I don’t post on this blog nearly as often as I’d like. In the spirit of changing my ways I thought I’d start with presenting my thoughts on my favourite albums of 2010! THE SEPARATION- OUR LIVES IN CINEMA clearly being number 1 on this list.

So in no particular order, here are the CD’s I couldn’t stop listening to this year:-

CRIME IN STEREO- I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE YOU TO SOMEONE
FOUR YEAR STRONG- ENEMY OF THE WORLD
THE HOLD STEADY- HEAVEN IS WHEREVER
SLEIGHBELLS- TREATS
KLAXONS- SURFING THE VOID
THE ARCADE FIRE- THE SUBURBS
LADY GAGA- THE FAME MONSTER
BRANDON FLOWERS- FLAMINGO
GRUM- HEARTBEATS
LINKIN PARK- A THOUSAND SUNS
VAMPIRE WEEKEND- CONTRA

Not for everybody but that’s what I enjoyed. Looking forward to a few picks from Steve, Phil, Greg and Arran

Mark

The EP will be available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from the release date.

This track is called Eighteen! We hope you enjoy it!

We’re today beginning the countdown to the release of our NEW EP!

Titled ‘Our Lives In Cinema’ it’s got 5 of our best songs on it and we can’t wait for you all to hear it!

It will be available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from the release date, but until that point we’re going to upload songs regularly to YouTube and MySpace. Here is the song ‘Being Serpico’ We hope you enjoy it!

It started that very evening when I met Phil & Mark outside Warren Street tube station to attend our first professional radio appearance, all very exciting but fairly innocuous stuff so far I’m sure you’d agree? The mood was pleasant, Mark & I were following Phil as he is the only one between us with a sense of direction. Whilst discussing this we discovered that Mark is more of a walk around until he eventually finds it kind of guy & I’m more the kind of chap who will be either walking in the wrong direction thinking it’s right or walking in the right direction thinking it’s wrong, basically, totally devoid of idea or hope when it comes to directions. I will however argue with Phil about which way we are going, wherever we are going. Most strange. I say argue, it’s more that I take the light questioning route of ‘are you sure we’re going the right way mate? Really?’ usually coupled with ‘I’m not sure you know, buddy.’

Having successfully negotiated the streets of London Town we arrived at the building. Hazaar! I thought as Mark pointed out that the computer screens read ‘Recharged radio’, we’ve made it! What happened next is indicative to the stupidity that all three of us carry around our necks like anvils, we totally ignored the screens & the big door that couldn’t have been any more helpful unless it said ‘You 3! Yep, you 3 dopey motherf**kers, get in here!’ & took a different door. We walked up 3 flights of stairs before any inkling of doubt surfaced. The bicycles & general feeling of being in a residential apartment area didn’t quell our desire to climb those stairs, it was only when Mark actually questioned it did we take stock of what was going on around us. Back down onto the street we marched & back to the now glaringly obvious entrance.

We’re in, we’re sat on plush leather sofas, this is it, I’m a pimp punk rock overlord, Mark’s likening everything to Wayne’s World (& then stealing it), Phil’s looking calm & composed, all’s good. We are then collected by Alex, Mark’s been in contact with guy & from the initial meeting he seems like a really nice chap. We go down & meet the other good folk of Recharged Radio, all very pleasant & we are all at ease. We chat about being on the Engineer label until it’s time to get ready to go on air. They didn’t tell us where the loo was so before we had to hit the radio booth I made a mad dash to where my instinct carried me. Fortunately I was right, could have been messy & embarrassing otherwise.

Sat in a plush radio booth with a giant microphone isn’t for everyone but we all seemed quite comfortable. I harboured dreams that this would be my ‘Brodie’ moment, I would say something so outrageously funny that the world would rock on its axis, even the hundreds of millions of people who didn’t hear it would spontaneously burst out laughing due to my uncompromising wit (I did say it was my dreams earlier, f**k you!). Chris Evans? Russell Brand? Terry Wogan? F**k you Wogan, there’s a new kid in town & I’m here to claim the adoration of the grannies you’ve made a very decent livelihood out of seducing. You silver tongued b@stard.

