While we’re all in lockdown, we’ve recorded one of those split screen videos. We’ve done a lockdown version of Bob Dylan’s ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’. You can watch it on YouTube or Facebook. We hope you like it. We had a lot of fun making it.
Our second album, Unsinkable Sailor, is out now on CD and as a download. You can get the album from our Bandcamp store now.
Unsinkable Sailor is also available at these places:
- Jumbo Records in Leeds
- The Record Cafe in Bradford
- iTunes
- Google Play
- Amazon
- Spotify
Unsinkable Sailor is inspired in no small part by amazing women and the endurance of hope against all odds. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it.
Four long years have passed since our debut album, Molehills out of Mountains, but our new album Unsinkable Sailor is finally here. The album will be released on 22 April on CD and as a download. You can pre-order the album from our Bandcamp store now and get an instant download of the opening song, Hunger.
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Unsinkable Sailor is inspired in no small part by amazing women and the endurance of hope against all odds. The album encompasses songs which are brand new, as old as the hills, and everything in between.
The CD will also be on sale at Jumbo Records in Leeds and The Record Cafe in Bradford, and you can also download the album from iTunes.
Launch gig in Bradford, Saturday, 23 April
We’ll be launching the album on Saturday, 23 April at a special gig in Bradford. Join us to celebrate this momentous occasion from 8pm at the Delius Arts and Cultural Centre (29 Great Horton Road, Bradford, BD7 1AA). Tickets are just £4. Join the Facebook event for the gig and invite your friends. Be there or be sunk.
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Making progress on our new album
Hands up who scanned the QR code in our Molehills out of Mountains album? Who even knows what that question means?
The black and white matrix on the album artwork (included in the CD, vinyl and the download from our Bandcamp store) is a QR code, and it was they key to access alternative mixes of the album.
If you scanned that QR code (there are lots of free apps and websites to help you do this) you would have been taken to a hidden page of our website where you could download different mixes of the songs on the album for free. We have now also put the download links on this page too.
The bonus mixes include instrumental, acapella and acoustic versions of the whole album, plus a few other bits and pieces too.
Take a listen to five of those extra tracks here, including isolated instruments and an abandoned intro:
You can download all 48 of the extra tracks here in these four ZIP files:
Molehills out of Mountains (instrumentals) (11 tracks, 95MB)
Molehills out of Mountains (acapella) (11 tracks, 61MB)
Molehills out of Mountains (excerpts and alternative mixes) (13 tracks, 41MB)
Molehills out of Mountains (acoustic guitar and voice) (11 tracks, 85MB)
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Crypt Covers – the album
On Halloween 2012 we recorded a version of Ghostbusters with Hope & Social as part of their Crypt Covers project. 2 years in and Hope & Social have now completed 10 of these Crypt Covers. These have now been released as a digital album. We’re in good company on this album, with other collaborators Dancing Years, Merz, The Travelling Band, Duke Special, Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six, Chris Helme, Sam Airey, She Makes War, and Ellen and The Escapades.
If you haven’t seen the video of our Ghostbusters cover, it is worth a watch. Listen to the full album below, and click through to buy it from Hope & Social’s Bandcamp store.
On 28th September we curated The Record Club, a monthly gathering of vinyl enthusiasts in Shipley, West Yorkshire. We performed a short acoustic set, but the main purpose of the evening was for each of us to play some of our own favourite records. Some of the records we played have inspired us in our music, but some were simply records that we love. We didn’t keep a full list of which records we played, but this Spotify playlist has most of them:
If you’re not a Spotify user, but you want to know what we played, here’s the list:
Paul Simon – ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ (Graceland)
Deerhunter – ‘Octet’ (Cryptograms)
Midlake – ‘Roscoe’ (The Trials of Van Occupanther)
U2 – ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (Under a Blood Red Sky)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio theme (The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy)
These New Puritans – ‘V (Island Song)’ (Field of Reeds)
Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man – ‘Mysteries’ (Out of Season)
The Beach Boys – ‘Surf’s Up’ (The Smile Sessions)
Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads – ‘Suicide Solution (Guitar Solo)’ (Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads Tribute)
Flying Lotus – ‘Computer Face//Pure Being’ (Cosmogramma)
Television – ‘Marquee Moon’ (Marquee Moon)
PJ Harvey – ‘The Glorious Land’ (Let England Shake)
Matt Molloy, Paul Brady and Tommy Peoples – ‘Munster Buttermilk’ (Molloy, Brady & Peoples)
Tindersticks – ‘For Those (Orchestral version)’ (Donkeys)
Massive Attack v Mad Professor – ‘Radiation Ruling the Nation’ (No Protection)
Sparklehorse – ‘Sad and Beautiful World’ (Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot)
Phosphorescent – ‘Endless (parts 1 & 2)’ (Aw Come Aw Wry)
Albert also spoke at length about the Phosphorescent album, Aw Come Aw Wry. Take a look at The Record Club website if you want to know why that album is important to him.
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We found our drummer on Instagram
As you may know, Ruth is currently taking a break from music to be with her gorgeous, and remarkably coiffured, new baby. We are now playing with a fabulously talented young man from Leeds by the name of Joe Cox. Joe has recently graduated from Leeds College of Music with a 2:1 in jazz (would an 11:8 not have been more appropriate for a jazz degree?) and he certainly has a bright future ahead of him.
Our quest for a drummer took us in several directions in the early part of 2013. We had a few enjoyable gigs with Gary Stewart and then Aid of Drum Machine on the sticks. Then Albert became acquainted with Joe on Instagram. We seem to have a knack of finding drummers via social media, having previously found Jonny Newell on Myspace when that network was the bee’s knees a few years ago. But when we started our search for a drummer earlier this year we wouldn’t have anticipated a photo sharing network would ultimately bring us together with a drummer. But it did, and we are very happy about it indeed.
We have already had a handful of gigs and a church session with Joe over the summer. We are also working on some new songs with him and we have enough ideas to form the follow up to our Molehills Out Of Mountains album. We haven’t started recording yet but we are road testing some of the new songs, so if you are coming to see us live over the next few months you will hear some of them.
We are currently writing some new songs which will form our next album. In the meantime, we have released a single we recorded recently for a film. Our version of ‘Scarborough Fair‘ is featured in the film I Know What I’m Doing, clips of which you can see in the song’s video:
The single release of ‘Scarborough Fair‘ is accompanied by three other songs. The first is the acoustic version of ‘Powerful Pill‘ from our recent session at St. Bartholomew’s Church with Jacob and Chris of Minster Studios. ‘Blue Poetry‘ was the fourth of our songs to be featured in Waterloo Road on BBC TV in 2011. ‘Thirteen‘ is a song by Big Star that we have occasionally played live. We’ll be back with our new album when it’s ready, but in the meantime, we hope you enjoy these recordings.
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St. Bartholomew’s Church session
At the start of June we recorded an acoustic session at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Armley with Jacob and Chris of Minster Studios. We played two songs, the first of which was a stripped down version of Powerful Pill, from our Molehills Out Of Mountains album. If you have seen us do this song live recently, you will probably recognise this version:
We also played a brand new song called Hell On The Waves. This song is still very much work in progress, and may well end up on our next album, but may end up sound a little different to this:
The acoustics in the church, and the setting itself were amazing. We may end up going back there for a proper gig.
Wilful Missing 