Britain's Best Slightly Shit Indie Band
May 14, 2012 by carps

The Duck and Drake, Leeds: 14th May 2012

After Saturday’s show in the unusual setting of a grammar school hall to a crowd of people in black ties and cocktail dresses (often both at the same time!) we were back for a Sunday slot at our favourite live venue – the Duck and Drake in Leeds – where anyone wearing a tuxedo would almost certainly get chinned.

After too many years of playing to contemplate, I’ve come to the conclusion that actually the critical ingredient in a successful gig isn’t the strength of your playing, the style of your music or the length of your hair (*offers prayers of thanks*). Instead it is driven by a weird nexus of the venue, the crowd and the band’s ability to communicate. We’ve done some gigs over the last couple of years that have been riven with equipment failure, woeful playing, injured vocal chords and muddy sound and yet somehow have been roaringly triumphant. Conversely, we’ve played gigs that have been technically faultless but have had all the convivial atmosphere and joie de vivre of a depressives’ convention.

The Duck and Drake is steeped in music. It is built on live bands and real beers and as such it attracts a varied clientele of people in tassels, hats, leather and beardage. People come because there’s a band on, rather than walking through the door and rolling their eyes as they see some lads carrying in some amps. In fact, over the past couple of years we’ve started to actually recognise some of the crowd

Prior to the gig I was a little worried. The previous night had been oddly unrewarding, but in the tradition of mach schau we’d done a full hour and half without a break and I’d stretched my voice beyond its limits. There was a time that back-to-back gigs in those sort of circumstances would have meant a set of me gargling ineffectually into the mic like one of those guys who lost their vocal chords in ‘nam and have to speak through a throat mic. Today my throat is, luckily, made of sterner stuff.

So it was that 2 hours of fabulousness ensued as we blasted through the set with brio – feeding off the alchemy of the crowd to blitz the various musical errors we committed into the dust. Halfway through the second set, my voice had been reduced to rubble, but thanks to my newly-discovered screaming technique and the liberal application of echo on the vocals I’ve discovered I can kind of hide it.

Highlights included a box of Iranian jammy dodgers, some Northern Soul/Wigan Pier dance madness, pork pie hats, a man with approximately £300′s worth of skunk in his inside pocket, a pint spilt on the electrics, some guys from Newcastle, rapping in a flat cap, £80 in a bucket and the promise of more regular gigs.

If you came, thank you for doing so: genuinely it’s the crowd what makes the gig.

Setlist

A ludicrous 30-odd songs these days, and we missed some out!!

  1. Substitute: The Who
  2. I Still Don’t Understand: Superset
  3. Where Have All the Good Times Gone: The Kinks
  4. Queen Bitch: David Bowie
  5. Bottles of Pills: Superset
  6. Little Green Bag: The George Baker Selection
  7. Paperback Writer: The Beatles
  8. Everything I Want: Superset
  9. All Your Love: John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
  10. Beetlebum: Blur
  11. All Or Nothing: The Small Faces
  12. Come Together: The Beatles
  13. 404: Superset
  14. Seven Nation Army: The White Stripes
  15. As Soon As You Thought It Was Over: Superset
  16. Bang Bang: Nancy Sinatra
  17. In The End: Superset
  18. Can’t Explain: The Who
  19. All The Love in the World: Superset
  20. Black Dog: Led Zeppelin
  21. Last Nite: The Strokes
  22. Gangsters: The Specials
  23. Until Tomorrow: Superset
  24. Are You Gonna Be My Girl: Jet
  25. Eye Know: De La Soul
  26. Waterfall: The Stone Roses
  27. Tin Soldier: The Small Faces
  28. A Town Called Malice: The Jam
  29. Green Onions: Booker T and the MGs
  30. Step On: The Happy Mondays
  31. I’ve Got You (I Feel Good): James Brown
  32. Sympathy for the Devil: The Rolling Stones
  33. Loaded: Primal Scream
  34. Communication Breakdown: Led Zeppelin
  35. Money: The Beatles

On the subject of rapping

Way back when, we used to do a vaguely comedic rap. As one of our songs ended, we’d strike up with the rhythm section of the Stone Roses’ I  Am The Resurrection, over which I would perform The Only Rhyme That Bites by long-forgotten Mancunian rapping also-ran MC Tunes.

