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It's easy na-how, it's easy na-how! posted 13.05.10

Over the last few years we’ve done some pretty sweet stuff. We’ve stolen some flags, played gigs at 5am, driven 800 miles in one go, lived off macdonalds for a week, released some singles and (most importantly) all grown most excellent moustaches. To add to this list we are going to record our first album.

We are going to record our album in the autumn with the Animal Farm. They are two thirds Finnish, love squash, Van Halen and know how to make a band sound fucking great. You’ve probably seen our campaign – we need to raise the money to do it and release it. We’ve already been bowled over by the generosity of our sponsors so far but we still need you to help us put the album out. This is about you giving us the support, showing that you believe in us as much as we do. When it comes down to it, it’s about 5 people writing music and being able to release it so that anyone can hear it. You can be a part of making it happen. I feel like a cheesy salesman.

Around ten or more years ago major labels would sign an act and give them a massive advance (actually a loan) to record their album. The label would own the recordings, and the band would pay back the label through their income for however many years. This doesn’t really happen anymore. Anyone will tell you the state of the music industry is fucked up.

I see record labels as a banks with contacts. They are contacts to distribution companies, PR companies, publishing, advertising, booking agents, merch companies, recording studios, producers etc. I don’t see why you need them if you can contact them all yourself, and own your own music! In the future the industry is going to have to change anyway. Labels are losing money because everyone is illegally downloading music, someone’s going to have to find a way of making money from P2P file sharing. Labels are scared of taking risks, that’s why remixes are aplenty. A remix of a track that was previously successful is more likely to make money for a label than a track that no-one has heard before. This is choking new music and I don’t want to make money for any record label that has that attitude.

Ok. Rant over!

We’re writing more songs for the album. The vibe has changed, it’s all about positive thinking. The lyrics are more optimistic, two new songs called ‘Winners’ and ‘Shining with Brilliance’ convey this.

it’s you whose the harvester of the seed’s you’ve sown.

everyone loves a winner, it could be you and me.

I can actually feel a change in myself, everything is getting easier. All you have to do is say it.

Easy.

Soon. It’s coming.

x

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So here we are, middle of the night... posted 28.04.10

…and it’s only just today i realized the leaves had come out for spring. it’s nuts how having so much going on around you can blind you to things that are going on right infront of you.
let’s talk about songs, our projection into the epicness! wrote a hit in the practise room this week. i can feel it. the coolest songs are the ones that get written in that quick half an hour, as opposed to the long ones that dive and resurface over time. this new song is called shining with brilliance. how do people write songs? i don’t think they know, some come fast and others wither over time. the magic is discrete.

there’s lots of recordings evolving through the production process!!

ep’s and album’s afoot!!!

the time for bigger things!!

here we lock into forward motion.

Sn

x

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i lie here, staring up at the stratosphere... posted 4.07.09

I’ve just got home from playing Winchester about an hour ago, my ears are ringing but it’s darn well good to be touring again. A couple of days ago we got home from Spain which included a three day solid drive in the van. It’s like the Shawshank Redemption (for whoever’s seen it), when we’re in there for so long it’s like we’re institutionalized and it feels strange being anywhere else..

Spain tour was wicked once again, very hot (40 degrees) so coming back to England is more bearable despite the English heat. Shows were fantastic, one tour ritual is a shot of whiskey each mid set, goes down a frickin’ treat. We’ve enjoyed once again cheap beer, which is always warm as it is kept in the warm fridge that is the Fun Bus. Tour food is rubbish. Crisps, baguette and chorizo (still mildly favorite!?), and that’s it. You never feel full, whilst trying to get inventive to feel full up new delicatessen tried was the ketchup and salad cream sandwich and the beans on toast (cold and just bread). We did get taken out for a delicious steak by our friends Fatima and Juan (spelling?) which was ace, it was like Christmas. Much sangria was drunk which made us much drunk on sangria. MacDonalds was overused, the highest frequency was 3 in two days, the first being a big mac meal for breakfast at 10am. it’s not big and it’s not clever.

