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Very happy to announce that we’re now entering our third week of radio play on Q Radio, the British IBM is being played as part of Q’s D list with the likes of Foals and Neil Finn. Big thank you to Andy Westcott who originally played us a few weeks ago on his excellent WestList show.

the British IBM

Originally written on an acoustic guitar and recorded as a demo on my iPhone's voice memo app. I experimented with various tempos before it ended up at the speed you can hear on the album. Lyrically it's about sociopathic tendencies and when we started playing it as a band I began using an overdrive pedal and it started to get slightly more grungey.

David (Martin) came up with the little octave riff that you hear in the 'yippee aye yay' section and plays the bulk of the guitar on this track. The rest of which was added by David Simpson who was nice enough to come along to the studio and play on a few things for us.

This song made its live debut at the Sun Inn in Stockton on Tees before we'd started recording the album and has since become a regular on our setlist.

Guest Musicians
David Simpson - Lead Guitar

Equipment
Fender Stratocaster
Fender Telecaster
Fender Deville Amp
Fender Jazz Bass
Peavey 115 Combo Bass Amp
Tama Starclassic Drum Kit
AXL Tube OverDrive Guitar Pedal

Atari 2600 Fridge Magnets

Here's a top tip! If you've got any old game cartridges knocking around and you don't know what to do with them, why not make them into fridge magnets? I recently purchased an Atari 2600 with a load of games and unfortunatley two of them (Pitfall and River Raid) didn't work despite my best attempts at cleaning the connectors with alcohol etc. It seemed a bit of a shame to just chuck them in the bin so I purchased some adhesive magnetic tape stuck it to the back of the carts and vuala! Two retro fridge magnets!

Try it yourself, all you need is a broken game cartridge and some adhesive magnetic tape. I got a whole metre of the stuff for just £1.60 off eBay.

Deep Sea
Sometimes we get asked about gaming soundtracks, and what are our favourites. Retro games had so little processing power to deal with audio, so it’s amazing the fact so many of those noises instantly create nostalgia today - Be that the coin sound of Super Mario, the “wacca-wacca” of Pac Man or the clicking from Chuckie Egg. I recently found myself in San Francisco on holiday, and visited The Museum of Art & Digital Entertainment (The MADE - http://www.themade.org/). They had an exhibition on - The Sound of Games - dedicated to the weird, wonderful games that made audio such a key part of their gameplay.

Read more: Deep Sea

Another song that’s existed for a while and possibly the only song on the album that we’ve yet to play live. I wrote the lyrics nearly a decade ago and I think they had something to do with getting a haircut from God. Pretty random but it came about after seeing the last episode of Quantum Leap in which God was a friendly bartender dishing out pearls of wisdom to Dr Sam Beckett and I thought it might have also been quite cool if he’d been a hairdresser. Anyway!

I dug up the lyrics and started using them with the chord structure you can hear in this song now and the two went pretty well, but it wasn’t until Paul added his almost disco like drum beat to the equation that it really started to come to life. The idea was to have this song as a slightly experimental “pallet cleanser” that divided the two halves of the album that faded in and faded out before kicking into Cannibal.

Guest Musicians
Paul Goodwin - Keyboard

Equipment
Fender Jagstang
Fender Telecaster
Fender Deville Amp
Fender Jazz Bass
Peavey 115 Combo Bass Amp
Tama Starclassic Drum Kit
Nord Keyboard

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