Lost in music
Edinburgh’s Lost Soul Band release two albums this year and another two are promised for ’94. Tom Lappin goes in search of Lost Soul rebel Gordon Grahame.
Stylish, fashionable, fiavour-of—the-month. ‘now‘ — just a few ofthe usual approbatory music-biz .adjectives you could never dream of applying to Edinburgh‘s latest great white hopes. The Lost Soul Band. The LSBs spring from a rootsier furrow than the Suedes. Pl Harveys and Manic Street Preachers ofthis world, making music that wears its humble antecedents on its sleeve, and pays suitable homage .to the venerable Fat Old Men of rock from Dylan through Gram to Van. These boys are definitely more trad than fad.
Which is why they do all those old-fashioned things like building up a fanatical live following before making an album. That album. The [and ()f Do As You Please, sees the light ofday in the autumn, but in the meantime tnain songwriter Gordon Grahame and his cohorts have perverser nipped into the studio, banged another sixteen tracks onto tape, and released the sessions as a mid-price LP entitled Friday The I 3th And Everythin g 's Rosie (greeted with deserved enthusiasm in these pages last issue). What's that all about then?
‘Yeah, it does seem a bit strange doesn‘t it,‘ says Grahame, giving the impression that this is a perfectly natural state of affairs. ‘lt cost only £1000 to record and we thought with the first album due out in the autumn we could put this out to push the
.. x p _ i band’s profile. get a few more gigs. And for anyone 3 who writes as many songs as i do. getting two
i great.’
Calling Grahame a prolific songwriter is like saying Oliver Reed has an occasional shandy. He's already got two albums planned for l994, and claims his proudest moment was phoning up his girlfriend late | one night to say ‘l‘ve done it. l‘ve written a whole l album. in one day' — ‘Bit ofa struggle mind. but i l made it.‘
So are these production-line ditties. bashed out to a § formula with the tninimurn of fuss? Not exactly. Friday the 13th . . . relies strongly on traditional 3 country-rock and white soul structures, but it's the I lyrics that pull you in. Grahame‘s compositions are ; wordy. evocative vignettes of his life. hanging out in l Edinburgh flats. pubs and assorted bedrooms.
l ‘l just write about me,‘ he says. ‘1 have these two
l lives going on. One ofthcm is the rock 'n‘ roll stuff. ‘ . , the songs so they want to buy the album. We ll burld
I doing gigs. promotional stuff whatever. But there's i also me, living in my flat in Edinburgh. trying to
: make money. playing a few pub gigs. trying to get my life together. And that‘s where the songs come
I from. When i started writing songs i was obsessed
: with the idea that the only way to be original was to
original and can't be. it's rock ‘n‘ roll and that’s 40
: albums out within a couple of months of each other is
i be yourselfas much as possible. The music isn‘t that " Silvertone Records.
years old now, ancient history. You can see the music asjust a medium 1 like to work in. like an artist will use oils instead of watercolours or whatever. it‘s not
a be-all and end-all. The original part is coming from
rne talking about my own life. and being as honest as
. I can so that people can relate to it.‘
Oh yes. honesty. another one of those desperately
unfashionable attributes. The Lost Soul Band started . life on the Edinburgh pub circuit (Grahame himself was a six residencies a week man until all that free
beer began to make inroads on his performing style) and have yet to lose the no-frills, please-the-puntcrs
approach.
‘We've never been that turned on by image.‘ says Grahame. proud wearer of a check neckerchief. ‘As
you son of progress it can become unavoidable. you
start dressing a bit more slickly, presentation gets smoother. But we‘re never going to be really marketable in that sense. All a record company can do with us is make us gig. get people obsessed with
gradually.‘ Get obsessed with the Lost Soul Band Is songs at
Glasgow Fleadlt on Sat 5. Irvine Rock ()n The Water i Festival on Sun [3 (afternoon) and Glasgow Arches
on Sun 13 (evening). Friday The l3th And Everything Is Rosie is available (mid-price) on
Naked & unashamcd
‘Vle used to knock other bands as a matter of course, until we started doing proper gigs and realised what hard work it was.’
What Paddy Mooney, singer for Fauldhouse band The flaked See, means by ‘proper gigs’ is ‘ones where people shout “You’re crapl” ’
In one shouts such a thing when The flaked See take to the stage a few 2 minutes later and kick off a set whose s first points of reference are some of ha the hands Paddy had been enthuslng about beforehand, like Magazine, Wire and .on Division. Bands that plied their trade at a time when it was so
late you.
rd to distinguish between profound and stupid that you just had to lump on board and see where they would
The flaked See pull several different 0N FOLLOWING PAGES: MARIA MCKEE O MEGA CITY 4 C THE BUZZCOCKS
ways at once, the aforementioned late-70s influences rubbing up against an aggression gleaned from Big Black and illisker [iii and a devotion to the crafted songwriting of Waits,
McGowan and Cohen. (According to Paddy, you can never get all four of them to agree on anything musical.)
Anderson (bass) and Jim Anderson (drums) whip up a maelstrom around him, Paddy - bathed in red light and looking, from a distance, vaguely like a young Jim flerr - grips the mikestand for long moments, swaying with his own lower-key intensity.
it’ll take a few more ‘preper glgs’ for The flaked See to dig deeper into their potential, but they already know how to keep one’s attention fixed. At about the point when i decide the song
flamenes covering iioxy Music, I give up. Endless comparisons don’t do them justice. (Alastair Mabbott)
The flaked See play The Venue, Edinburgh on Sat 5. Their debut single ‘flothing’s Lost’ is on Human Condition Records.
The List 4—17 is... l993 29
So while Colin Mclnally (guitar), Shugz
they’re playing sounds almost like The