nowhere

Ride flew on a kaleidoscopic vapour trail in the waking dream of this moody melodic haze. The group was formed in the summer of 1988 when schoolchums Andy Bell and Mark Gardener got together with fellow Oxfordshire College student Laurence Colbert and friend Steve Queralt, who worked at the local Our Price record shop. They recorded a demo which found its way to Alan McGee of Creation Records through Jim Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Gardener reveals: "I quickly sort of became aware of Creation when we were at art school. This is how ridiculous it was. I remember being at art school and we taking our art history A levels or something because I'd botched it up at school, and I remember coming back home to put a sort of pasty in the oven or something, and it was a guy from Warner Bros. saying that we want to speak to your band, we'd like to sign your band. And I just went back and completely botched up the exam again, because I obviously I just sort of felt like, 'Well, I won't be needing my art history exam now.'...It was only a matter of weeks. I think we ended up on a tour with Soup Dragons of all people, and that was when McGee started coming on the road. So it was all that little period at art school. Also, you have to understand that me and Andy were at school, and we knew Steve from school, but up to the time we went to art school, that's where who should we meet at art school but one of the most amazing drummers, which is Loz. So it was all coming into place. You have your dream lineup in a sense, so things were feeling great."

In 1990, they released three EP's Ride, Play and Fall, all of which made it onto the UK singles chart. 'Nowhere' was recorded live in the studio and features Mark Gardener on vocals and guitar; Andy Bell on vocals, guitar, piano, and harmonica; Steve Queralt on bass; and Laurence Colbert on drums. The album came together in London with producer Marc Waterman at Blackwing Studios, was mixed by Alan Moulder at Swanyard Studios, and remastered by Rick Webb at Abbey Road Studios.

Bell says: "Every time we came back to a town, we were playing a bigger venue. We got signed after six shows and there were a few major labels after us, it was a bit of a whirlwind...I love Nowhere and I'm really proud of it. I do find it hard to listen to, though, because my vocals aren't that strong. Sometimes I think I'd like to go back in time and spend more time getting the vocals in tune and sounding better. But I'm sure that would spoil it for the people who love the record as it is...I think that underneath the shoegazing sound, there is a classic rock band structure holding everything together. If anything gives the music longevity, it's probably that."

'Nowhere' reached number eleven on the British album chart and has gained in stature over the years as a pillar of the shoegaze movement. Gardener considers: "Obviously, with Ride and being involved with Creation and Sire, and the other bands that were around at the time, I feel very quite proud now to be in the middle of it and, to look back on it, I have to say that I have no regrets about any of it, and I'd sort of do it all again if I had that time again. There's not a lot I would change about it. At the time, you're always thinking, maybe you can change this, change that, but actually I kind of understand now that there's a great sort of freshness, rawness, and sort of naiveté about it, which is very sort of natural, and that's what really I hear in it now. And I think it really helps it sound fresh, you know? ... Creation was very happy because, for the first time they were starting to see a band on their label hitting the charts. So there was expectation around us. Alan McGee was coming in quite a lot as well when we were recorded Nowhere. So I think that we all felt that, and then we just tried to do the best we could. But because we had been playing so many shows, and we toured a lot around that time —your small shows, your little bars, all over the country, and I think we dipped into Europe and Scandinavia and stuff —I think actually we were probably a lot more competent than we even sort of realized at that point ... An art school foundation year was about sending you after that to a university to do an art master's degree or something like that. At a certain point, throughout the foundation—I was probably the first one—I was just like, 'Fuck going to do our art masters, let's just do this band.' So you make those choices, and on the outside of that, you have like your parents just despairing, and everyone just going, 'Oh my god, what are these guys doing?' At that time it could have all gone wrong, but we made certain choices, individually and collectively, and then it all just started to work, so it just vindicated the fact that we made the right choice. We followed our dreams, and that's the thing. It's kind of a cliché, but we did, and it worked out for us. So that's kind of what I say to anyone now, whether they're trying to play football or be in a band or whatever. Dare to dream. You can actually achieve it."




http://ridemusic.net/


http://www.markgardener.com/


http://andybellmusic.com/










"Vapour Trail"




"Taste" made it to number twenty-four on the US modern rock tracks chart.  