Over recent weeks, we’ve been toying with Eye Know by De La Soul and once more dipping our toes in the world of hip-hop. It’s a fabulous tune but, as you will know, based around rapping. Lord knows what’s possessed us, but with the aid of a sample trigger (apparently) it’s become possible to actually do a song like that. So it was for 3 glorious minutes I found myself bouncing at the front of the stage, in a flat cap and beard, rapping. We might even do it again, but it is waaaaaay out of my comfort zone.

I respectfully submit that we are the only band you will ever see that will play Bowie, Led Zep, De La Soul and Blur in the same set. Consider yourselves lucky!

  •   •   •   •   •
May 14, 2012 by carps

Wakefield Hockey Club Awards: QEGS, 12th May 2012

 

Via some circuitous route we know some guys from Wakefield Hockey Club – a venerable and successful sporting institution – and have done a few gigs for people associated with them. One of them, last summer, saw the first recorded instance of breakdancing at a Superset gig and very nearly someone leaping from a balcony.

They’re quite the crowd!

Saturday saw us turn up to play their annual awards ceremony. Now if you know or have seen us, you’ll know that we are generally the following things:

  1. Shambolic
  2. Badly dressed
  3. Sweaty
  4. Extremely loud

Thus, when we turned up at the venue – the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield (ex-school of The Crossbow Cannibal and the Acid Bath Murderer, fact fans!!!) we were a little taken aback to see that it was:

  1. Huge
  2. Posh
  3. Populated by people bedecked in finery

The stage was of sufficient size to have comfortably played host to every single member of the Brand New Heavies, Queen and everyone who has ever played in a band with Johnny Marr. Colossal.

Luckily, the size was such that it allowed us to deploy the enormous banner that Brendan constructed in his own free time – see the above picture for a sense of scale and wonderment at B’s stitching. If the band ever goes tits up, a career in haberdashery awaits.

As a gig, it was a little hard to gauge. I do vaguely worry about the band’s suitability for formal occasions, given our general noisy scruffiness. The support act (of a kind) was a 3 course dinner, some speeches and some award presentations. The crowd were in tuxedos and frankly saliva-inducing dress/stiletto combinations. Everyone was seated around large round tables and ice buckets and so on. It wasn’t your typical rock crowd, that much is for certain.

As we stood behind the curtain for what seemed like 47 hours, it seemed like the crowd would be extremely boisterous. When we actually started playing however, it was 10:30 and people were already drifting outside for fresh air, going into town and so on. Also, they were full of hefty portions of food and presumably a fair deal of beer. Resultingly, it was an oddly muted affair from where we were stood. While we played pretty crisply, the huge cavernous setting, the height of the stage, the distance from the crowd and the general ambience meant that it felt relatively subdued. There was some dancing, but no breakdancing. There was applause, but none of the riotous, bellicose cheering we got from the guys last time around.

We’re perhaps more used to standing pretty much toe-to-toe with a crowd, so if we didn’t come across as well as perhaps we should it’s just a function of the general stage/auditorium layout. After an hour and a half of rock, we judged it the right time to break out the DJing and a series of disco classics got a few more people onto the floor.

So performance-wise enjoyable and largely very crisp, but as an event somewhat stymied by the format of the evening and venue. Nonetheless, a good time was had by all, and we hope to back for next year’s show with some Freddie Mercury style stage moves so we can do the venue more justice!

  •   •   •   •   •
January 4, 2012 by carps

And so it begins….

