GALLOPS

BACK ON EARTH…

Hello all!

We’ve been unforgivably lazy with our blogging as we have been concentrating on being musicians, the wonders (?) of Myspace and the beautiful distraction that is the world of Twitter. http://www.twitter.com/GALLOPS

It really has been a wonderfully eventful summer for us, and we have achieved a lot of things that would not have seemed achievable when we started doing this shit back in 2007 AD. We’re all a bit bloody proud of ourselves to be honest. Didn’t we do well!!!!! Eh?

We won’t bore you with every sordid detail of our summer but rather document the highlights…

First of all we played the Radio One Big Weekend in sunny Swindon on the BBC Introducing stage on 10th. The whole weekend was a stormer despite the actual festival not being exactly up our street to say the least! In all honesty the event itself felt like a glorified, gaudy version of one of those nightmarish Radio One Roadshows that used to take place in obsolete British seaside towns. Do they still happen?!?

Moaning aside though, the actual show/weekend was really enjoyable and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all involved at Radio One and everyone that came to see us. We travelled to Swindon in a large rabble and it was great to spend the weekend at a local campsite with so many of our friends. It was actually quite a surprise to me that the security at the event allowed a group of 10+ alcohol fueled Wrexham lads with mild sunstroke, within touching distance of such ‘real’ celebrities such as Lily Allen and Alesha Dixon. Thank you security, for being so indiscriminating! The whole weekend was a blast and despite getting kicked off our campsite we came away from the weekend unscathed and with a high (ish) profile gig to put on our CV. Tidy….

After our appearance at Big Weekend we spent the rest of the Spring/Summer playing various shows all over the country. We played at:

Mad Ferret, Preston 30/05/09
Sacred Trinity Church, Salford 05/06/09
Dry Bar, Manchester 11/06/09
Adonzka, Milton Keynes 13/06/09
Madame Jojo’s, London 07/07/09
Wakestock, Abersoch 11/07/09
The Cellars, Oxford 18/07/09
Central Station, Wrexham 31/07/09

We enjoyed all of these shows a lot. It was particularly great to play two of the above (Oxford and Milton Keynes) with our partners in crime ‘Minnaars’, more on those later. But the highest profile show we played over the summer was undoubtedly our appearance on the Main Stage at the Wakestock Music Festival in North Wales. This was the biggest stage we’ve ever played on, both in terms of physical size and status.

It really was a strange feeling for us to be playing on a ‘proper’ festival Main Stage with a monitor engineer and everything! We even managed to get a small portion of our set broadcast on an episode of the saucy ‘Hollyoaks Later’ on Channel 4, which was pretty damn surreal! A full live track of ours (‘Joust’) and shocking interview was also broadcast on Huw Stephens coverage of the festival on S4C (telly for Welsh folk). The weather at Wakestock was absolutely shocking, gale force winds and HEAVY rain but we still managed to enjoy it and got to see the magnitude of Dizzee Rascals rider first hand. Which brought us back down to earth and made us realise we hadn’t quite landed yet! Warm cans of Carling for us I’m afraid!!

Check out our cameo appearance in the video below playing ‘Crutches’ at around the 1 min 24 secs mark!

At the end of the summer we were very kindly invited to embark on a short tour of France and Germany with the lovely Minnaars. We have played a few shows with Minnaars in the past and can’t recommend them enough. Get up, get into it, get involved!!!

http://www.myspace.com/minnaars

The shows we played on the tour were:

Le Sonic, Lyon 31/08/09
Cube, Paberborn 01/09/09
NBI, Berlin 03/09/09
Bang Bang Club, Berlin 04/09/09
Seven, Geldern 05/09/09

It has to be said this is probably the highlight of our career as a band. Experiencing touring of this kind was amazing. All of the shows we played over in Europe were great and it was such a good feeling meeting so many people who were interested in our work so many miles away. Thanks for this opportunity Minnaars! BIG LOVE FUN BOYS

We can’t wait to get back out to Europe! Watch this space…..

PICATURES FROM SAID TRIP:

Following our jaunt around Europe we also played the prestigious In The City and Swn showcases in Manchester and Cardiff to much acclaim! Great shows with great people. We got rather a lot of attention from industry types which is always nice! Getting quite a bit of label interest right now too, so who knows what will be the outcome of the next few months. Again, watch this space…

You will be happy to hear that we have finally completed the recording our debut self-titled EP (got there in the end!) It’s currently in the tweaking stages but it won’t be too long before y’all can get your greasy paws on it! Tracks that made it onto the EP are Miami Spider, Defbox, Oh The Manatee, Sonderhof and an ‘improvised in the studio with gear we couldn’t afford’ mandatory intro track, which sounds bloody lovely in all honesty! We recorded it in The Music Box studios in Cardiff with a friend of ours, Llion Robertson, on engineer/producer duties. Thanks to Llion for making recording the EP so relaxed and enjoyable. You are a star….

We have lots of gigs on the horizon. We are playing at the Redi Nights Christmas Party in Central Station, Wrexham on 27th December. Although we don’t play on our home turf often, we love it when we do! Also, we are playing a special extended set at Moho Live in Manchester for Audio farm on New Years Eve. Which is likely to be pretty special….

Upcoming gigs:

Redi Nights Christmas Party, Central Station, Wrexham 27/12/09
NYE Audio Farm Special, Moho lIve, Manchester 31/12/09
The Good Ship, London 21/01/09

Keep checking here for updates, we will update them as and when they happen….

Hope you are all good

LOVE

GALLOPS

1 Comment so far
Leave a comment