Winter Light

It has been many months since I last posted on here, not because of how quiet things have been, but because we have all been so busy. 2015 has been a great year for ex-members of Saloon, with Alison, Matt and myself all having released well received records this year.

But any success is always tempered by a degree of sadness, as we think about the friends and family we have loved and lost on our travels; none more so than at this time in November, when we remember Mike and his wife Sara who are no longer with us.

A few weeks ago Paul from Track and Field sent me a copy of a letter from his archives. It was the letter that Mike sent to Track and Field as an introduction to Saloon; at the time we badly wanted to play their club because it was so damned cool and we were sick of playing terrible gigs every time we came to London. Little did we know that Track and Field had already seen us when we supported Stereolab and couldn’t really see the point in Saloon. Still, the letter must have made a difference, as within the next few years we went on to play countless Track and Field shows and release three albums with them. Anyway here is the letter for you to enjoy. 

Missing you Smoughts!

Kicker Without Conspiracy

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.

Stock Take Time

After the plays on Gideon Coe and the setting up of the Arthur and Martha bandcamp, there has been a bit of movement with shop sales so I thought it was time to do a stock take.

This is a list of everything we have left.  I'm afraid the prices have gone up a little due to a) extortionate UK postage b) People buying off me at uber-reasonable prices only to then re-sell them for much higher on eBay 

MERCH

Electron T-Shirt: Dark and Light Blue (Medium in dark blue and Large in light blue) (no XS or XL left - sorry) £4.99

7' SINGLES

Girls are the new boys - 7' single (new in box - despite being the Festive 50 smash! I have still got a box of new copies. This was limited to 500)  £0.99

Saloon / Lazer Guided Split Single. (I just unearthed 2 of these - very rare [250??] and unplayed. Saloon's track Futurismo our first 7" release on purple vinyl. Very nice.  £4.99

Arthur and Martha: Autovia 7' single (Despite glowing reviews from likes of NME, I still have a box of these too)  £1.99

CD's

SALOON: (this is) what we call progress. (On Track and Field, new and unplayed. Stock running low now - about 10 copies left)  £4.99

ARTHUR AND MARTHA: Navigation (New and sealed.)   £4.99

SALOON: if we meet in the future. (CD Test pressing. I have 2 copies only.)  £4.99 Only one left

CD COMPILATIONS

Readipop No.1 Includes Pink by Saloon (our very first release!! Still have about 10 of these)  £0.99

Readipop No.2 Includes Nina Says by Saloon (never released anywhere else. Rare. Still have about 10 of these)  £0.99

SALOON: LP Demo (3 tracks from the debut album uber rare blue CD handmade sleeve demo. No idea if it works, but looks nice though - one to show off that you own on Discogs. I have one copy)  £2.99 Gone

LAUDANUM: Remixed. (Includes SALOON's only ever remix the wonderful 'Russian Moon' also never again released. I have two copies of the promo version left. Cover starting to look a bit dog-eared though)  £4.99

Litte Darla has a treat for you no.20. (Includes 'Happy Robots' from second SALOON album. Last 2 copies)  £2.99

Litte Darla has a treat for you no.24 (Includes SALOON 'Suivez La Piste Remix' - I think a slightly different mix from the 'Resonance 7" - certainly the only way to get this song digitally. Last 2 copies)  £2.99

BOTPOP vol 1. Compilation album from the Happy Robots label that I ran with Alice. Lovely sleeve by Andrew. Includes ARTHUR AND MARTHA: Ultra Alliance [perhaps our best track] as well as loads of other great tracks by the likes of Hong King in the 60's, Katsen, Jupiter etc.  
 £4.99

Please email me [adam.cresswell [at] gmail.com] with the stuff you want and I will send you postage details. Payment by Paypal please. First come first served on the limited stuff. Apologies if I do take a day or two posting stuff out - this will be due to me not being an amazon sized multinational conglomerate.

An audience with Matt Ashton

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.

Pow to the People! Easter Sunday 2000

An Easter gift. In April 2000 we played our first gig for the Track and Field Organisation, we were first-on at what became the annual 'Pow to the People' Track and Field All Dayer at which took place at the The Monarch (now Barfly) in Camden, London.

This gig was was a big deal for us. Mike had tried hard to get us on one of their line-ups for a long time and somehow he got Steve and Paul from Track and Field to agree. At the time we didn't know that they had already seen us, supporting Stereolab at The Alleycat in Reading. We also didn't know that they weren't all that enamoured with us. Their first impressions, was that next to Stereolab  they 'couldn't see the point'. Obviously they came around to liking us  in the end as we ended up playing another gig for them in the Summer of 2000 and eventually went on to release three albums with them.

This gig was a big turning point for us and perhaps moved us towards the second phase of our career, where stopped trying to chase record labels and we embraced our inner indie-ness. Certainly it was our first London gig where we were playing to both a full house and the right sort of audience. At the time the most memorable thing about the gig was it marked the first time that I had ever received a parking ticket (and I learned that Easter Sunday is not a national holiday as far as traffic wardens are concerned.)

In terms of the set-list, we played a pretty solid and reliable set of 6 songs. 'Plastic Surgery' was by then a regular opener. I think this is one of the last times we played 'Suivez La Piste', a song we always struggled to get right live and one that only me seemed to like anyway. 'Electron' was in the pipeline as a forthcoming single. 'Spacer' again crept into the set. 'Make it soft' was pretty new at the time and already becoming a song we really enjoyed playing. This show also features my favourite live recording of 'My everyday silver is plastic' (which at the time we were still calling 'Nashville'). I remember feeling goosebumps from excitement as I stared out at the audience while playing the melodica refrain at the end. I felt at the time that I was living out my own Bernard Sumner fantasies.

As was regular for a Saloon gig, where we felt we had to be as difficult as possible, no attempt was made to play either track from the new single 'Shopping / Song for Hugo'

The gig was recorded by a lovely French girl called Anne who had written nice things about us in the fanzine that she wrote for called 'Creme Anglaise'. This was definitely one of our favourite zines and I remember a previous issue with a  lots of articles about Belle and Sebastian knocking about our house for a while. Anne recorded the gig and sent me a tape of it which (for some reason) she recorded the debut Badly Drawn Boy album on the other side. I loved getting my first Saloon bootleg; it reminded me of my mispent youth when me and my mates would sneak off to Kensington Market on school trips and buy badly recorded Joy Division, Cure and Mission C9O's and almost get beaten up on the way home by putting then on the coach stereo on the trip back to school.

Saloon: Live @ The Monarch, London 23.04.00, a set on Flickr.

Photos by Rattail and various others.