 'Nowhere' 
full album:




All songs were equally credited to Ride (Andy Bell, Loz Colbert, Mark Gardener, Steve Queralt). Lyrics by Andy Bell, except where noted.

1. "Seagull"   sung by Gardener and Bell 6:09
2. "Kaleidoscope"   sung by Gardener with Bell 3:01
3. "In a Different Place"   sung by Gardener 5:29
4. "Polar Bear"   sung by Gardener 4:45
5. "Dreams Burn Down"   sung by Gardener 6:04
6. "Decay" (Mark Gardener)    sung by Gardener 3:35
7. "Paralysed"   sung by Bell 5:34
8. "Vapour Trail"   sung by Bell 4:18

bonus
9. "Taste" (Mark Gardener)    sung by Gardener 3:17
10. "Here and Now"   sung by Bell 4:26
11. "Nowhere" (Loz Colbert)   sung by Bell 5:23






Live at Reading Festival 1990


Polar Bear
Seagull
Taste
Dreams Burn Down
Like A Daydream
Drive Blind
Vapour Trail
Perfect Time
Chelsea Girl




The 'Today Forever' EP went to number fourteen on the UK singles chart and was included on the reissue




all songs composed by Bell, Colbert, Gardener, Queralt and sung by Gardener and Bell

12. "Unfamiliar"   5:03
13. "Sennen"   4:23
14. "Beneath"   4:06
15. "Today"   6:26




 Live at the Roxy, 10 April 1991  
bonus disk




01. Polar Bear 00:00
02. Seagull 05:03
03. Unfamiliar 10:53
04. Dreams Burn Down 15:10
05. Like A Daydream 20:25
06. Vapour Trail 23:07
07. In A Different Place 26:34
08. Perfect Time 32:05
09. Taste 35:27
10. Nowhere 38:45
11. Chelsea Girl 46:57
12. Drive Blind 50:50

halcyon digest

Deerhunter unfolded undertones of retrograde symmetry in a basement scene where sweetness comes suffering.    After four albums   (Turn It Up Faggot  in 2005,   Cryptograms  in 2007,   Microcastle   and  Weird Era Cont.  in 2008)  and two EP's   (Fluorescent Grey  in 2007 and  Rainwater Cassette Exchange in 2009) the Atlanta, Georgia ambient punk group had taken a hiatus while members of the band pursued other projects (Bradford Cox recorded Logos with Atlas Sound, Josh Fauver went back to work at his Army of Bad Luck record label, Moses Archuleta started culinary school, and Lockett Pundt put out The Floodlight Collective as Lotus Plaza).   They got back together in January of 2010 to tour.  



'Halcyon Digest' was recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, Georgia and Notown Sound in Marietta, Georgia with Ben H. Allen and Henry Barbe co-producing the sessions with Deerhunter.   Th album credits  Moses Archuleta on drums;  Bradford J. Cox on lead vocals and guitar;   Joshua Fauver on bass;  and  Lockett Pundt on guitar and lead vocals;   with   Bill Oglesby on saxophone;  and  Paul McPherson on 12 string guitar.    

Cox confesses:    “We recorded Halcyon Digest in two weeks.  For most bands that would be impossible, but for us those two weeks felt like two years! I don’t understand why things need to take so long...I’m a simple person.  I sit at home and play gui­tar, making demos. I do our graphic design and typog­raphy for our releases. I devote my life to all of these little details, so there’s not really any room for me to develop a social life.  I don’t have a private life to speak of, really. Everything is out there in the music ... The album’s title is a reference to a collection of fond memories and even invented ones, like my friendship with Ricky Wilson or the fact that I live in an abandoned Victorian autoharp factory. The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that’s kind of sad...It has a lot to do with the way people romanticize the past, even if it was horrific.”

