THE HAUNTING OF SARAHJANE SWAN

BLOGGER: shark batter records
LOCATION: scottish borders & brooklyn, new york
WEBSITE: sharkbatter.com
MYSPACE: myspace.com/sharkbatterrecords


(pic by martin millar)

Creepy and entrancing, Sarahjane Swan's new single Ghost features her abrasive, blustery vocals over gothic guitars and industrial synths and percussion. Her peculiar blend of gothic music with pop is not easy to describe--perhaps try to imagine an early 90s Siouxsie Sioux/Trent Reznor collaboration. - Silence-Killer.com

Released today on Shark Batter Records, Ghost is the second single from the Scottish sculptress, occasional alternative model and creator of left-field electronic Gothic-Pop ditties, Sarahjane Swan . And there's a spooky story behind the song.

It was the Fates who brought Sarahjane Swan and Shark Batter Records together. Throughout most of the 1990s, the two brothers in charge of the label's day to day dealings - Mike Sorensen Small and rogerSIMIAN (not his real name, you'll be shocked to discover) - lived with their parents in a converted church hall in the Scottish Borders. That's the house where they and some friends started the underground magazine, Sun Zoom Spark , featuring interviews with everyone from punk rock old-timers (The Ramones, Jonathan Richman) to Brit Pop whippersnappers (Blur, Radiohead, Pulp, Elastica, Supergrass, Manics, Echobelly, Oasis, Sleeper), noisier American acts (Beck, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Mercury Rev), pop stars (Coolio, Erasure, Garbage, Rolf Harris) and many riot grrrl influenced female-fronted acts. It's where Roger, Mike and two pals - Grant Pringle and Donald Kyle - formed cult Scottish band, Dawn Of The Replicants, with their lodger Paul Vickers.

It's also where Sarahjane now lives with her boyfriend, their son and the resident poltergeist.

A year or so ago, when SJS began looking for a guitar teacher she found her way to Mike Small, and the pair were startled to discover they had that old church house in common.

"Have you met the ghostie yet?" Mike asked. "He was pretty quiet when we all lived there. We probably made too much noise. Scared him away."

"He visits almost every day," Sarahjane replied. "He's a nice ghost I think but he's a bit fussy. He moves little trinkets about the bathroom and turns stuff upside down."

Within only a few months of starting her guitar lessons, Sarahjane Swan was still having to look at the fretboard when changing chords but had written almost an album's worth of songs.

Mike loved those songs. "Oh, we should put those out on our wee record label," he said.

"You have a record label?" Sarahjane asked. "Cool."



SJS's ode to her spectral lodger, Ghost, is the most recently written of her songs, composed without guitar: just voice, a beatbox and plenty of spooky reverb. The Shark Batter posse loved the demo so much they thought Ghost should be the next single. And so here it is.

This new version features musical shenanigans from rogerSIMIAN and Mike Sorensen Small, the drumming of Grant Pringle (Dawn Of The Replicants) and a bit of additional vocal derring do from Brendan McAndrew (Mike's co-conspirator in the Stone Ghost Collective).

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MUSINGS OF A WANDERING OAF

BLOGGER: fren attic
WEBSITE: wanderingoaf.blogspot.com

OBSERVATIONS ON 21ST CENTURY LIFE FROM THE RELATIVE SAFETY OF A GARDEN SHED.
OAF(N): CHANGELING, USUALLY DEFORMED, LEFT BY THE FAIRIES; A DOLT; A LOUT; AN AWKWARD FELLOW



It is not often that I drag my sorry carcass to the cinema. I prefer lost films myself. Celluloid masterpieces such as Edward D. Wood Jr.'s 1972 classic, The Undergraduate are my forte. Films that exist in rare prints, films that are only extant in a damaged or incomplete form and some that never existed in the first place are my usual fare. À tort et à travers, I lurched into the local picture house recently to satisfy a childhood craving.

The year was 1977 and my recently redundant father entered our sitting room with a brand new COLOUR TV. When I say redundant I mean relieved of his employment rather than his position as titular head of household. My dysfunctional siblings and I were already assembled around the space where the cathode shrine would take pride of place. Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis and all that. Up until then, and rather late in the day might I add, we had satisfied ourselves with monochrome domestic entertainment. We even listened to the radio in black and white, although this was only a problem when they broadcast snooker.

Anyway, the prospect of one show more than any other made our ocular facilities salivate or should I say lacrimate - Star Trek. We were a family of proto-Trekkies who weren’t sad enough to become actual Trekkies. We even had favourites. Mine was that irrepressible Russian Starfleet officer, Pavel Andreievich Chekov. I chose him because I was the youngest and all the others had been taken.

