Seedy Underbelly

At the weekend we took up residence in LA for the next 6 weeks. We are working with Nick Launay who produced the Grinderman albums and The Cribs last record, plus a whole load of other great records including Talking Heads and PIL. We are in the middle of rehearsing and reworking the 10 songs that will make up our third studio album proper. It's been a long 2 years of writing, and so many songs rejected. It's been pretty crazy how many songs we have written and how we have whittled it down to 10. But I'm hoping that it will all be worth the pain and that every song on this record will be the best we can do.
Its hot as hell in LA. It reminds me of that Bill Hicks thing about "Every day hot and sunny, what are you a fucking lizard? Back east we're evolving". But it does have a great pool.
The streets are so green in the suburban bits but you soon realize that nothing apart from the Cacti and Aloes are native. Everything else is supported by those pop up sprinklers. Acres of green lawns with no one using them, the only people you see on them are the mexicans cutting them. It literally is another world.
Henry

Hiatus

My brain is frazzled with music. We (the band) have been steadily going mad in our Oxford studio trying to make an amazing record. It is probably the most funnist thing ever but I just don't remind myself of that often enough. The hardest thing is to make it all sound easy. We have written about 25 songs and a bunch of half ideas and we are just honing and honing them until we have something we all think is suoer. It's not like before when we just wrote 14 songs, recorded them all and put nearly all of them on the album. I think its going to be worth the wait.

We are off to meet producers over the next few weeks, I will tell you who it's going to be as soon as I can but I don't want to jinx anything.

We are going to do some gigs in May to try some tunes out and generally blow the cobwebs out. It's only a few but we wanted to do some more off the radar gigs so they can be super cool and special rather than a big long run of endless dates when we haven't even got the album done yet. These dates are the only gigs we have planned so far for this year. We aren't doing any festivals (boo hoo, no muddy guitars to clean off after every weekend).

Here are the dates and info:

Thurs 6th May
Keele, University
www.seetickets.com
01782 733 700

Friday 7th May
Aldershot, The Palace
www.ticketweb.co.uk
08444 771 000

Saturday 8th May
Leicester, Music Café
www.ticketsource.co.uk/shadowpromotionsuk
0116 232 0794