Just before Christmas, we got together to run together a list of songs for the second album, whose plans I hinted at in an earlier post. Originally, we mooted the idea of a 4 track EP (if such things even exist any more!) but as we played through demo recordings and strummed our way through some of the tunes, we suddenly found ourselves with… 19 songs!

Well what the hell, right? Just record them all!

Instead of a simple blast through some well-established live tracks, we’re going to go all Pink Floyd on your ass. We’ve drawn up what amounts to a 19 song medley, where each tune will seque into the next – hopefully seamlessly and with some kind of wit. I had a feverish 4am-can’t-sleep-til-I’ve-written-this-down spasm, where I worked out how we could get each song to run into the next via keychanges, instrumental interludes and sound effects.

It will be very interesting to see how much of that idea actually comes to pass.

Anyway, as part of the exercise, we did some very very rough video recordings of some of the songs. For the sake of posterity and a little amusement, here we are futzing our way through Bottles of Pills – a country-ish ballad I first penned about a decade ago. Played electrically, it has a pretty cool lo-fi vibe about it, but this is just a rough acoustic cut in which I forget the lyrics and you can’t hear Den’s splendid country-twanging lead guitar for some reason. Enjoy.

The purpose of doing little things like this is to get a rough version of each track laid down, with the correct structure. This is important because when we record, we’ll be doing it the hard way: essentially a series of live takes of drums, guitars and bass.

The plan is to learn each song so well that we can play through it blindfold, with no singing. This will let us get down backing tracks in the fastest way and give us the chance to overdub extra parts and the vocals at our leisure later. Last time round, we ended up fannying about for the thick end of 18 months on this process, but this time round we’re more seasoned and should get through it all with a little more alacrity!

  •   •   •   •   •
December 19, 2011 by carps

What we sounded like 15 years ago

Now that we are all, to a greater or lesser extent (curse you Dave, and your perpetual youth!) grey, balding, overweight and wrinkly, it’s cherishable to find some old recordings from the mid 90s when we were still bouncy, bushy-haired and irritatingly chirpy. It’s funny listening back to these songs for me. As I pretty much wrote them in their entirity, they’ve still got some kind of personal resonance, even though clearly they are dated and pretty slight with retrospect.

One thing they certainly bring back is the memory of our optimism around that time. We recorded these track in a place in Castleford under the watchful  eyes and ears of Pat Grogan – whose credits included producing Terrorvision and Smokie (the walls were adorned with Smokie’s gold records). This seemed to be highly legitimate and almost like we were on the fringes of actually being something. We  even broke off recording one song in order to do a photo shoot. Ha!

In our heads, we wanted to capture “our live sound” – i.e., a kind of exuberant mess recorded live in one or two takes. Grogan, probably wisely, insisted on a proper process, with drums and bass played to a click track and everything else overdubbed later. Technically he was right – and we probably couldn’t have pulled out a convincing enough live version anyway – but even now I kind of resent the overly-polished feeling of these recordings – especially the way the guitars are so muted and weak in the mix and Brendan’s drums so coralled. Live, we’d have played everything twice as fast, with masses of improvisatory drumming.

Anyway for your aural pleasure…

Planet Monday


My mate recently pointed out to me that this seems to be a distinct play off from the Monkees’ Pleasant Valley Sunday. He’s certainly got a point. Lyrically, it is set in roughly the same kind of workaday milieu, taking its observations from the humdrum nature of suburban life. Musically too there’s an obvious reference in the intro with the chiming guitar parts.

At time, in fact, I don’t remember consciously doing any of this, but it could have been on my mind as I did (and do) have a respect for the Monkees output. My main inspiration was though, I think, the bubblegum end of the Britpop pool – Wake Up Boo by the Boo Radleys and Dodgy’s Good Enough awakening some kind of sick instinct for a catchiness within me that informed a good 3 years worth of songs.

