Too right it's cold outside....

What a winter - I haven't seen one like that before in all my freakin' life. It felt like the end of days with all of those 'day after tomorrow' styled headlines in the media. I'm glad we have made it through the apocalypse as a functioning society still.

Things have been relatively quiet over the Christmas and snowstorm period, however Spring is teasing us just around the corner, the daffodils are peaking out the ground and things are starting to heat up. We finally have our first gig in London booked, almost a year to the day since our first ever gig. This show will be at the Hope and Anchor in Islington on March 16th. We're quite excited about that - it's nice to be able to play a famous little venue for our first london gig too, ala Joy Division.

We have a few other things going on in March too, a Balcony tv shoot is scheduled (although the guys at balcony tv are sadly suffering the effects of the financial recession, so we shall see, it may be another time), and also a spot at oxfringe festival at the wheatsheaf, where Bob Harris will give us the once over. Also we have gig at malmaison, which sounds a little strange playing at a hotel, but we're going to play very loudly anyway. Also a little acoustic slot at cafe tarifa to get involved in.

Our main little slice of fun pie over the last couple of months was the BBC Introducing session at BBC Oxford in January. We had to strip back our sound very much but we're quite pleased with the way the songs worked - via a little tinkering - acoustically. The songs we recorded are on our myspace, where there is a video of a recording of the deer song too. Being interviewed was surprisingly okay too, although I managed to say one thing which was a bit stupid...i probably won't learn from this though. At all. I know i won't.




Very much looking forward to band practice tonight, it's been a couple of weeks since the last one. Ruben is hyper-busy in London at the moment, learning how to design buildings, but he's back tonight. We've got some exciting new material to work on, it's sounding good and it feels like we're still going forwards in our development. Should be a productive practice tonight, as our collective creative juices seem to be a splashing about all over the shop at the moment.

Recently I went to Cardiff, capital of the Welsh, to see Alphabet Backwards on their first nationwide tour. The Three Nation Tour as it was known. I spent a couple of days in the company of my good friends there, saw the sights of Cardiff and generally had a fair few drinks to celebrate the fact I was not in work and was with people i love. Their tour went really well, it was a great show in Cardiff and i was glad to have had a bit of a break from work to join them. I really want to get on a tour bus now and sleep on some floors. I feel like i'm still really a naiive little band virgin until I've had the pleasure of a week of back-knack and ginsters. I also saw Jonquil at the Lexington in Islington last weekend, which is a cracking venue. The place was buzzing and jam packed...it really felt like quite a special thing is about to kick off for them...fingers crossed.



I have mainly listened to Regina Spektor the last couple of days, a bit of Simon and Garfunkel, and George Harrison. Also new Jonquil tracks...which are forcing the world to bring on the sunshine. xo

This is instrumental

Hi there

With sliced up fingers and sprained wrists, we battle on regardless.

Here is a quick post concerning a song we wrote a few months ago. The song has no words, it is an instrumental, and since we wrote it it's kind of been thrown on the slag heap really, but I thought it was worth posting here as it's got some really ace bits to it. A little bit BSP meets DCFC. The beginning and end in particular...pretty sure they will see the light of day in another song sometime, but who knows. We're still writing and coming out with what feels like better and better stuff all the time, so perhaps this shall be consigned to the dustbin of history, other than on this blog here.

It has no title. And i can't be arsed to think of one at the moment. So it will be known as 'No Name #1', in homage to elliott smith.

Enjoys! x

'No Name #1'

God is a concept by which we measure our pain

I am listening to Lennon tonight. I had kind of forgotten about that chap. I guess there is a massive influence of his in Minor Coles, despite my Beatles-obsessive phase being redundant now. Although, of course, once you truly immerse yourself in The Beatles then it remains an obsession in some capacity for the rest of your life. I can't call it redundant yet, really.

So I came back to him tonight. I felt like listening to something real and pure. Emo if you like, before emo was even a concept in proper Emo bands like Sunny Day Real Estate's mothers minds. I've listened to a lot of the Smiths recently and although I love The Smiths and Morriseys lyrics, it's time for something a bit more to the point. And for that, I guess Lennon is one of the first real original Emo's.

