The band might boast a few familiar faces, but don’t be fooled – Dr Cosmo and chums make music quite unlike anything that the members might make in their day jobs. Psychedelic sci-fi pop might be a starting point in trying to describe them, but no, let’s have Stu Kidd try to pigeonhole their sound…

Who?

Joe Kane and Stu Kidd. Between the two of us we cover everything… although Joe does ALL the bass and Stu does ALL the drums. On our forthcoming album ‘Beyond The Silver Sea’ we introduced Adam Smith to the fray to add narration in between tracks. When we play live he becomes our ‘Bez’ but from a more ‘performance art’ angle and plays a bit of bass. And Paul Kelly from How To Swim has also just started playing keys with us in a live capacity.

DR COSMOS TAPE LAB HI RES - MW2015-3

When?

We have been recording together in Joe’s bedroom for the last two years. In that time we have recorded three albums and three singles. The whole thing came about after we went to see Todd Rundgren at the ABC and we left early because he was a bit shit. We retired to Nice’n’Sleazys where we sat knocked back a few ciders and decided to record some stuff together in the spirit of what we loved about Todd Rundgren coupled with our current obsession with McCartney 2 and Chas’n’ Dave. We also decided to do everything on a Tascam 414mk2 cassette four track.

When?

I guess you could say we formed in Nice’n’Sleazys (how very Glasgow…) and set about recording in Joe’s bedroom in Woodlands over the summer of 2012. He’s a home recording genius. In every sense of the word. The ideas and songs pretty quickly morphed into a concept album after we hit upon the idea of stringing a story together using titles from obscure sci-fi novels to make our own sci-fi ‘audio’ novel. The lover of sci-fi novels among you will note quite a lot of titles on our ‘Beyond The Silver Sea’ album come from there. To be honest I don’t think either of us have ever read any of them…. The idea came from reading that The Monkees song ‘Door Into Summer’ came from a sci-Fi novel but bore no relation whatsoever to the novel. We thought we’d go one better and make a whole album using titles….

What?

drcosmosilverseaalbum
We have an album out already called ‘Ever Evolving Lounge’ which was named by a fan after we ran a competition on our Facebook page, and as mentioned above we have our second album (although the first one we recorded) coming out on Sugarbush Records on the 30th March. It’s a limited edition of 300 silver vinyl and we’re really happy someone wanted to release it on vinyl. As soon as we had finished recording it we knew it was made for a vinyl release. Hopefully people will devote some time to listening to it as a whole, or they might not get some of the lyrical references/content, although saying that, we think most of the songs stand up on their own. We also have another album, ‘Cosmic Tone’, which we are very close to finishing already and it includes a 21 minute pop opera about a man who gets possessed by pyjamas he buys for a quid in a charity shop. We reckon this will be a summer release as it’s also got some pretty sunny tunes on there. We also have an idea that we would love to turn it into a short film. Any filmamkers out there fancy it? Haha.

To sum up Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab in 5 words I’d go with
POP, UPLIFTING, BONKERS, MELODIC, ADVENTUROUS. I’d maybe give you five different words tomorrow though…

Why?

We make music together because ultimately we have a really good time writing together. We have a lot of fun. We share similar tastes, make each other laugh a lot while we’re writing and I guess we wanted to make the kind of records we still want to hear. You get lucky sometimes with songwriting partnerships, and as far as we are concerned, this one works! We are both fairly prolific writers and that night in Sleazys we both agreed that we don’t have much of an outlet for what we do, so if we combined our efforts together it would probably be pretty good. We both have a bit of a leaning towards the wackier, freakier side of pop music and that has really brought out a lot of interesting directions in terms of collaboration. Writing songs on your own can be fun and you can learn a lot from the process, but collaborating with someone is where you really learn. You can open up a lot more because it’s easier to ignore your inner critic when someone else tells you that ‘those lyrics are awesome’ or ‘that wee chord sequence into the chorus is brilliant’. You will also end up with a song a lot more interesting because it has different ideas on there. One suggestion can trigger a whole series of events that can take you places you would never have went on your own. That’s the magic of it. We’re both as enthusiastic about it as we were two years ago, so until that wanes (which it has no sign of doing yet) we’ll keep enjoying writing and recording together and putting out records as long as people are still interested in hearing them I suppose!
The next stage for Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab? writing and recording the sequel to ‘Beyond The Silver Sea…’ we already have a story for it…. We’ll probably do a trilogy. All good sci-fi stories are trilogies!

‘Beyond The Silver Sea…’ is available now!