.”

How did you decide who would be paid and who wouldn’t?
“It’s a horrid thing to have to do – please try to understand that there simply wasn’t enough money to go round and that we’ve had to make horrible decisions. It’s really important to us that we treat people appropriately and we’re extremely sorry that we’ve not been able to pay people everything up front.

“We have had to juggle two factors in terms of deciding which artists to prioritise in terms of payment. Firstly, there’s the legal aspect – people we’ve signed contracts with which stipulate an amount of time (usually 28 days) within which they are to be paid (there are even still some of those left) and secondly, people who are in serious need of the money because they need it to cover travel expenses or otherwise.

“Sadly, very often the kind of artist who has signed a contract is not the kind of artist who actually ‘needs’ the money urgently, but you’re legally obliged to give it to the more successful artists (who will probably give about 20% to a booking agent). They also tend to be artists who you don’t have personal contact with, so you can’t send them an email to say, ‘Hey, do you mind if we don’t pay you yet?’ which would be a hard thing to do even if you know someone personally never mind doing it to people you don’t know.

“We have managed to get in touch with some artists with bigger fees who have taken something of a temporary severance (by which I mean they’ve accepted less than their total fee but we’ll be paying them the rest as soon as we can) and we really do appreciate that.”

Is there any realistic chance of the artists being paid what they are owed?
“Absolutely, there’s every chance – we’re working at it constantly and it’s getting closer every day. It’s a lot of work, a lot of funding applications and a lot of visiting banks and wearing ties but we’ll get there. If you’re able and if you care enough to do so, you can go to our website where there’s a PayPal ‘donate’ button – anything you give there will go straight into an artist’s pocket until they’re all paid.”

Is Doune The Rabbit Hole likely to go ahead next year?
“Of course, money is only one part of life and although it has huge importance (for some people more than others), we will find a way to make it work.”

You can donate to Doune The Rabbit Hole by clicking on the PayPal button on the right-hand side of the festival’s website

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Festival Thyme

Adam Green – Festival Song

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