Summer

Summer is almost here and my strawberries are coming along nicely. It feels like a good time to post a mix of the stuff I have been listening to at the moment to get me in the mood for summer.

Obviously I can’t claim this is a Saloon-mix (it’s an Adam from Saloon mix) but I have tried to avoid the handbag-house pop-cheese stuff that I like, because I am quite sure no-one else would appreciate it.

Most of this is fairly new stuff with some big tracks from great new albums by artists you would expect to see on a Saloon-related list (e.g..

Fujiya and Miyaji, The Horrors, Ulrich etc). I am looking forward to picking up The Soundcarriers new album from the post office-tomorrow.

I also had also to include Carice Van Houten (Melisandre from Game of Thrones –sigh) and Stromae (who says that Saloon don’t like French Rap, OK he’s from Belgium and only raps occasionally but still...) as I have played their albums to death over the last few months and I’m still spinning them.

With new albums / ep’s from collaborators Mahogany and Cosines out later this year I am sure this mix will change a bit – and I’m sure I will be talking about them here later. Maybe some Saloon news on here soon too.

Enjoy the sun and I hope you didn’t vote UKIP.

The Shape of Things to Come

Alison posted onto her Facebook earlier this week a link to the The Left Outsides' unreleased album The Shape of Things to Come.  Recorded several years ago by Simon Trought at Soup Studios with appearances from Ben Phillipson, Karl Sabino & Matt Ashton (aka Matt from Saloon) & mixed by Martin Noble & Graham Sutton. 

I've not had a chance to listen to it all, but what I have heard sounds great. Criminal that it was never released, but hey that's the music biz these days (grumble grumble etc etc). I am sure it will be much enjoyed by all you Saloon fans. 

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.

Saloon's Expanding Rock Family Tree

So it feels like the last few weeks have been a (relative) hive of activity for the ex-members of Saloon and their extended families, with our Rock-Family Tree seeming to spread its branches further.

One of the things I had been putting off for ages was getting the two Saloon synth serviced. The guy I have been using for almost 15 years now is the best in the business; the moog rogue is playing better than ever and the Moog Opus 3 finally has a working string section. The strings have never worked so this is a big deal to me (but probably not of much interest to anyone else reading this.)

Three tracks from the July 2001 Saloon Peel session were aired again by the brilliant Gideon Coe on his 6 Music Show. Someone emailed Gideon to say that he had fond memories of us at Truck Fest (hopefully from the great 2003 show as opposed to the ropey 2000 one where we were compared to The Corrs).

The Saloon ex-members have spoken a fair bit about setting up a Saloon Bandcamp, giving fans the chance to buy enhanced versions of the albums with extra bits and bobs. Hopefully we can make that happen soon. In the meantime I have set up a bandcamp for Arthur and Martha which is looking quite nice. No rarities on there yet (as there aren’t really any) although you can get the singles at a bargain price, as well as downloads of the three A&M videos.  

Alison and Mark have started recording their new album for The Left Outsides. News and links found on their Facebook. They are also playing in a band The Trimdon Grange Explosion which has a new Facebook page also.  I don’t know how the pair of them find the time to be in so many bands!

Matt has been doing some work with his other band The Form Group, in demo-ing some new songs towards a proper album. He is also writing songs for a new The Leaf Library album and they have a new 7" single coming out in June. A picture disc no less. 

Mike’s brother Rob with his Hot Chip hat on, posted a link the other day to a great cover of William Onyeabor’s ‘Atomic Bomb’ that he plays guitar on and will be released for a forthcoming remix album which I think will be out for Record Store Day. Nice moog on the cover too.

The news for me is that although I hinted previously that there might be another Arthur and Martha album in the pipeline, Alice and I have agreed that the record I have been slowly working-on, probably shouldn’t be an Arthur and Martha record. This is in part due to Alice’s commitments to her band Cosines, but perhaps more due to the fact that it really is an Adam solo album, and it’s very hard to pretend that its anything else. So instead I will probably release it under my solo-Rodney Cromwell moniker. Rodney Cromwell was the name I used back in 2002 when I recorded a song– Radaghast the Brown – for the Bearos Records Tribute to The Lord of the Rings (my song was inspired by the Spectum Lord of the Rings game).

I mentioned Alice’s band Cosines who played last night (which I missed due to family commitments / general flakiness) well their new single Commuter Love is out now via Fika Recordings and it’s a glam rock, glittertastic stonker. She originally wrote it for A&M, which might explain the name-checking of the old Moog Rogue, but obviously due to my aforementioned flakiness I never got around to doing anything with it.  Anyway I hope you enjoy it along with everything Alison and Matt are doing – hopefully one day I will have something new to contribute.

Saloon: Live @ The Alleycat, Reading 9.4.98 (Our second gig)

Here is another gig recording from the early days, this time of our second gig. I posted this on Soundcloud a while back but have been too ashamed to talk about it before. Matt spoke about this gig in his interview last year, specifically about what a horrorshow it was; but I did say that I would post everything on here, regardless of quality control, so I must not shy away

So having played a decent debut gig, there was a bit of a buzz on the Reading scene about us. Somehow we got ourselves booked onto a gig at The Alleycat which was Reading’s premier 500 capacity venue. (Over the next year we played a lot of gigs at the Alleycat, including an enterprising and lucrative show the Thursday of the Reading festival, and a night supporting our heroes ‘the lab’ – which was witnessed by our latterly friends from Track and Field who ‘couldn’t see the point’ in us). Anyway on this occasion we were booked to support a band called Blue Seed, who I think had had some Lammo airplay, and another band called Enertia (currently residing in the ‘where are they now’ file (along with the rest of us)).

