Lazarus Clamp to play Platform festival

Lazarus Clamp are delighted to be performing at the inaugural Platform Festival held at the Railway Inn in Winchester, on Sunday May 6th 2018.

There’s a really great line-up: Husky Loops, The Chap,  Souer, Long Teeth, Lazarus Clamp, The Wubworld Band.

Click on the picture above for more information, or here if you’d like to buy tickets.

LP update.

LC - TBINTM Package contents

So: ‘The bird is not the metaphor’ is released on Damnably/Little Red Rabbit on 18th April, 2015. In the UK and Europe it’s distributed via Shellshock, and in the US via Comedy Minus One.

There are advance streams of Latch (which you may have heard on BBC 6Music) and Let’s Get Fired on our Bandcamp.

We’ve had two lovely advance reviews already, one from Delusions of Adequacy and one from Louder Than War. They say such embarrassingly nice things that it would be rude to repeat them here.

We’re playing out too:

– London at The Windmill for Damnably’s Walpurgis Night on 2nd May
– Salford at The Crescent as part of Sounds From The Other City on 3rd May

Hopefully more to come.

 

 

Birds which are not metaphors.

 

The bird is not the metaphor.

If you’ve been following our progress on the Facebook page, you’ll know we’ve been busy. If you haven’t, then this will be news to you: we’ve been busy. We’ve been busy doing all the stuff we’re usually busy doing (eating foods that disagree with us, trying to be parents/children/both to our children/parents/both, working at our day jobs, worrying about the end of civilisation, worrying about the end of the world, trying to be useful, trying to be good, trying not to break stuff, etc). But we’ve also been busy making this record, this same ‘Bird is not the metaphor’ record that we seem to have been discussing for some years now (I’m not going to check – I’m sure it is years). In fact, we’ve been so busy – so intermittently-but-intensely involved in it – that I think we might even have finished it.

Over a weekend in November last year we recorded live bass, drums and guitars for 9 songs. Then Tom went back and did the violin. Then I got a chest infection, and went back and disappointed everyone with some wheezy vocals. Then I went back and did them again. I was allowed to stay in the band. Then in the spring, we went in and recorded a further 3 songs. I took the swearing out of one of them, and calmed the fuck down, and everyone stopped hating it. Throw in a couple of days worth of mixing and mastering, then factor in about 2,000 emails and phone calls to argue about the mixing and mastering and – bingo! – we were done.

We have 12 songs which we’re really very pleased with. And we have a plan to release this new record in early 2014, as a collaborative venture between our friends at Damnably and our friends at Little Red Rabbit. There will be vinyl and download.

We are super-excited about it. We think you’ll like it. Not as in ‘you-the-whole-internet’ obviously – you people will be sorely disappointed by at it, at best, and more likely, let’s be honest, you will remain entirely ignorant of this record’s existence. We have realistic expectations after all. No, we mean ‘you-people-who-occasionally-wonder-if-Lazarus-Clamp-are-still-going-and-if-so,what-they-are-up-to?’ You people. You will be pleased, we hope, that you linked our ill-considered hard-to-recall name to a little corner of your big, busy musical brains, and that you tripped over it sometime recently, and wondered what we had been up to. We have been up to this. We have been busy. We have been making this thing. We are super-excited about it.We think you’ll like it.

The bird is not the metaphor (N.B. I’ve lost count what part of the saga we’re on).

Apologies for the lapse in communications. I’ve been updating the Facebook group, but have been a bit reluctant to post ‘nearly news’ here. We were dormant from April until September. Reverse hibernation.

Since then, we’ve been busy, regaining the ground we had occupied until the ‘accidentally moving house’ incident. And the ‘inadvertently ruining a finger’ incident. And the ‘unfortunately being laid low by actual influenza’ incident.

Anyway, we are recording most of the new LP next weekend, fate and fortune permitting. And the remainder of it we hope to finish off the following weekend (violin and vocals). We’ll hold off mixing until after Christmas, but whichever way you look at it, there will be a new Clamp record in 2013. And it will probably be called ‘The bird is not the metaphor.’

‘The bird is not the metaphor.’ Parts 3, 4, 5 – and unplanned interlude.

Right then. ‘Blog lags behind life’ shock.

So – we played the Windmill show [part 3 of our recording preparation], and it seemed to go well. Certainly, we enjoyed ourselves. There’s some video evidence, which I have not seen, but which is apparently fit for public consumption. We’ll post the link, once its up.

From there, a week later, we picked up our ‘to do’ list for an afternoon in a cowshed somewhere near Milton Keynes [part 4], and spent a lot of time trying out the effects of different drum parts on ‘Bow down’ and ‘Things are sticky.’ Neither set of experiments are likely to be retained. And we edged slowly closer to some sort of shape for the end of ‘Horse you rode in on,’ which has been surviving live performances by the seat of its pants, but may need a sturdier underpinning if it’s to survive the scrutiny of tape. And Huw announced that he would probably have to move house at the end of the month. Oh dear.

A few days after that, and Huw confirmed that he would be moving house at the time when we had planned to record. So, in the way of all things Clamp, actual events may occur later than previously advertised. We are re-arranging our recording dates for September/October. We’ll keep you posted.

