MUSIC preview
Golden shot
BACARDI Rum/The List Unsigned Scottish Band of the Year, The Goldenhour are off the starting blocks. Words: Alastair Mabbott
There's a real air of excitement surrounding Glasgow band Goldenhour. Winning the BACARDI Rum/The List Unsigned Scottish Band 1996 competition enabled them to book into Park Lane studios and record the tracks that appear on their debut single 'Until I See You Again’, a shamelessly tuneful pop song influenced by the band’s 60s heroes like The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces, The Zombies and the broader
‘We don't fit in with the any of the . lo-fi Pastels—type family, we’ve got our own thing going.’ Neil Sturgeon
psychedelic and garage scenes. Add a dash of Northern soul and you've got the kind of sound that has been thrilling the band's growrng fanbase for the past year and more.
'You don’t want to be a band that wins a competition, brings a CD out and then disappears for six months, so we are gomg to be qune high-profile in the next three or four months,’
promises frontman Neil Sturgeon.
To that end, they’ve been rehearsing twelve new songs to perfection in a spooky warehouse in Bridgeton, and joined a couple of four-track recorders together to record demos for a single early in the new year. They have also been rationing their Glasgow gigs to one every month to six weeks, and holding back on gigs generally until finished copies of their CD come back from the pressing plant to be distributed to retail, business and media.
'Hopefully the mail out will lead to record company interest,’ says Sturgeon, ’but it's important to have your own agenda, so we are planning to put something out, either as a one single deal on a small label — there's been a couple of interested parties there — or we’ll probably scrape the pennies together to put it out ourselves.’
They have already sparked interest at the University of California,
where The Goldenhour share the
Berkley college radio playlist with Oasis, Pulp and Supergrass. Sturgeon thinks it is more of a help than a hindrance that their 605 influences come from more obscure British acts than the obvious and ubiquitous Beatles.
’I don’t think there’s too many other bands like us gomg about in Glasgow or Scotland, which I see as a really
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good thing. We don’t fit in with the any of the lo-fi Pastels-type family, and I think we’ve got our own thing gomg. I could see us fitting in with contemporaries like Dodgy and stuff like that, eventually, because our songs are good and quite commercial, for all that our influences are quite diverse. We could support a broad range of bands.’
The Goldenhour first got off the ground when Sturgeon bumped into drummer Andy Galley and the pair started talking about Jamming. A month later, ’Andy got in touch and he’d pulled a band together.’ They were all players Andy had been in
The Goldenhour: unscathed after rehearsing in a spooky Bridgeton warehouse
various bands with, and gelled from the first rehearsal.
’It’s the perfect line-up, because we bring slightly different influences to the party, but at the same time we all love the same kind of things,’ says Sturgeon. 'But the influences have broadened since we got together a couple of years ago, and now our songs have got everything from three- and-a-half minute pop songs to a fourteen-minute psychedelic song we do in rehearsals. We’re going to premiere it at Fury Murry’s.’
The Goldenhour play Fury Murry's, Glasgow on Thu 30 Oct.
hurricane #1
STEP INTO MY WORLD EP
featuring the perfecto edit NEW SINGLE OUT NOW. 00 1 / CD 2 / 7 "
CD 1 INCLUDES PERFECTO RADIO EDIT, ORIGINAL VERSION PLUS TWO NEW TRACKS CD 2 INCLUDES THE PERFECTO MIX. KANUNA MIX, PERFECTO DUB AND GET IT TOGETHER MIX
A CREATION RECORDS PRODUCT
42 THE “ST 23 Oct—6 Nov 1997
http://www.creation.co.uli
COUNTRY ROCK Jack Ingram Glasgow: King Tut's, Tue 28 Oct.
Jack Ingram is the latest in a long line of Texas troubadours to hit the UK, but while he is a newcomer to these parts, he has a solid apprenticeship behind him.
The release of his Li'vin’ Or Dyin’ album, co-produced by his mentor Steve Earle (’he knew where we were coming from musically, and we had a great relationship in the studio'), brought him to Wider notice, but he had already issued three previous albums under his own steam.
Livrn’ Or Dyin' appeared on Rising Tide, a label launched by his manager Don LeVitan, who had also managed such Texas luminaries as Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett and Joe Ely. Ingram must have seemed an obvrous chOIce and the singer was happy to sign up.
’Ken wanted a label that was committed to havrng integrity and respect for real country music, and you know there isn’t a whole lot of that around right now,’ says Ingram 'He knew I was a believer from way back before I even started playing music — my big influences were people like Guy Clark, Willie Nels. n and Jerry Jeff Walker, and some c,” the rock guys like Tom Petty.’
The album's kicking country rock feel bears Out lngram’s claim and suggests that his live show, wrth his regular Beat Up Ford Band, Will be worth seeing. The band evolved gradually from his solo gigs while he was still a student, and built up through the addition of a guitar player, then bass to make a trio,
Jack Ingram: Texas troubadour
and finally a drummer. From the
outset, though, Ingram was Singing his
own songs
‘Yeah, I was singing my own stuff way back, but maybe one song out of 50, you know, because that was all I had written,’ he says. ’Even before I started playing, though, I used to write things down — I definitely wouldn’t say poetry, but just little bits and pieces of things. When I got my guitar, I finally realised why I had been doing that.’ (Kenny Mathieson)