2 gigs! 19th September at The Black Box in Belfast & then 21st September in blekingska nationeni Lund, Sweden. These will be the only shows this year. Possibly ever. Should be fun. Support in Lund comes from Like Honey.
If you believe that No news is good news, then this is the place for you. We're planning to get together around May & start to put a new EP or album together for release at the end of the year we hope. We don't want to play anymore gigs until we have new songs finished, so no more gigs for a while. Meanwhile Marc has been playing with his new band, Solemn Novena (check out Siren), Ben's been putting a new band together, Tara has been trying to buy a house with the proceeds from our last album, DC has been chairing meetings of the Young Communists in Belfast & Colm has been staying in a lot & listening to Sally Shapiro.
Two London dates announced & then I think we need to get down to the nitty gritty of recording. Tickets are now available for the Popart here & How does it feel here. The How does it feel show is to celebrate the launch of their new label & compilation album. Our contribution is 'You're the one', which we recorded a couple of times for the last album, but it never sounded right. This version was recorded drunk in Marc's bedroom. It's an excellent compilation featuring Irene, Suburban Kid's with biblical names, Fanfarlo, Voxtrot & many more. It's called 'The kid's at the club & you can buy it here.
Just back from our Swedish mini-tour which saw us in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Lund and we are dog-tired. We premiered our new song Panda Girl which sounds like Del Shannon trying to pull Betty Rizzo from Grease, very 50's American prom muzak but we think it went OK. We arrived at the first gig in Gothenburg and were all getting very egocentric when we saw a line of nubile teens curling around the venue waiting to get in a good 3 hours before the doors opened. This buzz lasted until we worked out there was an R&B disco upstairs and the good kids of Gothenburg seem to prefer Tweet to twee. Around 5.30am our tour manager, Rickard, a little worse for wear thought it would be good to let Ben ring up Betty from Saturday Looks Good To Me in Detroit. For some reason Ben affected a Salford accent and pretended to be MC Tunes from 808 State and threatened to knock the poor girl on her head next time he "were in Motown, our kid".
In Stockholm we were playing outdoors at 5pm but as soon as we got onstage and kicked in to the first song (or not as Ben missed his cue) it started to rain. Things didn't get better as Tara missed the entire sub-meaning of the word "festival" which as everyone else on planet earth knows is "mud" and turned up to Popaganda with a pair of sandles. Marc didn't fare much better and his black suede shoes were looking more like two big dollops of chocolate cake by 3am. Ashton and Ben tried to run on stage mid-gig when the Embassy were playing but bottled it when they saw the crowd and settled for doing a Stereo MC dance behind the speakers.
We were all getting a bit tired and stressed out with each other (as you can probably know we usually only spend 1 week a year with each other and after day 4 we remembered why). Luckily the last date was in Lund which I suppose is Sweden's equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge, a huge student population all rattle round the cobbled streets on French Resistance bicycles and I must say I loved it. We had a great crowd here and met some cracking kids called the Budgies who invited us back to their digs and Marc sang the Cantonese version of Brassneck by the Wedding Present. Things turned stranger when Ben was asked to sing "Call 911, I Think I'm In Love" to which he replied "OK, how does it go?" to bemused looks and whispers, "But, it is your song, don't you know?" - apparently they were talking about the secret track on our album "Goalhanger" (it seems to have acquired a new title on Last.fm's download page). How we all laughed later as we let the tires down on every single bike in the city
