Dr Alan Farmer from Bearos Records recently recorded an interview with Brum Radio which you can catch up with on Mixcloud. Back in 1999 Saloon were incredibly excited by the noises coming out of Birmingham from bands such as Pram, Avrocar, Plone and, of course, Broadcast which is why we made a concerted effort to try and get in on the action. We played numerous gigs in Birmingham at The Jug of Ale for Alan and Arthur from The Catapult Club. We also made some good friends. 'Electron' our single for Bearos Records was probably the most effortless record we ever put out, and I still list is among my very favourite Saloon releases. Bearos also saw the debut of my ongoing project Rodney Cromwell with the track 'Radaghast the Brown' featuring on their Lord of the Rings tribute album. In the interview, as well as spinning 'Electron' Alan talks about how Bearos championed Birmingham bands between 1998-2007 as well as talking about Kushikatsu Records and his current fascination with Japanese pop. Rodney Cromwell will be coming to Birmingham as part of the Ohm from Ohm tour, and on the opening night on 15th March, Alan will be DJing for us playing entirely Japanese indie and electo pop. Details on the Ohm from Ohm website. Adam Saloon
Friday, 17 April 2015
Recording Artist Rod Cromwell
Other Projects
It has been a busy few weeks. My new album has been out for over a month now and I have still not officially announced the release on here. I tried writing a lengthy blog post about it, but just can't find the time to finish it, so here is the quick version.
So you know, the album is out in the shops, called RODNEY CROMWELL 'Age of Anxiety' released on the Happy Robots label on CD and digitally:
It has been favourably compared to early-OMD, Giorgio Moroder and Krafwerk (I think in terms of its sound rather than its cultural impact). The record has had really good airplay, with plays on the Gideon Coe show on BBC 6 Music, multiple plays on several Radio 3 in Spain and on loads of synthpop shows and other radio shows (all of whom I will thank again properly at a later date). Oh and somehow two songs are on heavy rotation on Croydon FM. So muchos respect there.
Thanks to everyone who has played, bought and said nice things about it. It has been very much appreciated! I will write some more about it I'm sure. Oh and feel free to follow Happy Robots on the Facebook. You can hear it on Spotify too, although obviously we would prefer you to buy it.
What else to report:
Alison's band 'The Left Outsides' have a new album 'The Shape of Things to Come' out on 8th May which itself is getting some great airplay. Follow all their news too on Facebook. I've not heard it yet but I'm sure it will be really good.
Indietracks 2015
Matt I know is in the studio at the moment with The Leaf Library working on their new album. And both The Leaf Library and Rodney Cromwell will be appearing at the Indietracks festival this 24-26th
July. It's the first announced gig for Rodney Cromwell so many thanks in advance to Indietracks for taking a punt and booking me.
On the Saloon front, I've renewed the Soundcloud subscription so all the old stuff is available again. Gideon Coe played two songs from the first Peel Session last night (that is the 16th April 2015). Gideon has played that session several times so many thanks for that Gid.
Lastly I've been emailing a chap James who was in the band Postalowa who we played with once in Norwich. As well as having a great Mixcloud show Tall Ships Radio Club, he has a band Broads who Saloon fans may be interested in. Our chat also enabled me to find the details on the 2003 gig in Norfolk which I've added to the Saloon timeline. As keeper of the archives and master of the data this stuff matters OK.
Our friends and former label mates Kicker, with whom Saloon played countless gigs, have finally gone and got themselves a Soundcloud. Their great singles album is up there already.
Their 'Get Rid of Him / Turning Left' single still is one of my favourite 7"'s, which I still spin on the rare occasions when I can get the wife and kids out of the living room.
Other 'news' I have done a bit of work on the various Happy Robots websites - the full Happy Robots back catalogue is now available from our Bandcamp, there has been a fair bit of activity on our Facebook, we have a label Soundcloud that includes unheard before rarities and we have a new YouTube (because I lost the password to the old one.) We don't have a Twitter as the last one was compromised by Russian hackers. I can't really be arsed with twitter anyway.
It has been a while since our last update. The reason being,
well we have been rather busy.
2015 has been dubbed the year of the Saloon comeback!
Ex-members of Saloon have, we hope, three new records out this year, so Loonatics start
saving your pennies…(please)….here is the news so far....
RODNEY CROMWELL
(Adam)
Age of Anxiety
The album that I have been tinkering with for about for several
years is finally finished. It is very much an extension of sonic area explored with
Arthur & Martha (it features Alice / Martha on a couple of tracks too). It
is an album of ten songs propelled by hissy analog synths, cheap vocoders, toy
instruments, crackly samples, bass riffery and – errr - more analog synths.
Although the title is a nod to 80's electro (Age of Chance
and/or Age of Consent by Bronski Beat) its themes are those of love, loss, grief,
paranoia, euphoria in our modern post millennial world of over connection and tribulation
That sounds quite ominous - it’s really just a silly indie disco record.
I’m releasing it under the Rodney Cromwell name – which is a
moniker I used once before, during the Saloon days, when I recoded a song
Radaghast the Brown for a Lord of the Rings tribute album on Bearos. It is to
be released on CD / digital download on 9th March 2015 and distributed by the good people at
Cargo Records. The lovely cover was designed by ‘our Matt’. And it will be the
first release in five years on the Happy Robots label; hopefully – if we break even – we will be able to put out some more releases (by other bands) in the near future! …oh and
you will be able to buy it on our website
as well as in the shops and on iTunes.
