FROM THE ASHES

“This is your first gig? Really?”

We were pretty much taken aback by that comment after we first got off stage at Tommy Flynn’s, Camden in September 2010, but put it down to the hard work and intense preparation we had made since Steve finally cobbled us together in August 2009. You could say we have steadily been climbing the gigging scene since then, with appearances at The Enterprise, The Water Rats, The Barfly, and come the 14th of December, The Underworld in Camden Town.

Yet we have also had some amazing times in between, including down and around the rest of Greater London. The New Year began with The Water Rats, where although one of seven bands on the night (hectic to say the least!), we proved we had tightened our set since only a few months previous, including a much acclaimed cowbell solo from our good friend and supporter B to the R to the A girl-Hassett!

February saw us mooch on down to the South-East London Rock scene at the Birdsnest a pub of good vibes, good alcohol and good sound of which you can see a clip of in the video section. This was our first tailor made promoter flyer (see below), one of which is now stuck in our gigging journal (or Gids’ for that matter as he would probably be the one to write a memoir when we are famous): and it looked awesome.

The following months entailed much focus and energy into deciding, recording and mastering our EP, which with the brilliant assistance of Pete at Zed One Studios and McCartney’s Boys down at Abbey Road, produced our pride and joy that was our first release! iTunes went crazy and Amazon couldn’t get enough of it, rising from #64 in the MP3 Rock download chart to #1 in a matter of a week! Needless to say it was the power of our fans that pushed it up there and we hope to replicate the same success in the future.

As May came around we joined among 500 other bands across Europe to compete for some awesome prizes in the Surface Festival and we entertained several venues including 229 The Venue, The Purple Turtle and finally O2 Islington Academy for the Semi-Finals. During this time our promotion became a well oiled machine selling around 70 tickets per performance and our stage craft improved tenfold, giving us more confidence as a whole and with each other. It ended up in us dropping out of these stages but this gave us a huge release from consistently practicing and playing 20min sets and allowed a fresh stream of ideas, music and lyrics between the whole band that has seen us creating, crafting and fine tuning our ‘sound’.

How important is a sound engineer? Damn important for sure, as was testified this August when we we re-visited the SE London rock scene to play the New Cross Inn. The guy was terrific and gave us a real good setup from which we learnt that plying sound guys with alcohol is definitely a sure way to success. We also met some great guys called the Reckoning and we realise that we wanna replicate this for the future finding other bands with a penchant for loud and good harmonies and our general don’t give a fuck attitude.

The pinnacle of our gigging experience and 2011 though has been playing The Barfly, Camden that besides some sound stuff was still a pretty awesome gig. What we found was that were solid, able to mess around on stage and stil deliver a slick and sticky performance. Since then we have been hugely focused by putting in the hours, creating new material whilst re-working old material to make it sounds even more awesome, even more dynamic and even more FTA.