Born from endless midnight recording sessions in a converted lighthouse, this UK collective crafts devastating piano ballads. Producer Arthur Finch records every vocal take while wrapped in a vintage velvet dressing gown to achieve maximum emotional vulnerability. Their secret weapon is an out-of-tune upright piano rescued from an abandoned seaside hotel.
Scrapbook
1994
The lighthouse auction
We won the lease on the lighthouse because no one else wanted a damp stone stump next to a crumbling pier in Dorset. Arthur spent three days dragging an upright piano out of an abandoned seaside hotel with a borrowed Ford Transit and a very short rope. The keys are yellow like old teeth and the middle C sounds like a wet boot hitting a lino floor. We set it up in the lantern room where the wind whistles through the iron frames like an angry uncle. Arthur immediately put on his velvet dressing gown, which smells faintly of damp wool and decades of pipe tobacco. We plugged in a noisy four-track cassette deck that eats tape whenever the humidity spikes. Simon made tea in a saucepan because the kettle has no bottom. It is cold, it is loud with gulls, and we have exactly four blank tapes left to record an entire album that nobody asked for.
February
Three hundred meters of cable
Arthur insisted on running three hundred meters of extension cord down the spiral staircase to power the reel-to-reel machine in the dry lower chamber. Every time someone walks up for a cup of tea, the lights in the entire tower flicker and the tape motor groans like an old dog. Simon managed to solder the headphone jack using a bent fork and some insulating tape after the original connector snapped off in his pocket. We recorded fourteen takes of a song about losing a glove on a bus, and each one sounds progressively more miserable as the temperature drops toward zero. Arthur refuses to take off the dressing gown, claiming it acts as an acoustic baffle, though we suspect he just lost his trousers somewhere near the coal bucket. The local postman dropped off our mail, which consisted entirely of three bills and a circular about agricultural lime.
The Tuesday after next
Water in the hammer rail
A winter gale blew spray right through the leaded glass of the lantern room, soaking the hammers of the upright piano. Now every note in the upper register sounds like someone dropping a wet sponge into a bucket. Arthur stood over the instrument for an hour with a hairdryer borrowed from a bed and breakfast in Weymouth, looking deeply tragic in his velvet robe while nothing actually dried. Simon spent the afternoon patching a hole in the roof with a flattened baked bean tin and some roofing tar that smells like a dead motorway. We tried to record the vocal for track three, but every time the bass note hits, a dead spider vibrates out from behind the soundboard and lands on Arthur's wrist. We have consumed eighteen tins of lentil soup this week and the walls are growing a very specific shade of grey fuzz.
After the first gig
Seven people in a cider pub
We loaded the damp piano and the four-track into the back of the Transit and drove forty miles to play our debut show at the Red Lion in Bridport. Seven people were in attendance, three of whom were sheltering from the drizzle and two of whom were asleep in the pool table alcove. Arthur wore the velvet dressing gown behind the keyboard, which caused the landlord to ask if he had escaped from the local asylum. We played forty-five minutes of extraordinarily slow piano music while a dog licked Simon's left ankle. We made twelve pounds and fifty pence in the tip jar, plus a half-eaten packet of cheese and onion crisps left on the bar. On the drive back, the exhaust pipe fell off and dragged along the tarmac, leaving a shower of sparks that illuminated the Dorset hedgerows like a very sad celebration.
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Fictional act. The name, bio and photo were made up for this catalogue — the songs are real and were made by Musify users.