Adam
THE LEAF LIBRARY
(Matt and Co)
Daylight Versions
Second album time! We’re halfway through recording another
album at Studio Klank in north London – it’s a lovely place, and they’ve even
let us build a little shrine on the wall above the mixing desk (the full Happy
Robots back catalogue to the first person to name them all...).
It’s all shaping up nicely thanks with tons of guitars, a
bit of synth and some piano, lots of drones, some pedal steel and a ride cymbal
orchestra all recorded so far. It’ll hopefully feature contributions from some
of our mates too including members of The Clientele / Amor de Dias, The Drink,
The Left Outsides and Singing Adams. And horns! There are definitely going to
be some horns on there too.
The album is called ‘Daylight Versions’ and is inspired by
(variously) the sea, commuting, the Suffolk coast, Walthamstow marshes and
death. It’ll be out on vinyl via Where It’s At Is Where You Are some point this
year. Happy listening.
Matt
That’s all for now. Hopefully more soon. Do get in touch if you need to
know any more.
It has been a few months since the last post - I am getting into bad habits again.
This afternoon, I stumbled upon an interview that Matt did a few months ago with the folks from Readipop . If you are in any way a fan of Saloon, the John Peel show or the Reading band scene in the late 90's / early noughties, then you may might to give it a listen.I for one was interested to get someone else's take on our Festive 50 success, as in 10 years we have never really spoken about it.
I hope all our readers and listeners are having a great summer.
A message from Matt reminded us that this week is the 10
year anniversary of the release of the second (and last) studio album by Saloon.
A combination of passing time and failing memory has been
unkind to our second album. I can’t
speak for the others, but it’s fair to say that I have never looked on it as fondly
as (this is) what we call progress.
There are loads of reasons why. The plan had always been to
make a fast and noisy record that was more like our live sound, but by the time we had
finished the second record it had become a lot more restrained and polished and more of a tiwwcp part 2. This
was partly because of the track listing; some of the louder songs we were
working on (like ‘I have found the way’ and (the unfinished and unreleased) ‘World
War III’ we just couldn’t get to work right. Perhaps it was because it was a slightly
somewhat more rushed affair as we didn’t want a long gap between albums,
certainly where with tiwwcp we demoed all the tracks before, with iwmitf we didn’t
have the chance. So instead of being a collection of fast noisy ones, we fell
back to the more polished and restrained type of song, like ‘Dreams Mean
Nothing’ which we knew we did well. Also, as control freaks, we chose to record
and mix the album ourselves and, in hindsight, that was perhaps too much work, particularly for Amanda, who did the brunt of the work. I certainly still can’t listen to it without
thinking about all the little things we should have changed.
BAD: Branded Review
We also felt a massive amount of pressure after the whole
Festive 50 thing to deliver something really special, although now we had even less
time to write and rehearse due to all the gigs people wanted us to do, and we had no
more money and support than we had ever had. We still had full-time jobs
to hold down, which many of our contemporaries didn’t. Of course the real reason
I like this album less, was the fact that we split up so soon after it; the tour
to promote the album was a horrible slog and I don’t think any of us were in
the best of places at the time – at least with the band.
But, as ever on this blog I am accentuating the negative.
The record still sold pretty well, and at least half of the songs production-wise are as good as anything else we have done. I think ‘Vesuvius’ ‘Kaspian’ and ‘Intimacy’
are up there with the best things we ever did. The sleeve – which I was not
that keen on at the time – I think looks pretty cool now especially the
gatefold vinyl version. If the sleeve of ‘progress’ (recorded in May 2001) was
about building an optimistic future, the sleeve of ‘if we meet in the future’ (recorded
post 9-11 and depicting something akin to a ravaged nuclear wasteland) captured
a far more period-appropriate dystopian aesthetic.
Also the reviews were for this album were almost entirely
glowing, with 8/10 in the NME which for us at the time it was all that mattered
(finally making up for the terrible live review in 1999). I’ve posted on here
the best reviews – the NME – and the worse (from something called Branded
magazine).
In terms of audio goodies, I do have some demos from this
album but we only demoed 6 songs and all are without Alison’s viola and many
without vocals. So instead I have posted a session we did at the time, recorded
live in our own studio, for Aligre FM (French radio station) which includes
some decent versions of several of the tracks from that album. I have also
posted two remixes done by AUW (aka Dom Cresswell, my brother).
Unbelievably I have now sold all the remaining copies of ‘If
we meet in the future’ but I am quite sure you can track it down on ebay for a
few of your hard earned pennies.
A few days ago it was lovely to get a message from David, a Saloon / Arthur and Martha from Madrid who sent me us these great photos of him sporting a fetching Happy Robots T-Shirt that he made himself.
Perhaps you have noticed that I have made a few tweaks to the blog; the ‘gig list’ is now the timeline as I hope to add details about release dates and other things that we were up to. And the big update is that I have uploaded all of the old photos that I had on my computer onto my Flickr page with links from the relevant event in the timeline. As you might expect, I have not done much in terms of editing them, which is why they are not all that flattering (my double-chin features quite prominently on several photos).
For future blog posts I may say something about the recording of each of the singles, mainly so that the people updating the Saloon Discogs page have something to chew on. If you have any other suggestions for things you would like to see on here please let me know.
Finally, big congratulations are due to Matt and his lovely wife, who have fantastic news that they are now proud parents. With all our best wishes as they enter the magical realm of the un-slept.
