‘1,313: A Sotones Sampler’ is the second Sotones Records compilation, featuring some of the best music from across the south coast, spanning indie rock to dubstep, folk to electronica. Featuring smash singles by Moulettes, Moneytree, Haunted Stereo, Peter Lyons and Fresh Legs, as well as new works by artists including rude_NHS, nato, Ann The Arc and Jeffisalive. Artwork by Billy Mather (billymather.co.uk)
Tracklisting:
Moulettes / Horses For Hearses / Horses For Hearses EP (Licensed from B.alling The Jack)
Fresh Legs / Julian / Julian EP – Deluxe
Moneytree / Medicineland / The Great Indoors Part III
Haunted Stereo / Lock The Doors / On A Pin/Lock The Doors
Anja McCloskey / Newton / Turn – Turn – Turn
Jackie Paper / All The Wine / What’s Wrong With Broken Glass
Acoustic punk-in-disguise Lonely Joe Parker began his career with indie-rock kids The Power, but after festival appearances and national airplay he put down his electric guitar and set out alone last summer to discover ‘a more interesting way to tell stories in sound’.
His bold, performance style harks back to Billy Bragg, while musically he owes more to Pavement, Broken Social Scene and The Clash. “I quickly realised that I wasn’t very good at the guitar,” he explains, “at least, not good enough to be a “guitarist”. But that doesn’t mean it has to be boring, either – you can make just as good a racket with two fingers on a fretboard, you just got to know which ones!”
As his growing live reputation across the UK proves, melody, harmony and performance make a potent combination and Lonely Joe Parker has already supported significant artists such as Band of Skulls, My Luminaires, Stornoway, The Moulettes, Edward J Hicks and Thomas Tantrum in his burgoning solo career.
Joe recently released a split EP, What’s Wrong With Broken Glass, on vinyl and download with Sotones label mate David Miatt a.k.a Jackie Paper. The EP gained the pair a “Track of the Day” accolade on the Q Magazine website, an extensive interview on Fairtilizer, features on The 405 and a great review in The Fly. All proceeds from the vinyl copy of the EP went to Oxfam.
Shanty is taken from the aforementioned EP and gloriously encapsulates Joe’s sincere lo-fi folk sound, with nods to greats such as Nick Drake. His ability to take you on a journey far, far away with heartfelt vocals and simple, beautiful strums will more than charm you into submission. Lonely Joe Parker is defintely set to become one of the most enchanting, underground songerwriters of our generation.
Tracks:
1. Shanty
2. Mary Rose
3. Shanty – Live At Den Of Iniquity
Press release (c) Sotones / A Badge of Friendship, 2010. All rights reserved.
Over every day in December up to Christmas Day I’m giving away a different song for free each day! I’m a bit excited about this.. I haven’t figured out the whole tracklist, some of them aren’t even finished yet. Fuck, some probably aren’t even written yet, for all I know..I think I wanna get back to a clean slate for this album I’m doing in January you see. Plus stuff gets recorded to be heard, no? Some of them are old stuff, some demos. Some released, some on tape, some never heard. Plus some live gems.
In the meantime there’s also some good gigs coming up this month:
“A split release of jaunty confidence and empathy. It’s worth buying a turntable just to hear this.” Matt Golding, The Fly
“intriguing melodies and playful composition… highly alluring.” Track Of The Day 15/12/09, Q Magazine
“Gentle finger picked guitar and stream of conscious lyrics.. like a late night busker serenading the drunks staggering their way home… Get it for the Indie kid in your life.” Singles Round-up 14/12/09, Clash Music
“a strange, yet fantastic collaboration” Will Slater, The 405
Itinerant bum, romantic, and songwriting-genius-in-rags Lonely Joe Parker stumbled on a brilliant idea when he made it back to the UK last year, fresh from a busking tour of the eastern US seaboard. A planned tour following the Obama campaign trail had threatened to derail when a robbery in Miami left him penniless with 1000 miles to home.
But down on his luck amid the squalour and splendour of an American election, he sat down with a $20 pawnshop guitar and wrote a new clutch of songs inspired by his surroundings. Motivated by the chink of change in commuters’ pockets, he dug deep into americana, conceieving a twisted soundtrack to his predicament that took Tom Waits-ian observation and St. Vincent or Feist’s sonic vision, blended with a streets-eye view of the USA. The songs earnt their creator enough change to make it up to NYC, where gigs in the East Village and Williamsburg followed.
