You're sitting in a pub in Sheffield. The beer is warm, all the chairs have arms, and it's open mic night. Currently crowded into the makeshift stage area (actually just a corner of the room that's been cleared of chairs and tables) is a band called Robberie, a local three-piece armed with acoustic guitars, a glockenspiel, a melodica, and a tambourine. They are certainly one of the better acts you've seen this evening - right now they're playing a song called Journeyman, which spins the story of a lower-league footballer into a moral about how you don't have to be famous to touch people's lives. The singers pull off some nice harmonies and the song goes down well with the regulars, who are probably thrilled to hear something that isn't yet another cover of Hotel California.
Robberie's short set is a highlight of the night - the two or three songs they play are fun, original, and quirky without ever being, y'know, quirky. As you head to the bar for another round, you promise yourself you'll track them down on SoundCloud, but in the end you forget to follow up on this mental note and Robberie more or less disappear from your memory.
Perhaps one of the best things about CDs is that, unlike DVDs, they don't use region codes. You can't buy a Pokémon boxset off US Amazon and expect it to work in your lousy limey DVD player, but you can go to see a folk group in Ireland or a jazz trio in Japan or a country singer in Texas and you can buy their CD and you can take it home and show everyone.
Not that that's how I came to own Consosci Victor Jara? by Daniele Sepe.
I actually bought a second-hand copy of this album from The Record Shop in Cardiff back in 2012. I had never heard of Daniele Sepe before, but I decided that the eye-catching artwork was just too colourful to pass up, especially given that they were only asking 25p for it.
Do you remember when you hit puberty? I sure as heck don't. I remember boys in school talking about the exact moment their voice broke or their balls dropped or whatever, but I have no recollection of experiencing a 'BAM! Puberty!' moment like that. Where others spoke of puberty as a sort of instantaneous levelling-up, I just sort of gradually noticed that my voice was changing, I was getting spots more frequently, and I had fur where there was no fur before.
In retrospect, though, my teenage years were pretty uneventful in general. While my friends were having scandalous hook-ups, explosive break-ups, and all manner of drunken drama in between, I was mostly watching from the sidelines, convinced that I was somehow above it all (teenage me was kind of a dick). I remained a virgin until the age of 18, and I didn't drink until I was 19. I don't think I even masturbated for the first time until I was in university. My adolescence was primarily defined by playing in bands, listening to music, and sneering at my peers for being normal teenagers who did normal teenager things.
pictured: teenage me
My twenties, in contrast, have been far more tumultuous. Since turning 20, I've been cheated on, I've imbibed an ungodly amount of rum, I've vomited on pavements, I've been to parties that I could scarcely even remember the following day, I've jumped into bed with people mere hours after meeting them...I've basically done all the stuff that my friends were doing when we were still in secondary school. At times, I've felt happier than at any other point in my life; I've also felt more lost, more hopeless, and more bereft of direction than I ever felt during my occasionally stressful but always neatly-structured journey through school and university. In short, my twenties have belatedly given me a taste of the drama, the thrills, the emotional strife, the existential uncertainty, and the heady recklessness that most people associate with adolescence.
It's time for another edition of Backchat, where awesome bands offer some insight into the nooks and crannies of their back catalogues.
I first discovered Johnny Foreigner in December 2008, when they supported The Futureheads at a gig in Cardiff. They put on a very impressive show - very energetic, very shouty, very sweaty - and I ordered their then-latest album, Waited Up Til It Was Light, soon afterwards. When the CD arrived in the post, I excitedly unwrapped it and immediately dropped it on the laminate floor in my parents' hallway. The case was horribly cracked, which was devastating, but fortunately the disc itself survived, and the songs thereupon were just as energetic and shouty and sweaty as they had sounded at that Futureheads show.
Johnny Foreigner have come a long way since 2008 (although I, regrettably, am still the clumsy butterfingers I always was). Their fifth album, Mono No Aware, is out on Alcopop! Records today, but before we get to that, here are JoFo themselves to take you through the story so far...
From left: Lewes Herriot, Junior Elvis Washington Laidley, Alexei Berrow, Kelly Southern
we left you sleeping and gone now
(self-released, 2006)
Junior Elvis Washington Laidley (Drums & Noises): This is our first ever album. It was my first "proper" band and I joined after Alexei and former member Daniel decided they needed a drummer. What I'm fond of when remembering recording this record is the complete freedom of time and deadline. We were just doing it because we could, spending pretty much every evening down the studio with no grown-up real life commitments to make us compromise. Experimenting with sounds and recording chants in the rain. Even after a night out we'd usually end up there again, just because. It's a record I would love to steal most of the songs from and record again.
I told Jamie to write something about his favourite album and...well, he had a bit of a time deciding what exactly his favourite album is, but he eventually came up with this ace post about Variations on Swing by Meet Me in St Louis. Enjoy!
Music has always been quite a solitary thing for me and more often than not this meant a fixation on just a few artists, rather than a broader enjoyment of many. I think this has shaped how I’ve run my stupid record label.
Even still, I'm kind of fickle and I've probably had a lot of 'favourite albums', so it's possible that I never really had one at all. Nirvana, Joy Division, Dr. Dre, (hed) P.E, Jeff Buckley, Deftones, Lacuna Coil, Gary Numan, Bruce Springsteen, Glassjaw, The Smiths, At The Drive-In and others have all made albums that were my 'favourite' at one point or another. Some albums lost their shine and some were tarnished by their creators doing shitty things, but others still feel like heaven.
Since I have no definitive favourite album, I've chosen one that wasn't just influential, but inspiring too. Meet Me In St Louis issued a rough-as-fuck demo in 2005 and I loved it. I might never have heard it were it not for the fact that I vaguely knew their bassist, Lewis, from college and I guess we had some mutual friends. A rare occasion where I actually knew something.
MMISL started to do well and their debut EP, which came out in 2006 on a label called Function Records, was mind-blowing. None of the bands we knew were doing anything like that. MMISL offered hope that if you had something special and it resonated, then there was a real world out there. I listened to that gorgeous EP on a loop.
Then, in 2007, they released Variations on Swing on Big Scary Monsters.
While I had loved everything that had come before, this was somehow different. These weren't songs that really made sense. It was violently emotional and musically unpredictable. The band themselves swore they didn't understand time signatures, that it was just how stuff was coming out. This kinda sounded like bullshit at the time but it feels true now.
Toby Hayes was a one-of-a-kind vocalist and lyricist. For me, the meaning of his words change every year. The album is uncompromising. It's a near-perfect 10-song album that doesn't sound it like was made for any specific audience, time period, outlet or purpose. Despite its ferociousness, it doesn't feel like a Rock record. Rather, it feels like music for the soul. I don't want bands that sound like MMISL, I want bands that feel like MMISL.
Not long after the album came out, they split up. It was unthinkable at the time, but really, that wasn't the end. The band members individually went on to make lots of music that I ended up loving; in particular, Shoes and Socks Off and Colour led me back to Big Scary Monsters, who delivered heaps more bands for me to love. That Toby continued to make great and creative music post-MMISL was something that I found inspiring too. This proved that one door closing isn't the end of the story, that you can tell your story in different rooms, to different people, as long as you've something worth telling. In a way, MMISL gave me all of this music. I believe that the best music doesn't just claim you as a listener for itself, but instead it gives you more music to listen to. It doesn't mind sharing you.