Clearly as soon as we got on the big stage we were totally out of our depth; we didn’t know what monitors or DI’s were, and what were these things called ‘BV’s’ that the sound men kept talking about? We also found it very hard to persuade the soundman to let us put our pocket Theremin through the PA. Anyway, despite this somehow we managed to get set-up and play a semblance of a gig.

Rather than play safe and drop the same set that we played a few days before (this would be a running theme throughout out ‘career’) we dropped one of our catchiest songs (Fuzzy Felt) (y’know the one Earworm wanted to release a year later) along with the AA side of our first single (Conquistador) and we added a new track, Nina Says. (For each of first five gigs we kept adding a new song to the set further complicating things).

 

As you can hear, our playing was a shambles, with things out of tune even more than normal, feedback all over the place and beats missed right, left and centre. The crowning glory was a capo related incident which meant we couldn’t play Spacer and led to much frantic messing around between songs.

Garthie

I can’t remember exactly how we felt after the gig. I know our glowing review in the Reading Chronicle didn’t make us feel much better about it (I am pretty sure a friend wrote the review anyway). I do remember getting home and listening to the tape of the gig that had been recorded off of the PA. Rather than sounding like a messy embryonic VU (which I had hoped) the reverb and delay that the soundmen had added, made us sound like the world’s worst Corrs tribute band.

After regrouping, working on the Blue Demo and rehearsing, thankfully the Alleycat had us back a couple of months later, this time supporting the band of Garthie from Birds of a Feather (at this stage, a career highlight for us).  

MOSKVA The 4/4 project

First gig featuring members of Whispering Bob

In 1999 – 2000, as well as doing Saloon, we were also putting on a lot of gigs (culminating with the Happy Robots festival in 2001). Although we had no problem getting headline acts, we struggled to find decent local support bands and Saloon could only play so- often before everyone would be sick of us.

From that came Saloon offshoot-band Moskva.

 Matt and I had always been keen to pursue our Krautrock side, but Mike just wasn’t into it - we could never persuade him to just play the drums from ‘Mother Sky’ for 20 minutes. Initially working under the title the ‘4/4 project’ (although strictly speaking 2/4 would have been more correct) with Matt on guitar, me on synth and with my housemate the brilliant avant visual artist (and occasional piss-artist) Philip Newcombe on bass, we threw together three ‘songs’ and Moskva was born.

Second Gig Flyer. Supporting Electrelane

Before we had even rehearsed, I earmarked us to support Oxford band Whispering Bob (who included the founders of Truck Festival and who morphed into the successful (by our standards) band Goldrush). The one problem was that Moskva had no drummer and time only for one rehearsal before the first gig. Matt met some guy in the Purple Turtle who had ‘band-hair’ and claimed he could drum. Unfortunately we discovered during our one-rehearsal that the guy couldn’t keep a beat at all. He could just about shuffle through an approximation of the funky drummer – badly. But what we wanted was something between Jaki Liebezeit and Volkswagen building industrial automaton.  So Matt sacked the drummer on the day of the gig and we turned up to the venue with just a just a Casiotone MT-60, and the plan to use the ‘rock’ setting as the drums for each track. 

Thankfully after Whispering Bob finished their sound-check, Robin the lead singer asked if we wanted to borrow anything. I cheekily replied ‘Your drummer please!’ and they agreed! With the Whispering Bob drummer (sorry I can’t remember his name) and with Robin improvising and adding extra melodies on the flute, Moskva muscled our way through a 3 song set of noise, 2/4 beats and errr more noise. It was a great gig, with an audience of about 20 people there to see it.

Second Gig. The Classic Line Up

It was at least six months before we played again, this time to support the fantastic Electrelane who we put on at the Rising Sun 2^nd March 2001. This time we were more prepared and made sure we had a drummer of our own, this time Clare a friend of Amanda’s from Reading College. With a new song in the repertoire (the originally titled Neu-One) and with Amanda completing the line-up on the melodica, we played another barnstormer of a set. Although there is no recording of this gig either, we do have a recording of the rehearsal which I have included here.

The final gig was in support of Printed Circuit from Leeds, also at the Rising Sun. By this time most of Saloon were living in London and busy enough with the main band so, despite not having even been in the same room for at least 6 months, we didn’t bother having a rehearsal. Someone did video it and clearly we got through it without hiccups somehow. God knows who had the bright idea of dressing us all like Italian waiters (probably me).  Once I stopped putting on the Rising Sun gigs and once the Saloon album came out there was no time for side-projects, and Moskva never happened again. I wish we had gone into Wired Studios and knocked up a 12” EP or something, but at the time we didn’t even think about it.

Now as all three of us live in London, there is talk of Moskva reforming. I suppose you’re never too old to be in a Krautrock band, right?....

DIETRICH



NEU 1



SAFETY CUT



FLIGHT CASE



And here is a playlist of a few of my own Krautrock faves.