To promote the album, the band encouraged fans to print out a flyer from their website and post it around their towns and take pictures.  Cox admits to "...always being fascinated with the ephemera of 70's – 80's artrock in record stores like Wuxtry in Athens where I hung out as a kid or Wax 'N Facts in Atlanta. You'd see a photocopied faded B-52's flyer next to a poster for Lou Reed or XTC. It was like an artpunk scrapbook on those walls. It made my head spin. Who are these people? Who are the fucking Residents with these weird-ass eyeball faces?"


'Halcyon Digest' went to number eighty-four in Japan, seventy-nine in the UK, thirty-seven in the US, twenty-three in Norway, thirteen on the US rock album chart, nine on the Belgian heatseeker album chart, eight on the UK independent album chart, seven on the US independent album chart, and number five on the Dutch alternative album chart.  






http://deerhuntermusic.com/


http://halcyondigest.com/





"Helicopter"




"Memory Boy"






'Halcyon Digest' 
full album:


All songs written and composed by Bradford Cox except Desire Lines and Fountain Stairs by Lockett Pundt. 


1. "Earthquake"   5:00
2. "Don't Cry"   2:49
3. "Revival"   2:13
4. "Sailing"   4:59
5. "Memory Boy"   2:09
6. "Desire Lines"   6:44
7. "Basement Scene"   3:41
8. "Helicopter"   4:58
9. "Fountain Stairs"   2:38
10. "Coronado"   3:19
11. "He Would Have Laughed"   7:29

bonus tracks
12. "Rhythm"   2:56
13. "Colorscale"   5:10

live at The Interface


- Desire lines
- Fountain stairs
- Helicopter/He would have laughed
- Memory boy

crocodiles

Echo & the Bunnymen took a chance and kept things dark with the sound of something burning in this moody blue rescue.   The band was formed in Liverpool by Ian McCulloch after he left A Shallow Madness (which eventually became The Teardrop Explodes) over increasing creative tensions with Julian Cope.   The new group started out as a trio with McCulloch, guitarist Will Sergeant, and bass player Les Pattinson with a drum machine.  McCulloch recalls:    “We had a gig coming up but I don’t think we had a solid name at the time, and a friend of ours kept coming up with the funniest ones. We thought Echo & The Bunnymen was just as stupid as the others, but it was the most memorable, I thought, and it was great for the time. I said yeah, that’s the one. And still, after all these years, people know it.”

Sergeant says:  “We had this mate [Smelly Elly] who kept suggesting all these names like The Daz Men or Glisserol and the Fan Extractors. Echo and the Bunnymen was one of them. I thought it was just as stupid as the rest ... We have been called all kinds of things "New Psychedelia", "Post Modern", "Post Punk", "Bleak Northern". You don’t really take much notice when you are in the eye of the storm. I just combine sounds into a form I like and let others worry about what to call it...It is a bit on the strange side, but we had a lot of cool things going on back then. The punk attitude kept us away from churning out crap or doing anything too naff, so we were wise to the whole big-label London attitude early on, and could see that people would step on your face to reach the next rung on the career ladder with no regrets. To most of these people it never was about being into music, it was knowing what would sell to drippy kids (no change there then). I am not prepared to play that game, maybe we would be a lot richer now if we had. "Hey Bill, pass the firelighters!"

Their debut single "The Pictures on My Wall" came out on Bill Drummond & David Balfe's Zoo Records with McCulloch/Cope collaboration "Read It in Books" as the b-side.    Their debut album was recorded at Eden Studios in London and at Rockfield Studios near Monmouth.  'Crocodiles' was produced by Bill Drummond and David Balfe, while Ian Broudie had already produced their second single "Rescue" (with "Pride").   The sessions featured   Ian McCulloch on vocals and guitar;   Will Sergeant on lead guitar;   Les Pattinson on bass;   and new member  Pete de Freitas on drums.    The album went to number thirty-six in New Zealand and seventeen in the UK.  