A week later [part 5], and we met up [without Huw, who was ripping out plasterboard and 100 year old electrics in preparation for the move, by this point] in the cowshed again. When we arrived, it turned out that they were doublebooked, and we spent the first part of the afternoon rehearsing in a kitchenette. This was kind of OK: I made everyone try out a group singing part for ‘Horse you rode in on,’ which we would never have got round to trying with the distractions of drums and volume closer-to-hand. It sort of worked. John – who has listened to the recording – tells me that it may sound ‘too grumpy’ to be workable. We’ll see. I enjoyed it, without being sold on it. Later – in the real rehearsal room – we figured out details on ‘Things are sticky’ and ‘Simple and easy’ [which finally has an end], and then spent hours playing one chord in two thousand different combinations, for the end of ‘Horse.’ Progress of sorts: Andrew and I know what each of us are doing, and in what likely sequence, without having forced the thing into some unrecognisable shape. Should work …

Later that evening, John tore a ligament in his finger, while catching the bass when his strap broke. So, he’s out of action for 6-8 weeks – which would have scuppered the recording anyway. Que sera, sera, etc.

Windmill, Brixton, 23rd March 2012 – with Shannon Wright.

We are playing this Damnably show, which is exciting. I don’t know what we’ll play. But we’re playing it.

Shannon Wright
with Lazarus Clamp, Former Utopia.
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Windmill
22 Blenheim Gardens,
London, UK SW2 5BZ

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/157671

‘The bird is not the metaphor.’ Part 2.

We spent an enjoyably exhausting 9 hours in the dankest rehearsal rooms that Birmingham has to offer this weekend. Saturday’s time was spent revisiting, ‘Bow down,’ ‘Latch,’ and ‘This is how I cut my own throat’ from the previous session. So – somewhat predictably – ‘Bow down’ has now lost the dronerock intro that was so lovingly constructed a couple of weeks ago. To say that there was some eye-rolling and groaning at this decision, is to understate the extent that our practice room briefly resembled the killing floor of an abattoir at the peak of the BSE crisis. Interestingly, I think the song itself is tangibly better ‘with’ the absent intro section, than it ever was before the intro even existed. How can this be? I don’t know. Call a psychologist.

‘Latch’ benefited from some final decisi0n-making on drums, violin parts, and the fine-tuning of Andrew’s free-floating guitar. It is done.

And ‘This is how I cut my own throat’ was a revelation. At least, it was to me. We have been chipping away at this one for months, and until now it has retained an elusive and intimidatingly ‘interesting’ quality, without ever having the feel of something that would be good to hear. But on Saturday the chorus that we thought might actually work, did actually work. The beginning section now has a vocal and a structure that also seems to work, and after one of those excitingly serendipitous mistakes, the bridge also got an unexpected little boost. The whole thing feels like a song for the first time. [I have always thought of the bridge as the ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’ bit, but I’ve just googled ‘Girl on a Motorcycle,’ and the music from the film bears no relation to my recollection of the music from the film. Maybe the bridge just sounds a little French.]

On Sunday, we restored some dynamics to ‘Let’s Get Fired,’ injected some swing and swagger into ‘Things are Sticky,’ and were given permission by John to extend the ending to ‘Horse You Rode In On’ by several minutes. We reconstructed ‘Simple and Easy’ and ‘Dirty Names,’ creating some nice new parts for drums, violin and guitar as we went. Once or twice it looked like we might even persuade Tom to write something down. But he didn’t – so you’ll be hearing in a few weeks about how many of those new parts he actually remembers …

So that makes eight. I was convinced we’d done ten, but apparently not. We do already have pretty good arrangements of the remaining songs (‘100W bulb,’ ‘We Are In Water,’ ‘Tethered Not Caged,’ ‘Magpie,’) however, so I think we are about on track to hit the small window of recording time available to us at the end of April. Fingers crossed.

Now I need to eat some proper food.

‘The bird is not the metaphor.’ Part 1.

We braved the impending severe weather warning and made a trip to our rock n’ roll meridian [Milton Keynes] on Saturday afternoon for the first four hours’ work on songs for the new LP. Despite the frozen pipes in the rehearsal rooms, and the lurking expectation that we would emerge into a silent winter wonderland at the end of it all, we made good progress on 3 songs.

‘Bow down’ now has a splendid dronerock intro; ‘Latch’ has ditched its pretty-but-pointless middle section and fessed up to being the popsong that it probably is, and ‘This is how I cut my own throat’ has a version of the chorus that may even, eventually, work. Also making their debut, a new handbuilt pedal made and played by Andrew [it was loud] and the new bareknuckle pickups on my partscaster [they were lovely]. And, if we get sick of the putative LP title [above], then John coined an alternative [LP Title Pathway B]: ‘I am the auditor.’

To top it all off, it hadn’t quite started snowing when we all pealed out at 4pm, and if it hadn’t have been for Birmingham’s notorious inability to cope with the snow, I’d have made it home in decent time, too.

Recording booked for late April. Yip yip!

Recording mode / Christmas compilation

Three things:

Firstly, we have a song included on the forthcoming Little Red Rabbit Christmas compilation. It will be a home recording of ‘100 W bulb’ – so its a work in progress – but evidence suggests that there’s something rather nice happening there.

Secondly, there is another home recording on the L. Clamp Facebook page. That one is a draft of ‘Magpie,’ a song that I wrote during the anxious months prior to my daughter’s birth, a couple of winters ago. There was some risk of a rather unpleasant viral syndrome, at the time, which couldn’t be disconfirmed til birth (happily, it was a false alarm). I’ve played the song at a couple of solo shows this year (usually in a style less deadpan than in this recording) and people have asked to hear it, so I’ve uploaded the draft until something more ‘finished’ is available.

Thirdly, we’ll be doing some studio recording in March/April for the next LP. Will keep you posted.

Onwards, to 2012 ….