The song 'Mother' being the prime example. Lennon lost his mother twice - first as a toddler when his mother gave him up (abandoned him, to put it in blunt terms) and put him in the care of his Aunt Mimi. Then, just after he and his mother had reunited after a decade and a half of having only seen eachother a few times, and just as he had finally developed a relationship and bond with his own mother.......she was knocked over and killed by a car. 'Mother, you had me....but i never had you'

You can hear at the end of this song everything was flooding out of his head about this. You can picture the scene in the vocal booth. You can imagine how his face would have looked (not quite so carefree as the photo below, mind).....just pure and sheer emotion, primeval, unforced and utterly honest. In part this was in-line with the primal therapy he was experimenting with at the time, which was an un-conventional psychiactric attempt at ruthlessly purging childhood memories and 'moving on' through the expression of animal like emotions. However, to put all of that real emotion into song and make it feel unforced and brutally honest is something I find pretty special. So it is probably in many respects one of my favourite John Lennon songs.

'Mother'

gypsy chic

I never realised how cute Stevie Nicks bloody well was, least not until I watched a documentary on Fleetwood Mac the other night. Woweeee. Gypsy chic.

She was only five foot high, yet commanded a stage as if she owned the place, (with the help of six inch heels) and with a mystical bewitching aura about her. A romanticism too. Bohemian romantic and ethereal. Fuck me was she good.

I guess the only modern day comparison i can think of is Natasha Khan.

I learnt to play the song 'Never Going Back Again' this evening. That's quite a proud moment in my life.

Up the Mac.

I'm going to put The Chain on again now and think of Nigel Mansell's tache. xxx

New song

Howdy, so last night at band practice we wrote a new song, it is here now for your ears. The recording is an ambient recording so the quality is a tad ropey, but we can't be perfect all the time. Also need more lyrics perhaps and more in-tune guitars. But hey ho. Given that it was fresh outta the box last night and written in about 30 minutes, we'll work on it more. The best ones always tend to come out the quickest though. Hope you can dig it (or imagine yourself diggin it when it's a bit more practiced and finished). x

Tell Me Friday

Oh haii there

Oh hai there. It's been a while since the last blog update, but we Coles' have been keeping busy. We've been frolicking about on farms and rolling around drunk on village greens and we also now have some songs recorded with the full band, which are available on our myspace. Do check out. In all we recorded 4 tracks: The Deer Song; 5,4,3,2,1; Last Days of The Summer; and Small Rooms.

Hopefully we will record Little Miss Sunshine too, and once that song is nailed down and all 5 tracks are mastered we shall endeavour to do a little pressing of a CD EP, which people can listen to on their hi-fi ghettoblasters from here all the way to the Don Valley to their blessed hearts content.

The recording session was conducted upon Hill Farm in Steventon, at Truck Studios. Hill Farm, famous for it's Truck Festival and awesome sunsets and drunken moments of fun, is a strange place when there is no festival happening. However there was an amateur rally going on at the time to provide some distraction. And distracting it was, because their savage little souped up Vauxhall Novas were quite loud and were blatantly disregarding the local speed limit.

Joe Bennett, who used to be in Goldrush (and could probably be called 'Mr Truck'), and currently plays in Dusty and The Dreaming Spiers, put his skills to the test by making us relatively novice recording artists bash out 4 songs in just one day. Which I think we did pretty well all told, and I'm quite proud of them as our first tracks. We intended to essentially try to create a really decent demo, and I think we've managed that. Joe helped massively and made us all feel at ease and confident in what we were trying to do, so big thanks to Joe. He also drilled into us knowledge of the quite shocking amount of wasted energy that is used when a kettle is re-boiled soon after it has already boiled. Something I have taken on board and notified my good friend Ciara about when she tried to reboil an already boiled kettle at work the other day. I demanded it was not reboiled. Lessons have been learnt.