It starts, & as you may have guessed, Wogan need not rush to change his colostomy bag through fear just yet, instead of changing the world with humour, what actually happened was rather more shameful. With the show in full swing, Jordan (the disc jockey) was introducing a track by an Irish band & said that the CD that they had sent was accompanied with a letter, he started reading ‘My name is Brian, I am 8 years old’, at this time I was thinking that although it’s a bit strange to say you are 8, it’s still a rouse to get on the airwaves, it continued, ‘& I have terminal bone marrow Cancer.’ With that I am afraid to say that I creased up laughing, I could not believe that someone had gone to the lengths of writing this shiz just to get their tune on the radio! It continued, ‘I would like to go to Disney World for my final holiday’. It was then that it began to dawn on me that this was no elaborate rouse, this was some poor sickly kid & me & my mates have just been laughing at his misfortune. Laughing hard. The guilt I felt when I realised will stay with me for some time so fear not folks, consider it lesson learned. I’m sorry Brian, can’t win ‘em all though eh!?

So, that little mishap over & done with we set about readying ourselves for our interview. This is how it went down:

www.rechargedradio.com (21.05.10 Friday Forum – ‘Six Degrees of Separation’)

If you cannot fathom the enthusiasm to listen to it I shall sum it up for you: -

Mark basically said that our album is a steaming pile of horse crap in comparison to the new EP.
Phil & myself sport obnoxiously monotone voices.
Sleep Trash Deep is a radio song.
I have a ‘Do the Bartman’ picture disc of which I’m immensely proud.
The only way that I know how to negotiate my way out of a difficult silence is to say ‘What do you think, Phil?’
& we debate at length on how long an EP is.

After the show we were taken to their local in which we were treated to both a refreshing beer & having our album played over the sound system, nice.

So, thanks again to the guys at Recharged Radio! Hopefully we can get on there to enlighten the airwaves again in the not too distant future!

Whilst being sucked into a cacophony of hooks & joy, an overview on how we reached this point with the tune & the EP: -

For starters I guess it’s worth pointing out for those that don’t know that this song is a re-write of a song we wrote some time ago, also titled Sleep. Trash. Deep. The only reason I can possibly offer for not changing the name is that by the time it came to the title, our creative juices had run drier than Ron Jeremy’s nutsack. Regardless, the title works fine for me & I consider it as a polite nod to the good folk that have been around since our inception.
Anyways, I guess it’s about now that I should thank Phil for his persistent pursuit of a re-write for this track, he was keen to do it a long time before anyone else even considered the idea & without his incessant badgering & belief that it would be worth doing I would be sitting here typing about anal fisting Madge Bishop over a different tune & more importantly, not listening to a track that on a completely selfish level, I thoroughly enjoy.

Getting to this point has been rather challenging though, as documented on these very pages, the recording of this EP started some time ago but as we’ve made the decision to do it pretty much completely DIY it has taken a lot of effort & frustration on all our parts. If you’ve never sat for hours on end making sure something is lined up correctly, I strongly suggest you don’t. It’s dull & pretty soul destroying. I have since found out (& had a bloody good strop) about a magical computer program that can accomplish the same results in a fraction of the time. Why in the name of Ailsa’s reappearing ghost (throwing in a bit of Home & Away now for the purists) did no-one tell us beforehand. Flipping useless!
On the up side, once this task was completed, the drums sounded awesome which gave us the ideal platform for the rest of the tracks. Nice.

Onto the Bass & Guitars, all pretty much straight forward, Arran & Phil blasted through their bits without too much trouble. I however, was on the verge of a minor breakdown recording the chorus part for the title track. If you search hard enough on the internet you’ll find a very composed looking Stephen playing through it & then uttering some random musings. This was the highlight of that particular evening, by the end of it I was probably about 2 takes away from throwing a huge diva fit, screaming that I didn’t want to hear the take that I’d just guffed up & to press record. PRESS RECORD! I also came close to telling the rest of the band that they are a bunch of pr!cks for making me play something that I’d written. Yeah, doesn’t make much sense to me either but at the time, it was the next logical step in deflecting blame from myself!

With the music done & painstakingly edited by Greg’s nimble fingers, Arran’s keen ear for detail & both Phil & I sitting there agreeing that the guitars sound fat/phat, it was Mark’s turn to add his vocals to the mix. There’s little I can say other than good job really, oh yeah, & that before one of the recording sessions I sat & watched in amazement as he munched his way through a carrier bag full of food culminating in a dazzling crescendo of manliness by smashing down 5 galaxy chocolate cakes before getting up & sounding the battle cry of ‘Let’s do this!’. Astonishing, truly astonishing.

Good, right, everything’s done & we have found the man to mix & master it, a gentleman by the name of Gavin Brady – (myspace.com/gavsrecordings). This is the only part of the process that we as a band won’t be doing, mostly because we don’t have the technical skills but also due to the fact that we want it to sound as ace as possible & us mixing it would end up with all of us bickering about not being able to hear ourselves!