At the time, we were so confident of getting signed and perhaps getting this out as a signal that I consciously designed the end of the track to be friendly for DJs – a swinging 5/4 fade out over which Simon Mayo or Bruno Brookes could effortlessly overlay some smarm. We clapped and laughed during the first playback and I mooted sending it to Noel Gallagher with a note saying “this is songwriting – no fuck off”. Ultimately, I suppose I was proved wrong!

Wasting Your Time


While apparently cut from the same kind of bouncy wellspring that informed Planet Monday, this was supposed to be (and perhaps actually is) a little bit more sophisticated.

Firstly, the lyrical content is probably a bit cleverer. I’ve never especially enjoyed writing lyrics and don’t particularly like reading them back, but in this case I’m still relatively satisfied with them. Is it trite to attack the fashion industry? Well, duh. But I like to think this slice of gently humourous joshing still passes muster.

Musically, a lot more thought went into this track. There’s a proper arrangement of guitars… a smattering of hand-clapping percussive goodness, and a stop/start structure that we rehearsed endlessly until we could carry off a one-take recording of the backing track with  real crispness, which I think you can still hear in the recording. Sadly, my favourite bit of guitarwork (a lovely counter melody over the descending bit of the chorus) is a bit buried in the mix.

Since then, a load of people have said “haha this is Shed Seven’s riff” regardless of the fact that this was definitely recorded before Shed Seven, and the riff itself is actually a pop staple – check out I’ve Got a Feeling by the Beatles or Suspicious Minds by Elvis to name but two obvious examples.

The Weatherman


I’ve billed this as “the 1997 version” on YouTube, but in reality I’ve no idea when we recorded it. It was the second bite at this particular cherry, and (we thought) a critically important one.

An earlier version of this song, much slower and with a picked riff a little bit like Dear Prudence had been called “interesting” be Alan McGee’s Creation Records and so we’d decided to rock it up a little bit, thicken the guitar sound and blast through it at a higher speed.

Maybe the wrong decision, with hindsight, but this was the form that became the standard live version that was one a fans’ favourite throughout almost the whole time we played together. There’s nothing much to say about this recording, as it’s technically quite dull and short of it’s one interesting feature – a queer ascending, atonal riff I used to tack onto the end to add a touch of drama. From memory Grogan couldn’t figure out a way for us to record it properly and we were running out of time so it got binned. A pity.

  •   •   •   •   •
December 15, 2011 by carps

The Difficult Second Album…

Sequels are a bitch. Scientific and unscientific explanations for the phenomena abound, but the principle is really this: you generally blow your artistic wad on whatever you do first and then discover there’s not as much in the tank second time around.

In music in particular, this leads to the “difficult second album” syndrome. Personally, I think the mechanics behind the phenomena work like this:

  1. Spend years toiling in obscurity writing a batch of songs which you’re very passionate about
  2. Suddenly ‘make it’
  3. Throw your all into making an album out of your songs
  4. Go on tour for a year to promote the album
  5. Find yourself under pressure from the record company to get a second album out
  6. Churn out noticeably less-inspired songs because you’re under pressure and writing on the road

Of course, not every band falls into this trap – but there’s plenty that do. In recent years The Fratellis, The Stone Roses, Franz Ferdinand, The Kaiser Chiefs and a raft of similar acts have followed a stellar debut with a record that doesn’t quite scale the same peaks.

And, of course, with success the subtle personal dynamics in a band begin to shift. The singer gets the attention and the guitarist resents it. The rhythm section don’t think they’re getting their share of the cash. The singer sees his attempts at songwriting get turned down.

So with all this going on, when a second album fares less well than the first, it’s relatively easy for a band to implode. Again: not a hard and fast rule, but certainly a noticeable trend. Oasis lost their rhythm section… Suede lost Bernard Butler… The Stone Roses lost their drummer…

Truly exceptional bands, of course, weather these storms and turn into massive sellers/perennial cult favourites, but the second album is definitely a trial of fire that many bands don’t survive.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean shit to us because we’re still not successful in any way you could scientifically measure. Nonetheless, it’s time for a second album….

 

  •   •   •   •   •