YOUNG KNIVES LORE
Are you ready for a bit of a history lesson? History can be fun…..
The 90's - Simple Pastoral Existence
Hiya – Henry here, reminiscing about the good old days. I don’t hold with too much pouring over the past but let’s have a quick look at the dusty vaults of my memory banks and see if there’s anything interesting in there.
In the beginning……
Ashby Grammar school in the Leicestershire market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in 1993/4. I met this super cool guy in NHS specs as I started by Design and Technology GCSE. We both sat at the table with the only two girls and immediately I wanted to spend a lot of time with all of them.
I got a C by the way and that was mainly because the teacher designed my project which was an emergency button for old people that fall over. I still have no idea how you would design that. Ollie made an early model of a wind turbine and has since gone on to make his millions in renewable technology, oh hang on, parallel universe, his windmill didn’t work.
Our main interests were trying cigarettes, Charity shop clothes from the 70’s and cool Midlands bands like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Senseless Things and Pop Will Eat Itself. And girls. Ollie lived in a nice big house with a Drum Kit in the attic room and some guitars and stuff, so I liked him even more.
I lived in a small village nearby and started biking over to Ollie’s at the weekend to have sleep overs, watch movies, smoke, play pool and eventually we had a go at making music.
At this point we needed more people and I convinced my brother Thomas to try playing the bass and our friend Alex to teach us all how to play and be the guitarist. We weren’t in a hurry though; we just did a bit of music. I was in another band with Alex at the time called the Fruit Pickers, and they were more serious: we did lunchtime shows in the music rooms at school and in the end did a couple of completely terrifying gigs in Leicester.
The band with Ollie Tom and Alex was a hangout and I don’t think we had a name. By the time we played our first gig we must have been nearly leaving sixth form.It was either at the 3 Nuns pub in Loughborough or the Bull’s Head on Ashby High street.
The nband name, Simple Pastoral Existence came later, around 1995/6 because my mate Tom at college said the phrase and I nicked it. At this point we were meeting in the summer holidays from college, and I had bought a Tascam Porta7 4 track tape recorder with my first student loan. I think at this point we had finally decided to write and record songs.
It is obvious to me now that basically not having access to the ability to record meant that our band was just a passing thing, as soon as you add recording capability, then it changes your outlook on the possibilities. Porta7 pictured below with the first SPE tape.
2000's - Pony Club and Early TYK
After college we entered the world of work and soon realised that the music we had been making together was too important so by 1999 we had engineered our lives so that we could all live together in the small village of Kirtlington just outside Oxford.
Along side day jobs in offices and record shops we began writing songs and rehearsing in the village hall.
Oxford didn’t immediately take to Pony Club and it wasn’t until late 2000 that we really got any shows supporting local acts. Then the local zine Nightshift (still very much alive and supporting the Oxford Music scene to this day – This archive is well worth a browse if you like other Oxford bands like Foals/Stornoway/Fixers/Supergrass and others) – gave us demo “Demo of the Month”.
Local record label Shifty Disco then approached us to make a mini LP. Although we were told that there was a band from Bicester called Pony Club, so a name change was necessary. We hastily came up with The Young Knives and went to record our first real record – The young Knives…Are Dead.
We played a lot in Oxford. I think we had the kind of energy that came from not beleiving that we could end up playing gigs and, as has always been our ethos, making the most of every moment on stage. The Oxford music scene was inspiring back then too with a huge range of bands and outlets for music. Particular high-lights at the time were the Punt festival which was a multi venue festival in town and of course the fledgling Truck festival (picture below).
2002-2005 - Cooking something
…Are Dead got a bit of attention but what to do next?
A few local gigs and a little but of anxiety as to how to follow up the first record led us to booking our own small shows outside of Oxford and wondering how to move things forward. At this time we recorded a few songs in the village hall and released them on our own CD-R “Nolens Volens”. These songs would go on to form the basis of our first album.
Here is the Nolens Volens version of “Weekends and BleakDays”
But things went a bit dead and the gigs outside oxford were always less than 10 people.
How to move things forward?
Our real problem was that we were to embarassed to big ourselves up so we needed some help. The answer was obvious, we needed management. As luck would have it there was a managment company set up by a few friends of friends. But obviously anyone can say they are managment so we were very resistant. But they were obviously trying to make an impact and they threw a beach party/gig at the cellar in Oxford and asked us to play.
This is where we met Duncan Ellis who was just overflowing with enthusiasm and obvious drive. We couldn’t resist, he was exactly what we needed. Even if he knew no-one in the industry he certainly had the hutzpah. So we just said, lets just give it a go. Funny how looking back on it these things just kind of fell into alignment, it didn’t feel like it at the time.
So Dunks got to schmoozing and one of the first people he spoke to was the fledgling record label Transgressive records.
Tim and Toby from Transgressive were soon visting Oxford to watch the us perform at the Wheatsheaf. They loved it and that was it really. I know, it felt like a slog at the time, and completely unrealistic like we were going to be working 9-5 jobs forever and this was just a pipe dream. And then it wasn’t.
As it turned out Transgressive had just landed a deal with Warner Music to be a subsidiary Warner label. Wow this bit is very businessy. Yes the manager did know this was going to happen and yes he probably did cleverly engineer the whole thing.
Well it meant that Young Knives were all of a sudden hot shit. And it also meant that there was some money to make a record. So we were asked who they would like to work with and asked about Andy Gill from Gang of 4. He said yes. I mean this is like a super condensed version extracted from my terrible memory, but it kind of was that simple.
One of the first things that happened was that we got entered for the Road to V competition on Channel 4 after a band dropped out – We won because it was all rigged and the production people liked us (allegedly). Then things just seemed to snowball.
I’m not saying that this was the dream because there are a lot of problems with small bands ending up on Major labels out of nowhere and I think all of that was to play out, but also we got to experience what it was like to be in that world, a world which is as alien to me now as it was then, and has very little to do with music quite often. Although Tim and Toby and Duncan were all passionate about music, the whole flavour of big (ish) business music is weird.
But let’s just say the experience had to be part of it, because 1. it was what happened and 2. It has informed many things about how we work now and feeds our passion for DIY music and an almost puritanical pursuit of music for it’s own sake.
2006 Onwards
There is a bunch more to go on about – The one we have milked for the best part of 20 years is being nominated for the Mercury Music prize in 2007. But I said I wasn’t going to cover these years particularly so here’s just a teeny hint at the popularity contest we got ourselves involved in…..
Peace and Love Henry x