McCulloch muses:   "Speaking on behalf of Will, Les, Pete & myself I’d say [three albums that have influenced us are] The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and The Doors ... [The darkness in our songs] probably came from my childhood. It wasn’t a terribly dark childhood but it was one where I had to live with a dad who was a compulsive gambler. And I never would say that to be negative towards him; he’s still me hero. But he had certain problems, and when you’re compulsive – whether it’s gambling or drink or drugs or whatever – it kind of becomes the fabric of your life. Even small life becomes big when there’s a web of problems. So I think that affected me. There was a sadness there that, even though I didn’t really know it when I was 19, I was already trying to deal with it through my song-writing ... I think it gets easier to resist writing for writing’s sake and therefore feels completely natural and unforced. From day one we wrote completely instinctively and never formulaically, approaching each new song as an artistic step forward. Obviously we knew we had, which Crocodiles, our debut album, created our own overall sound and style, but we’ve always tried to stretch the parameters of our song writing. So, yes by not forcing them the songs seem to come to you spontaneously."







http://www.bunnymen.com/








"Rescue"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0NODlOX4Pc
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32clt_echo-and-the-bunnymen-rescue_music

Echo and The Bunnymen - Rescue by epb21


"Crocodiles"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrSrOd7XDdE



"Villiers Terrace"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Sewv2S5lA








'Crocodiles' 
full album:

https://myspace.com/thebunnymen/music/album/crocodiles-9813486

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4D1C9FD425AFC2CB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_Zqqc4P9Y




All tracks written by Will Sergeant, Ian McCulloch, Les Pattinson and Pete de Freitas except where noted.

Side one
"Going Up" – 3:57
"Stars Are Stars" – 2:45
"Pride" – 2:41
"Monkeys" – 2:49
"Crocodiles" – 2:38
Side two
"Rescue" – 4:26
"Villiers Terrace" – 2:44
"Pictures on My Wall" (Sergeant, McCulloch, Pattinson) – 2:52
"All That Jazz" – 2:43
"Happy Death Men" – 4:56

bonus
"Do It Clean" – 2:44
"Read It in Books" (McCulloch, Cope) – 2:31
"Simple Stuff" – 2:38

sixteen tambourines

The Three O'Clock rang out from the paisley underground garage with the psychedelic punk of this power pop paragon.  The band began as a trio called the Salvation Army with Michael Quercio (Ricky Start) on lead vocals and bass; John Blazing on guitar; and Troy Howell on drums. They released a single with 'Mind Gardens' and 'Happen Happened' on a small independent label.  Quercio reveals:    "Our original 45 was released in the fall of 1981. We were all still in high school or just graduated. It was on the Minutemen’s label which was called New Alliance. There was a place where a lot of bands played called Alpine Village in Torrance that’s kind of like a German biergarten. Anyways, D. Boon from the Minutemen saw us there and after our show he came up and asked if we had anything and we had just made this little demo tape that we made with money we saved up from our parents and stuff. He liked two of the songs and said he wanted to put them out and he put them out on his label as a 45."

Blazing quit the band and Louis "Gregg" Gutierrez took his place and The Salvation Army signed with another local independent label Frontier Records releasing their self-titled debut album in May of 1982.  That summer, the band went through a legal battle with the actual Salvation Army and decided to change their name to The Three O'Clock, which was the time that they would rehearse.  

Around this time, Howell departed and Mike Mariano and Danny Benair joined the group.   Benair says:      "I actually joined before they changed their name. I joined Salvation Army and then shortly after, we were forced to change our name. For all intents and purposes that kinda made sense, because what Salvation Army was and what Three O’Clock went on to be, even though it wasn’t meant to be, it sort of made a lot of sense in the long run."