We spent the first day amongst little mountains of carbonated soft drinks and confectionary and I genuinely felt like my stomach might explode due to the fizzyness of it all. I also had a secret weapon though, some baby bell cheese, which helped regulate the acidity a little, and i was surprised at my subconscious cleverness with regards to that. We ate in style in the evening however, with the underappreciated al fresco dining that is pot noodles sat on a hay bail. After that was eaten, i pretty much felt like a badgers arsehole. Next time, i'm going to be better prepared with regards to foodstuffs.

Amongst all this frivolous junk food consumption we managed to record the songs in pretty swift style - something we needed to do in order to get the 4 tracks completed in time. Martin, who plays the guitar with the 4 chunky strings, had to work during the day, so he didn't arrive until around half 8. Because martin has skills akin to that of an experienced wizard however, he nailed his bass lines all in one take. Job done in about 10 minutes for Martin. Heroic performances.

The second day in the studio consisted of a few finishing touches and the mixing - the 'sitting around a lot and stroking the beard' phase. We basically made sure that the part in the song Small Rooms where Ruben has made the sound of 'mario collecting gold coins' was at a nice volume, and other things like that. We added a few more vocal tracks and some handclaps here and there too, and the icing on the cake was provided when Joe got involved with his trumpet......and created a beautiful, melancholy, lonely trumpet line over the top of the deer song. Job done.

Within one week we had our first radio play with the results of our work in the studio, which was quite surprising and made us all do pretty epic smiles. Apparently BBC6 are going to whip The Deer Song on too this week.

We hope you like the songs. We are writing some new tracks at the moment, a couple of which we will air at our next gig, which is also our first headline show, at the Wheatsheaf on the 20th October.

In other news, with regards to friends and bands and stuff, it looks like I may be doing another temp stint in the hit band We Aeronauts for a while, which should be fun (providing of course it doesnt clash with the day job of the coles). The Aeronauts are currently recording their debut EP. It will probably come out in the new year so that they can be in all of those top 10 artists to watch for 2010 lists....as Greg Aeronaut so humbly put it in a radio interview - which he gets away with, because it's probably true.

Alphabet Backwards have their mini album for sale on itunes now too, if you want a nice slice of sunshine cider and shagging to get you through the bleak midwinter. Jonquil meanwhile have been spreading calypso vibes through continental europe and are currently recording some amazing stuff in a basement in the West Bank town of Jericho, which is literally going to fuck you all up with feelings of wow. Their blog is here.

The Gullivers also have a beautiful, fragile and gorgeous EP, Legerdemain (which translates as sleight of hand, I googled it) just out, which I'd recommend indulging in. Oh and Birminghams finest NME stars Ace Bushy Striptease, who have helped us get our first gig in Birmingham in November, did this thing, which is just far too wonderful to not CLICK HERE (stick with it....)


Take care of yourself, and take care of the ducks
Mark x

When you play a kitchen this small, someones going to get a guitar in their face

The Friday before truck was outstanding. We played our second house party gig (and 9th gig in total, wow, we are getting used to this). Big thanks go out to Ben and his housemates for putting this show on in his little kitchen. Another one of the series of Les Editions De Minuit gigs that Ben has put on at his house over the last few months. Sadly, being that Ben has now graduated from studentsville, this was the last of the Kitchen Gigs which have been so much fun every month recently.

A crowd of about 40 were present and rammed in little corners and peeking through little windows to watch all the bands play.

We even got to play our first encore.

Ruben sported a fucking fantastic moustache, which i was shocked and saddened to see he then shaved it off for truck the next day.

My mate Ceri from Liverpool came down to join in the fun and now never wants to leave. Almost. He might move down here someday anyway. Big respect to him for bringing all the RUM.

Jody and Hugo Jonquil came along to psyche themselves up for the Jonquil houseparty on the 15th at the secret location. (PS Can't fucking wait for that)

Anna Log played an amazing set with various members of her day-job band we aeronauts helping her out.

Mark and Grillo gulliver coined my new nickname, Steve-o, and proceeded to shout that out a lot.

We missed UTE a lot, because they couldnt make it sadly. Last time they played in this kitchen, i had a spiritual awakening.

We got drunk and mingled and chatted, I think.

And all was gooood.

Thank you for mr daniel ershov (legend) for the photos x