GALLOPS

A big pancake shaped hello to all,

Hopefully February has treated you as well as it has treated us. Have not posted anything for a while as we have been a lot busier than usual, plus there has not been any interesting goings on to update you with to be fair. Practicing, working, writing, financing, planning and generally procrastinating (<repeat) have generally been the order of the day for the past month or so. All of these being activities that hold little interest to anyone but ourselves and are most definitely not worth writing or posting pictures about. Anyhoo…

We were back down in Cardiff over the weekend for a show at Barfly on Friday supporting the brilliant This Town Needs Guns, whose LP ‘Animals’ is phenomenal might i add. Buy it via their Myspace page, don’t download it! Do as i say not as i do. Also playing was Zail who were very interesting according to various sources, unfortunately we missed them due to the mandatory trip to Wetherspoons for pre-show beer and burger deals. Hope to catch the two-piece play at some point in the future! This Town Needs Guns were as good live as on record and impressed all of us suitably. Barfly in Cardiff however doesn’t seem like ‘our kind’ of venue though to be fair, didn’t seem to get much reaction from the crowd who seemed to be more interested in sending texts and updating their Facebook statuses on their iphones than watching us perform our work. Are we that boring??? However, it soon became apparent that this was the general mood of the venue/crowd who didn’t seem too enthusiastic about seeing the headline band they had paid their hard earned nuggets to see either. There was some mild head nodding but nothing to raise the spirits. Shit choice of beer too Win some, lose some. Big thanks to This Town Needs Guns, Zail and most importantly the people in the crowd who gave a fuck, you were all splendid. See you next time.

Having had more beers than we intended to and 2-3 hours sleep on Meilirs living room floor, Saturday morning was a little vile but a few rounds of beans and eggy bread soon made it all better. I’ll take this opportunity to both plug Meilir and thank him for his hospitality once again. Check his brilliant music at: www.myspace.com/meilirmusic and be astonished. A top bloke indeed. Diolch.

We headed to the ITV Machine Room studios on the outskirts of Cardiff to record our session for Bethan and Huw’s Radio 1 show. An hour late (naturally) we were met by engineer Nick Palmer and studio owner/composer/arranger/all round good egg John Rea. The studio was modest in size but the gear was fantastic, I had my first experience of playing a mk 1 Rhodes organ and if i’m honest nearly did a little love wee. The session went well and after a minor hitch with Dave’s hi-hats (thanks to the Music Box for the loan btw!) we finished recording the session in a couple of hours. The session was produced and mixed by Richard Jackson who knew his way round Pro Tools like a mutha. Legend. Overall we are more than pleased with the overall sound of the session and it was a pleasure to work with all of the above. We really can’t thank you enough! Big thanks to Nick for warming up the Leslie for us!

The session is being played next Wednesday sometime after midnight on Radio 1 Wales so tune in. The stems of the session are also being remixed by a handful of producers and will be played as an extra special ‘Gallops Remix Session’ at a later date which of course we will update you on. If you’re in Wrexham this weekend we are playing at The Talbot again on Sat 28th with support from F.O.E (amazing) and DJ/Noise sets  from myself as Birfmarq (Shite) and Wondercut (Shite) Doors are at 8 i believe, get there early as we are expecting it to be as busy as ever, 3 sheets entry. Word

Heres some motherfucking average pictures from the session, hope you like them:

Ta