Leicester, best known for crisps and Gary Lineker, has a new reason for a visit – a groove-ridden, slightly psychedelic duo / trio including former Viva Stereo man Stuart Gray. With that and their album rather well-reviewed in is this music? the time seemed ripe to grab Stuart and ask him to introduce the band…
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Who?
Gregg Hunt – Guitar, vocals
Stuart Gray – Keyboards, vocals
Helena Hauff – vocals
When?
We started in 2012. Quite a casual thing. I knew Gregg as friends and he had some songs so we got together and I put some keyboards on. We released an album through our own label but didn’t really push it and in fact didn’t really do anything for about 6 months. In mid 2013 I then helped put on a gig by 90s shoegazers The Telescopes and asked Gregg if he fancied playing live as one of the support acts. We got back together and played the gig and then decided to re-release the album and it started getting positive reviews which spurned us on to get more gigs and record more. A limited edition 7” came out last year and our second album has just been released. We have a 12” mastered by Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember from Spacemen 3 due out through a German label in June and making our Scottish debut at the Shuffle Down all-dayer in Larbert in May where we will also be playing alongside The Gravity Waves, a new band made up of the remaining members of Viva Stereo – cue sabotage…
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Where?
I was in Viva Stereo. Moved down to Leicester, tried hard to keep VS going but ultimately life gets in the way and the distance didn’t help. Met Gregg whilst drunk – he told me had some songs, I told him I had some synths, we bonded over the love of Loop, Spacemen 3, Velvets, Neu, Joy Division. More recently we’ve been collaborating with German experimental electro artist Helena Hauff who has been putting vocals on our latest recordings. Other highlights so far have been supporting Sonic Boom’s ‘Spectrum’ and playing a gig London where the crowd were actually really appreciative, something neither of us had experienced before! We’re still based in Leicester.
What?
Motorik-driven psychedelic horror pop sums us up! We’ve also been called the psychedelic Chas’n’Dave but that’s maybe not as flattering depending on what your view is! We’re not reinventing the wheel. We record only on 8-track so limited ourselves to what we record.
Why?
We’re both getting on a bit now! I won’t divulge ages but I reckon as a duo we’re probably close to the same combined age of One Direction. So ultimately it’s something we do cos it’s something to do. We’re proud of the music but we’ve both been in bands in the past where we’ve to a certain extent ‘chased the dream’ and we both can’t be arsed with that now. I don’t want it to sound arrogant because its not that but we do just put things out and see what happens. We know the music will only appeal to that small number of people who like repetitive droney psych music. Some people don’t get it (they’ve told us!) and that suits us fine. We also pretty much decide what we want to do – we rarely go looking for gigs but enjoy playing live and we’re quite happy releasing our own stuff – although if someone came along who wanted to release it for us we’d listen. We meet up for practices but sometimes don’t even plug in and spend the time chatting about music, football, politics and probably the weather, yes it is that exciting being in Children of Leir but that’s how we like it.
The band play the Shuffledown mini-festival in Larbert on May 23rd. More at www.shuffledown.co.uk or see a short piece in the Falkirk Herald
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