Back in the UK he began to wonder why the songs that had earnt his own keep couldn’t help others too. Hitting the buffers in the docklands of his native Southampton, he ran into guitarist and songsmith Jackie Paper – better known as David Miatt – himself taking time to decompress with a raft of misfit songs written following a hectic six months with his band Thomas Tantrum. Critical acclaim had seen them catapulted from rehearsing in a garage by the docks to the Reading, Bestival, SGP and Latitude festivals and national radio appearances (including BBC1 and 6Music), but now winter had bitten and an older, folkier impulse led him to pen a book of wistful, almost melancholic songs that didn’t fit in with his day-job-band’s indie-pop template, referencing Elliot Smith and Nick Drake more often than YYY or the Pixies.
Whilst browsing for vintage Lemonheads in their local Oxfam Music Store, the two hit on the idea of a split EP to shamelessly showcase their songs while raising money and awareness for Oxfam Music. It seemed deceptively simple: do a record on tick, release it through the UK’s network of Oxfam stores specializing in vinyl (touring them to promote the release), get new punters into the stores themselves (essentially great local indie record shops that happen to be benefit empowering development projects worldwide) and walk off with the memories while letting Oxfam pocket all the filthy money.
Six months later, after many long hours waiting outside friends’ studios (Furnace, The Ranch) for spare time, instruments and beds to sleep on, these six songs are the fruit of that collaboration. Friends in Modernaire, Peter Lyons Band, The Moulettes and Moneytree also perform, while the record was mastered by Thomas Tantrum drummer Dave Wade-Brown. Co-operative indie label Sotones release the EP, with original artwork commissioned from local illustrator Billy Mather.
Tracklisting:
1. Brooklyn
2. Shanty
3. Raining
4. All The Wine
5. Natural History
6. Down Among the Dead Men
Press release (c) Sotones, 2009-2010. All rights reserved.
My debut for Sotones (with Joe Parker And The Power) was this 4-track EP made up of the title track (“a slice of poppy exuberance Nightshift magazine praised as ‘… a summery pop thrash with some great pots and pans drumming…'” according to the press release), perennial LJP standard Number Nine (an oddly restrained version, in fact) plus the obligatory live version and demo. We thought we were gonna take over the world back then, and it kind of captures that youthful arrogance, even if the highlight of our career was supporting a late-decline Voodoo Glow Skulls. I quite like it.
Not available any more – CDs were limited and distribution deal with 7Digital has lapsed.
In the summer of 2008 (while I should have been in the death throes of my PhD thesis), I collated most of my recorded musical output to that date.
Weighing in at 88 tracks, this collection of archive tracks, demos, live material and unreleased studio recordings came in boutique (read: hand-assembled and really fiddly) packaging. I made a run of, yes, 88 copies, initially each 7-disc sets. After about five of these monsters at CD-quality, I switched to a single disc per copy with tracks as 320 kb MP3s (burning 7 CDs per copy by hand being a huge pain in the arse.) The inlay was also pretty special – handwritten, I spent a couple of days laying and re-laying it out before I was happy with it. The power of PhD procrastination, hey?
The tracks span the period 2003-2008, with tracks being roughly split chronologically over discs. The first disc covers early songs written as a student in London, mainly (of course) being about girls’n’stuff. These mainly fall into forgettable 3-chord pop ditties lile ‘Spanish Girls‘ or more interesting constructions like ‘Slurry Jamaica Rum Night‘ – which I like for their naivete. I gave a lot of these tracks out at open mic nights and the like, usually with art by Liz Moores and the title ‘All My Friends Wear Stetsons‘, or something similar.
Next up, the ‘Basement Songs‘ were recorded in my first year as a grad student in Oxford, mainly with my mates Ben and Finn, who lived in the building next door. Drinking wine late at night was de rigeur for them as Oxford arts undergrads. It had a worse effect on me and these are mainly pretty hopeless songs (as in, both rubbish and depressing).
