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Thanks for listening, and thanks again for having us, ATH. 2020 was rubbish in so many ways, but at least we made a lot of stuff, and were able to make some good plans for 2021. We hope you have a great holiday and that we get to see you in real life next year.
Finally, here is the latest video from European Sun, a Christmas card for your digital mantelpiece. Rob, Amelia x
One thing we remembered – and re-lived – in 2020 was the spirit of indie DIY. We wrote songs, recorded them at home, took our own pictures, made our own videos. So we decided it was about time to start a label. The first physical releases on Skep Wax will come out next spring. We will be co-releasing the next Swansea Sound single with US label HHBTM and Japanese label Formosa Punk, and we will co-release the new Catenary Wires songs with US label Shelflife. Its great to be working alongside these other labels. We always loved the idea of the International Pop Underground, and in 2021 we hope to breathe new life into it. If we discover we are any good at running a label, we will start thinking about releasing other bands music on the label. Very excited about this!
You can see all the work at Skep Wax Bandcamp.
Follow on the socials: @skepwax
With everything else going on, our main band, The Catenary Wires, took a back seat. We had a bunch of gigs booked in the spring, but obviously they all had to be cancelled. However, the album that we had started putting together at the beginning of the year is now nearly finished. We managed to record a few songs here, before lockdown, but most of it has been recorded since. Fay recorded her keyboards at home, Ian added some extra finger drums, weve done our parts and Andy has played bass and put the whole thing together beautifully. We are lucky to be working with a band who arent just musically gifted, but technically clever too. We are going to release a single early next year, called Mirrorball. Its the story of two lonely individuals who attend a retro 80s disco, and are forced to re-live the horror of the worst music of that decade but then make eye contact across the dancefloor. Yes, its a love song!
We dont have a video ready for the single yet, but we thought we might include a live performance we did for the Wedding Presents At The Edge Of The Sofa virtual festival. These songs will be on the new album: they are The Overview Effect and Like the Rain.
Follow them @catenarywires. Buy music HERE.
One of the last gigs we went to before lockdown was Penelope Isles, and I was bowled over. The band is based around two siblings from the Isle of Man, Jack and Lily Wolter, alongside two friends (Becky and Jack) they made on moving to Brighton. Their live show is relaxed and funny, noisy but packed full of great tunes. You cant always tell which out of Jack or Lily is singing, but it doesn’t matter. Their first album Until The Tide Creeps In was released by Bella Union. Leipzig is one of my favourites of their songs. – Amelia
Heavenly is not new obviously, it was the band we were in in the 1990s. But lockdown also gave us the time to delve into the storage boxes in our cupboards and get a bit nostalgic. Ian from Damaged Goods Records had suggested putting out a compilation of material a while ago. We thought it would be good to collect up all the singles and make an album out of them. Some of those singles are very hard to get hold of now. The process of putting the album together was great in that it also brought us back in touch with people wed known back then, and reminded us of the amazing scenes we were lucky to be part of. Sarah Records in Bristol, determinedly releasing music for the love of it in the face of contempt from the major labels and the London journalists who serviced them; K Records and the Olympia scene generally, where Beat Happening were creating great music and where Riot Grrrl was coming into being. Plus the vibrant indie scenes in Europe and Japan. Hearing the old songs brought that all back to us. We got hold of some old footage that was shot in the Capitol Theatre in Olympia in the 90s, and we edited it into a video for P.U.N.K. Girl. Its archive material, but it captures something of the time.
Buy from Damaged Goods
The last live thing we did in the days before gigs stopped was to sing with Pete Astor (The Loft, The Weather Prophets). Pete had arranged for a dozen or so friends to sing a cover version of one of their favourite songs. (We did Jackson, with apologies to June Carter and Johnny Cash.) The gig was to promote Petes new album You Made Me. Anyway, since then, he has produced two singles as The Attendant. Its spoken word, with an excellent soundtrack. It feels like Pete has been on a parallel course to us creating new pop music, but also experimenting in the place where poetry and music meet. – Rob
Stream the Attendant HERE
This is a venture that had been developing slowly over the past couple of years. Our friend Darren Pilcher, who lives just up the road, has developed an amazing system for creating soundscapes. He takes samples of real sounds: bunches of leaves, shingle, a church bell, the ambient hum of a power station, and then applies reverb, delay and loops to create potent textures and atmospheres. Wed started improvising material with him Rob playing heavy basslines and Amelia adding all sorts of other things we have lying around at home: harmonium, melodica, glockenspiel, omichord, ukulele, clarinet. We got into the habit of meeting up on Thursday evenings, creating a few tracks, and then throwing them away as it was more fun to make new ones a week later than to do anything twice.
Then we met poet Nancy Gaffield and got talking. She was interested in writing a series of poems about our local environment in Kent the ancient woods, the marshes and the shingle at Dungeness, and these were the environments wed had in mind with our music. Leaves and shingle foraged from those environments were already part of the music, buried in Darrens sound loops. We decided to combine forces and create Wealden a half hour of poetry and soundscape. The recording was made just before lockdown. We would have performed the piece live in the summer, but that was impossible. So we made a film instead. This is the final section of it.
Another event we had to cancel this year was our Words and Music At The Skep Festival we host in our barn. We had a great line-up of poets and musicians booked in for May, but obviously it never happened. We did a virtual mini-version of it on YouTube, which was fun, but not as fun as the real thing would have been. One of the bands we were most excited about seeing was Panic Pocket, a female duo (Selphie and Nat) from London. This is “Pizza In My Pants.” – Amelia
Song features on Never Gonna Happen EP; stream/buy it HERE.
After a period of gestation that lasted several decades (Rob and Steve have been friends since they were 14), we made an album as European Sun. We were just finishing the album as we first went into lockdown. This was the first time the two of us had arranged and produced a set of someone elses songs, but Steve was very trusting. He is still talking to us, and WIAIWYA were happy to put the album out, so it clearly wasnt a disaster.
In the summer, during one of those periods when it was ok to meet up with friends, we all went to our local seaside town, Hastings, for the day. We admired the sea, ate chips and made a video for Favourite Day, one of the singles off the album. Rob decided he wanted to make a set of European Sun videos that would, over time, become a collection of cards that could be put on a digital mantelpiece. This is the first: a seaside picture postcard.
I’ve only just got into this band, Snails, but I think they sound lovely. I am probably sentimental about them too because they come from Bristol, my home town. They are a band Id really like to see live in 2021. – Rob
This song appears on Hard-Wired; released by Glass Modern Records. Buy it HERE.