In France we stay in Formula 1 hotels, basically rough 2 star hotels on an industrial estate in the middle of bloomin nowhere. They are all the same inside so on the way home we get up from our hotel, drive 8/9 hours then arrive at the next one and it seems like you haven’t traveled anywhere! We had a campsite in Madrid where inbetween shows we

- caught some sweet rays (stand ruggers next to a blackboard and all you will see is a John Deere hat, a pair of eyes and some teeth) – jammed in the sunshine – played frisbee; we invented a game which is good to play when you get up in the morning. everyone play frisbee and whoever misses their catch does a shot of whisky. we call it frisky, great game – sweated and got burnt, except hunt (merch roady and lout, but whole lot of fun) who was adamant he wasn’t burnt despite resembling a lobster – grew moustaches. bowman’s was amazing before he shaved it off, ak’s is growing still. we met the most amazing sound guy in Madrid, he was ‘tashe tastic, my idol.

one night mike was about to go to bed after post-gig-partying when hunt busts out the amazing line of ‘come on mike, you can get another litre in you’. it was only remembered by driver Geej who was the only sober person in our camp. the line was used many a time after that.

shows were so late, we were told for one gig to sound check at 9pm, we then went on at midnight then drove many miles to play another show at a festival at 5.15am!! it was nuts, when driving home it was getting light. during the festival our Spanish friend Kike went up on our Y axis when he picked up a bottle of 4€ whisky, held it in the air half a foot above his head and necked it, it was amazing, i can’t even stand it but there wasn’t nae a flinch. legend.

before setting off we installed a new sound system in the back of the van which is two speakers and a bass on the floor which has a volume control. in the seat across from the bass bin there is a corner where the bass is trapped and when you sit there all you can hear is wooom wooom wooom! even more when someone turns the bass bin up, worst seat in the van award goes to… and best seat goes to the one next to an ace photo on the wall from a certain type of french magazine…

tour songs have to be:
bombay bicycle club – always like this
minus the bear acoustic album (journey there)
enter shikari – juggernauts

normally we come home from spain and we’re deep in post tour blues but oh no we’re now blitzing the uk and it’s right, oh so right.

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Gig gig gig posted 12.06.09

This time next week we’ll be in the newly pimped van (it’s had it’s wheels painted, bling) cracking into warm tins of beer, tops off, travelling towards Madrid where we’ll be coming home to tour! Pre-tour itchy feet are the order of the week. We’ve spent so much time over the last year just rehearsing, writing and recording in our band room when we need to be out there playing! The agenda used to be tour, tour and more tour but it slipped in favour of writing songs which is important. When just write and rehearse constantly without touring you start to get cabin fever. It’s going to be a great month, I can’t wait!

We’ve been exercising a splutter of song writing diarrhea recently but have come out with some good tunes, and none of them with ‘new song’ as working title (they all seem to merge into one that way). Instead we have Bowman’s Rave, Pistol, Manana, Fizzbitch and my favorite, GUN! Things are getting a tad synthy but always epic. And smothered with 340 delay.

Oh yeah we played a local show in Salisbury last week, it was fun. We were playing the alternative/acoustic section whilst downstairs a metal gig was scheduled from the evening and could be summed up in three words: line six spider. Awesome. What else happened recently? We went up to Kerrang to do a session, we rehearsed, did some more radio interviews, rehearsed a bit, planned tours, rehearsed, plugged the single, rehearsed…

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Lights! Camera! Action!! posted 30.03.09

Packing the van is like one massive game of tetris. This was never more true than last weekend when we packed it early morning before departing to single two’s film set. The day after the shoot I opened the back of the still laden van to try and find some gaffa tape, only to be met by a black wall of cabs and flight cases with arms crossed and heads shaking, not a chance of finding anything in all that gear! I retreated. The film shoot checklist was:

School gym: check.
We did a few favors (wink) for a school teacher and managed to get a school gym to shoot the video in. It was big, wooden, reverby and had big gym ropes that we were climbing like we were 13 again. We were toying with the idea of the video starting with us cheesily descending from these ropes but in hindsight it was probably for the best.