The remaining sleeve art master
Disc Three is ‘Ten Friends‘ in its entirety, the demo disc that ended up turning into – with friends from Moneytree, The Beaux Hardts and Jimi Ray – The Mega Hairy Men and later The Power. The fourth disc was also released elsewhere, as the Power’s EP ‘Bee Stings’. Here it was also packaged with the vaguely Nick Cave-esque murder ballad ‘Mary Rose’, which was removed from the EP tracklisting prior to release. A shame as it was the best song on there, though a poor recording.
More tracks from The Power make up Disc Five, this time in the form of unreleased studio tracks (finished and unfinished) as well as live sets from the Access Festival (a 4000+ open-air fundraiser held in Southampton in 2007) and the Beaux Hardts’ leaving show at The Talking Heads in September 2007. After they left, the Power effectively dissolved despite a few ill-fated attempts to revive it with a different lineup. Songs like ‘Buttercup‘ and ‘Points / Quiet‘ are still in my live set today, however. The most finished tracks make up Disc Six, the ‘Do This’ EP which was – heheheh – never actually ‘done’.
Finally, Disc Seven consisted entirely of new works and demos from Jan – April 2008, after the van I was living in got stolen and I had to move into accommodation. I tend to write in busts and this was a great example of that – for a few months I averaged about three songs a week. Also, I was trying to pull a girl, which always helps get the creativity flowing a bit…
Tracklisting:
Disc 1 – All My Friends Wear Stetsons (2003)
Intro
Aim For The End
<3 U Baby
Caught In A Trap
Charly
Coke-A-Coke-A-Cocaine (Feat. Dave Wade-Brown, Alec Fraser)
Davy Crockett
…Ever!
How To Make A Rock N Roll Song (Feat. Dave Wade-Brown)
I Didn’t Try
Introductions
London Streets
Not That Good
torture
Spanish Girls (Feat. Dave Wade-Brown)
Sorry Lover Song
Walking Down Streets
Slurry Jamaica Rum Nite
Surprises (Feat. Dave Wade-Brown, Alec Fraser)
Disc 2 – Basement Songs (2004-2005)
bedsitroom (Feat. Finn, Benn)
beestings2
Concrete Gypsies
cowboyjam (Feat. Finn, Benn)
definitelynotbjork (Feat. Finn, Benn)
moreswing (Feat. Finn, Benn)
notevenslightlybjork (Feat. Finn, Benn)
princesses
somedaysaredifferent
spacemehbones (Feat. Finn, Benn)
Disc 3 – Ten Friends (Original Demo) (2006)
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Disc 4 – Bee Stings EP (2006)
Bee Stings (Feat. Campbell Austin, Dave Wade-Brown)
Number Nine (Feat. Campbell Austin, Dave Wade-Brown)
No Sex (Feat. Campbell Austin, Dave Wade-Brown)
Going Out (Feat. Campbell Austin, Dave Wade-Brown)
Mary Rose (Feat. Campbell Austin)
Disc 5 – The Power… (2007)
*Live tracks feat. Campbell Austin, Dave Wade-Brown, Rob Wade-Brown and Jimmy Hatherley, except where indicated.
(‘Vol.11′ was a scene on a CD – Sotoness’ first proper release and a showcase for everyone involved…)
Original blurb:
Featuring the best bands in the south there’s something for everyone as post-rock jostles with glitchcore, drum’n’bass rubs shoulders with indie. Uniting the music and the musicians is a belief that good music is better put together and released by artists who care about it, about their fans, and each other. Every single copy is individually put together and numbered by hand, by one or more of the bands making this a truly historic release.
Self-released LP (September 2006); ten songs about ten-friends.
Break up with a girlfriend and imprisoned in the house? Write some songs…
Recorded in two days in a bathroom. The names of the ‘ten friends’ were never revealed, though most of them guessed since. Three of these songs went on to become mainstays of the Mega Hairy Men / Power set (‘r’ / ‘No Sex’; ‘c’ / ‘Princesses’; ‘mE’ / ‘Number Nine’).
I ran off about 20 of these on a CDR machine. Each disc was spray-painted a different colour and numbered. None are left that I know of.
Also, I’ve since been told that spray-painting CDs is a REALLY bad idea; the paint tends to melt after repeated plays and screw up any disc drive unlucky enough to house them at the time…
Released 04/11/2010