The television came replete with a sliding, wood effect door. This enabled you to hide the fact that you dared to watch the goggle box from your disapproving neighbours - if they ever popped around for tea. Middle-class families in our neck of the woods were obviously expected to have a good old sing song round the piano of an evening. Television was for common people and Roman Catholics. We were both. Property prices took a nose dive I can assure you.

Having switched it on, in eager anticipation, we were forced to wait while it ‘warmed up’. The picture seemed to wobble on to the screen like a sort of green tornado, something I’ve never witnessed on any other piece of televisual equipment. But, and this is the crux of my tale, the image that burned itself on to our retinas was the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Captain James T. Kirk sat in his throne, looking habitually pensive. Spock stood to his right, typically emotionless and calculating. Scotty stood to his left, a look of familiar defeat crowning his features. Only this time they were devoid of their dull, grey uniforms. Kirk was yellow, Spock blue, Scotty a shocking red. We had never witnessed anything like this. It was like walking in to a Jackson Pollock painting. That image lives with me to this day, in sparkling Technicolor.

So, having been blown away once by Gene Roddenberry’s baby I couldn’t help but notice that Star Trek was being reinvented for the big screen, again. I thought nothing of the original movies, still less of the cloying, saccharine, vomit fest that was The Next Generation. Those other abortionate incarnations will remain unnamed for aesthetic reasons. The difference here was the prospect of the original characters once again being introduced. I always loved Kirk’s logs which appeared to be full of faux ‘philosophispeak’ and Shakespearian buffoonery: “My soul searches for meaning on this deserted planet. Spock and the others seem distant. What is the lot of man, are we meant to suffer? The others may return to the ship but will they be the same men and women who left it”? In truth if an unknown character went on a mission they were invariably struck down by a child-like Apollo or laid low by a prosthetic disease. We called them ‘the expendable ones’. I do wonder how the Enterprise functioned with Kirk’s inane ramblings. Couldn’t he have inter-spliced them with some practical announcements like “The Holodeck needs a wipe” or “The canteen will be serving Vulcan selhat soup, followed by shepherd’s pie”?

I was not disappointed by the aural and visual delights that faced me as I drank in the latest incarnation. The story was a little far-fetched. A convenient meeting between the spanking new 'buff' Captain Kirk and a decrepit Leonard Nimoy stretched credulity, but with plenty of stunning, ear-splitting effects and a little humour, popcorn spilled on to my velveteen chair, the tangy taste of caffeinated coke fizzed around the roof of my mouth and I was entertained. Oh, and Simon Pegg really is a star, after all.

VACUUM SPASM BLOG July 2009

BLOGGER: charles s bravo
LOCATION: scottish borders
BAND WEBSITE: vacuum spasm babies
BAND MYSPACE: vsb myspace
BLOG: vsb blog
LABEL: shark batter records

Being a Spasm Baby and getting played on the BBC.



It's been a tough couple of months trying to keep up momentum and push the album to anyone who might listen or purchase. One way has been radio. We've been quite lucky with radio play, generally, and for 'Whipping Clowns' with plays on the BBC, and a list of internet stations. Vic Galloway who does a show on BBC Radio One, and another on BBC Radio Scotland has always been really good to us, and recently we've been getting played on BBC Radio Bristol Introducing, presented by Richard Pitt and Gary Smith. They played 'Song for Katie' and read out a bit of the press release, which was a great introduction to the band. The bad press reviews makes us laugh, especially reviews written by people who don't seem to like anything. One Edinburgh magazine reviewed the album without saying much either way, but after asking a few folk about that particular publication, I was told that in actual fact it's put together by idiots. Our favourite review was from Maarten Schiethart writing in Pennyblack Music who said "Forget about your Maximo Ferdinand Monkeys, Vacuum Spasm Babies are the band for the future". That made us smile, a lot.

Playing a few live gigs also made us smile. We've had a riot playing the tracks live a various places in Edinburgh, and getting to hear other new bands. We especially liked Rodent Emporium, who i think like us like to make a lot of noise, and have a bit of humour in what they do. We have some very odd people coming to see us live, and based on the way the album turned out, we wouldn't have expected anything else.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF FLAGWOMAN

BLOGGER: paul vickers
LOCATION: edinburgh
PAUL'S BANDS: paul vickers and the leg, dawn of the replicants
LABEL: sl records