Big tall lights and smoke machine: check.
Smoke machines are fun and mega cool, especially when you have 1.5k’s worth of lights shining through the smoke. Although the smoke makes you feel like you smoke about 60 a day, it does give your hair, drums and guitars a nice greasy conditioning coating. Lovely.

Gear, gear and a little more gear: check check.
Video shoots we’ve done previously were quite tedious and uneasy but this one was the complete opposite, if knackering! The amount of gear we had was one of my favorite bits, especially Rugger’s mega-stack-wall-of-amp. If only we could have patched it all in!! I do need my hearing though so maybe it was good that we didn’t.

A stellar film crew: check.
Blake Claridge was shooting the vid for us (all by himself!) and aside from doing a great job, he was a very nice chap also. Blake was all things lights, camera and action. Other crew included our mate Kev Scullion who took photos and had to use all that was left of his hungover strength to pull the camera trolley around us in circles while Blake crouched on it and filmed. I’m not sure he had that in mind when he came down but he was certainly cream crackered by the end of it. Jeej was as always roadie and camera puller on a slower scale, as was Candy who also did our make-up. On tea duty was Miss Fisher (known by the kids as ‘maam’), a home ec teacher who was right next door to us who provided us with tea and had to listen to us play the same song through about 35 times whilst trying to get some marking done. She only managed to do 4 pieces. Job well done.

The week before we had another film shoot but a bit more informal in that it was whilst we were playing a gig in ‘the flat’, our rehearsal space. Now this room looks crowded when we have anyone more than us 5 in it at any one time. At the gig we must have had about 60? We had never played a show in this format before, and what was planned to be a small intimate show with only closest mates turned into a wicked house party with pretty much everyone there entirely sh*t faced. As there we a lot of hardcore followers there from many a year ago we decided to play a mixed set with a lucky dip. At certain points in the set we would announce ‘It’s Brucie Bonus Time!!’ and we would hand a red lunchbox with a photo of ‘tashe glory Bruce Forsyth gaffa taped on each side to the crowd. They then pick a random old song from inside for us to play. The night got sweatier and messier as it went on, my only regret is that I did not get that pint of gammon that was being bbq’d and served in plastic glasses! I can feel a new breed of gigs coming on….

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Winchra time posted 30.10.08

It’s cold, f-king cold and I don’t ever remember the evenings getting so

dark so early. Bright pink finger syndrome in the mornings before I go in

to my work. Winter has come in seemingly like a sledge hammer blow to the

face, it’s time to mummify ourselves inside hats, coats and scarfs.

We’ve been doing lots of recording recently, it’s strange to remember back to two months ago when there was about 7 of us sitting in the hot control room with window open and fan blowing while we sweat to our pits, thanks to all the gear radiating heat at 100 degrees Celsius. It seems like there’s just not enough time to get everything done when it needs to

be done in about an eighth of the time. But you know if there were more hours in the day you’d fill them with stuff you didn’t want to do, a catch 22. Still, hopefully we’ll get some demos finished very soon and available for download now that the harvest is over…

Someone Else, Long Distance and Sympathy are our newest three songs which you may have seen us play recently on our tiny tour string of 4 dates last weekend. Someone Else is probably one of the lighter songs we have at the moment with duel drumming by AK and Birdy while Long Distance and Sympathy are a bit rockier.