So here we are, present day, & other than some light drama & heavy overreactions about the 1st mix we received from Gav (due to the mix being how he needed to mix it for the purposes of mastering & me being a dimwit who did not know this & panicking slightly, sorry mate) we arrive at what you have listened to. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Now I’m off to consider how my life would’ve turned out if I’d been fostered by the Robinson’s, tried to convince Julie that she was going mental & being kept awake at night by the scraping sound of Helen Daniels’ nipple pierced t!ts dragging across the floor.

4 more tracks to follow!

Cheers!

We are hoping to have more videos online in the near future, so check our Youtube page for more videos.

In other news, our songs that have recently been uploaded to the website JamLegend have been going down a storm! Three songs have been ‘tracked’ (and more are on the way) so that you can play along with the guitars, just like in Guitar Hero or Rock Band. You can even plug in your guitars from those games! To view our profile CLICK HERE and you can play along with Amber The Forgotten, I Gave Myself A Final Solution and Cold Blooded Costumes.

Below is a video of someone playing along to Cold Blooded Costumes on the hardest difficulty and getting 100%!

Awesome!

Anyway MERCH. We are running seriously low on the Luminous Lime Logo Tees so pick one up at a gig soon if you want one:

But now its time for a new batch! Based on ‘Cold Blooded Costumes’ for the design we reckon it looks pretty rad.

Phil

We didn’t even know we were definitely playing said gig until 2 days before when we found a event on facebook with us listed on it. We knew we were penciled in, but even though we hassled them we never got confirmation. With nothing on the venues mayspaz its good to see the promoter is promoting. So two days for us to advertise, and worse still, with a hometown Bromley gig the very next day!

So its a Friday night in the middle of a industrial estate and there is not much passing trade here. Anyone with any sense will be ‘larging it big stylee’ in a town centre somewhere with everyone else who has any sense.

So to the first band and it must be their first gig, I mean they are just children and so are their audience. Now im not against kids starting bands or coming to see gigs, in fact I encourage it and think there should be way more ‘All Ages’ gigs but FFS bring the equipment you need! Im talking essentials here like amps and cymbals. Their bassist is late and as I speak to the guitarist (who is borrowing Stephens amp) he tells me their bassist is shit and they would be better off without him. In fact the guitarist had clumped the bassist in the chops just this week. Wow this band is one tight gang, like brothers………Gallagher brothers!

After 20 minutes of their ‘my first’ metal songs including such future classics as ‘Head Fuck’ and ‘Tarsan Wants to Lick Your Skanky Vagina’ (their mothers must be so proud) they make a quick lineup change and decide to bend over and seriously bugger the legendary metal classic that is Slayers ‘Raining Blood’. This is to much for our token metaller Arran (every band has one) who has already had one of the four rug rats moshing at the front bounce into him (though he did say sorry and looked kinda scared when Arran gave him a mild glare). So Arran’s had enough and so has the sound guy who boots them off stage. Never work with animals or children!

Its us up next and we have successfully brought pretty much no one, the band after us have done equally as well and so has the promoter. At least there is still a handful kids here who have just had to endure their mates playing the kind of childish metal that should be left in a secondary schools practice room and not inflicted on to my delicate hearing. As Mark put it ‘We’re going to look like Van Halen after that!’. Well the room cleared within 3 songs of our set. I think their mums have turned up to take them home bless. Slightly irritating as we had the decency to stay through their utterly cack set so they should stick around for ours. So now we are playing to virtually no one! Its bands playing to bands. This is not good! Luckily the band after us ‘The Grafters’ are good guys and stick around to make some noise between our songs and we use the gig to practice for the next night.

We stick around after to return the favour to the Grafters who, despite being very different from what what we normally listen to and play are pretty entertaining, very tight and have great live harmonies. I actually really enjoy them so check them out (http://www.myspace.com/thegraftersukmusic). The sound is actually really good in that place as is the stage and lighting, gigs there can be really good, just sadly not last night.

Tonight will be better and Im sure there will be a more positive gig report to be written. See you in Bromley!

Phil

I’ve also updated our MySpace layout with some new pictures, which you can see here:
http://www.myspace.com/the_separation

Arran

Lyrical topics include; Mans need for huge explosions, Al Pacino, triumph over adversity, wishing work would go away, my favourite comics being cancelled and the inevitability of marriage.

The heavier bits are heavier, the poppier bits are poppier and all round it’s a way tighter and focussed effort.

Wish me luck!

Mark