The new lineup recorded an EP 'Baroque Hoedown' with producer Earle Mankey, which was released in late 1982.  Their full length debut 'Sixteen Tambourines' was also produced by Mankey with Danny Benair on drums; Louis Gutierrez on guitar, vocals, and percussion; Mike Mariano on keyboards, vocals, and percussion; and Michael Quercio on vocals, bass guitar, and percussion.  'Sixteen Tambourines' established the band as the progenitors of the neo-psychedelic movement, which was described by Quercio as "the Paisley Underground".  Benair recalls:    "I think a scene was naturally brewing. There were a lot of scenes and a lot of bands doing a lot of things. I think we were part of one of those scenes. Michael at lunch at a Denny’s on Sunset casually referred to the four close-knit groups as the Paisley Underground. You know, publicists love that. Now they’ve got a title for a scene...The main bands were us, the Bangles, the Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade. And there were others, but I think initially those were the bands. We kind of played in this scene and Michael made an off-the-cuff remark that he probably never thought twice about but it got picked up nationally very quickly...It was one of these things that, especially for us, it grew rapidly very quickly. We would go and play in a city like Orange, California, and there’d be like 800 mods on scooters and we were just overwhelmed. We would play these kinds of off-the-wall places and we had no idea that so many young kids, especially like kids that were 15-20, were just really into it. We’d show up and it was a lot bigger than we were expecting in the beginning."

Quercio considers:    "There was kind of one period where bands like the Miracle Workers, with the press if you were doing anything 60s you were part of the Paisley Underground. Even if you weren’t part of the L.A. thing they just kind of lumped it all together...We definitely wanted to get that feeling and we loved the sounds from those records but I actually love the sounds more from the 60s’ very produced records like Beatles records or a lot of other stuff that I think is lovely sounding even to this day. I think a lot of those bands went for a very simple sound and you got a lot of independent punk songs in the 60s and whatnot and we were maybe going for a more produced thing."





https://myspace.com/thethreeoclock


twitter: @The3Oclock






"Jet Fighter" became a hit on college and independent radio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0933KDaWATM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcpTl5HPupc




In My Own Time 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S3i1Agy2QI




With Cantaloupe Girlfriend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvjUgdNbTUc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PzuTg2FBvg





I Go Wild
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF-F83uzjDU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9bABfFd4YU





Sorry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_44fzAp9zf4

Lucifer Sam






'Sixteen Tambourines' 
full album:
https://myspace.com/thethreeoclock/music/album/sixteen-tambourines-baroque-hoedown-18361480



All song written by Gutierrez and Quercio except were noted.

Side A
Jet Fighter - 3.22 (Mariano, Gutierrez and Quercio)
Stupid Einstein - 2.17
And So We Run - 2.40
Fall To The Ground - 2.27
A Day In Erotica - 4.20
Side B
Tomorrow - 3.41
In My Own Time - 2.03 (Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb)
On My Own - 2.48
When Lightning Starts - 3.31
Seeing Is Believing - 4.27

Their EP 'Baroque Hoedown' was added to CD versions of the album



With A Canteloupe Girlfriend
I Go Wild
Marjorie Tells Me
Feel A Whole Lot Better
Sorry
In Love In Too
Lucifer Sam  (Syd Barrett)
As Real As Real

'The Salvation Army' was recorded with Michael Quercio on lead vocals and bass; Troy Howell on drums and kalimba; and Louis "Gregg" Gutierrez on guitar and keyboards with H.B. Lovecraft producing.  It was repackaged and released four years later as 'Befour Three O'Clock'.




Happen Happened
For Hours
Fight Songs
Mind Gardens
She Turns To Flowers (Alternative Version)
Grimly Forming
The Seventeen Forever
Going Home
Cellophane Nirvana
She Turns To Flowers
Upside Down
The Seventeen Forever
Mind Gardens
Grimly Forming
While We Were In Your Room Talking To Your Wall
Minuet
Happen Happened
I Am Your Guru
Going Home