Of the four shows we played three were with a band called Tripwires from Reading. A nice bunch of lads with some wicked songs, I hadn’t seen them prior to us playing together but wished that we could have played a few more together as I was quite getting in to them. Hopefully we’ll do some more together soon. Last Thursday we played Salisbury Alehouse, and then the Bristol Louisiana on Friday of which we finally discovered the backstage area which we never knew existed before(!?). I must be getting stronger beyond control as at the end of our set I managed to snap the mic stand in two with my bare hands. I don’t remember getting on it much that night but the next day we all felt like shit and all tired out. Probably some higher power telling us ‘you should have not stopped touring!’ After the show we decided that at 12am when Bow’s Bday would start we would all take our tops off in respect to our hot driving tours in Spain. 12am hits on the motorway and shortly after we head into a service station. Do we put our tops back on? That’s not how we roll. The look on most people’s faces at 7 of us lined up next to each other in front of the urinals with no t-shirt on and walking around the services when it was icy freezing outside was worth it.

Anyway the Saturday was Bowman’s 21st birthday and for which Lauren at the George where we were to be playing that night tricked the venue all out with balloons. Amongst Bow’s presents was a Boss Space Echo effects pedal which actually puts him at a disadvantage as he now needs to shell out £100 for a big enough pedal board to fit them all on. Ah, looking back to the days when all he had was a tuner. How times have changed. Soon we’ll have to buy some extra stage to take with us on tour to be able to use all our gear at shows. The George show as always was wicked with a great turnout and a whole crowd rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ for ‘Bowlash. We’d been looking forward to playing it all year and it didn’t disappoint, thanks to everyone who came out and made it so. After the show we went out in Andover to some of the shite ‘clubs’. Somehow a maraca managed to get into circulation, no-one knows how but I think it was being shaken on the dance floor all night, passed between us when someone got arm ache. There was also a plastic machine gun with sound effects at one point. At some stage of the night I was wasted and trying to speak Spanish and German to a Brazilian who spoke Portuguese. Obviously the maraca was still going at this point…

Next after that was a gig in Downend near Bristol. The backstage of this was actually a skittle alley, and after the majority of us playing a nice harmless game for a few minutes Bowman and Ruggers get so narked with the noise that Bow steals all the bowling balls and takes them up the other end, squatting down on top of them so we can’t play anymore. Spoil our fun. We then decide to make a racket by chucking a tom hard case around the alley until Bowman gives in. After the show I had the worst ever chicken chow mein, it looked like early learning centre food, a bit too high contrast and slippery.

At the moment we’re thinking about single two and are really eager to put it out as soon as we can. It’s unconfirmed yet as to what song it will be though. We’re trying to do as much recording as possible and we’re managing to swear in everyday conversation more and more, using the F word as an adjective for the same word. I blame it on the farmers.

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Whist is ein single?!! posted 14.09.08

It’s Monday morning and only by 53 minutes but it’s going prey swell. Our debut single is out RIGHT NOW!!! It’s been strange because it’s all that I’ve been thinking so much about for the last however many months and now it’s actually here, the release of one ‘A-side’ 3 minute 23 seconds of music by a ‘band’ who are trying as hard as they can to be as true to themselves musically as people as they can. Looking back it’s strange having a single out only now when all that it feels we’ve done: playing random shows that you think are going to be the best thing you’ve done but won’t turn out like that, practicing when work permits it, writing songs, the tours, self doubt and misbelief, taking gambles that you hope you’ll win on. It does feel good to put all the work we’ve put in so far into a physical product.

Definitely we have to thank everyone who’s supported us up until now, it’s been pretty sweet and we owe you our hearts… you know who are are.
So Drifting Away is out on CD right now. You can buy it from our myspace or website and it’ll be on itunes in exactly a week so you can get it in delicious internet 128kps quality on 22nd Sept. This week should be wicked, come celebrate the release with us at Bristol, Camden or Marlborough this week, it’s really going to be ace I promise.

In other news it has been Crispysock this weekend in our hometown Andover. Our good friend and legend Crispy passed away three years ago and this year was the third annual Crispystock; and judging by the state of the majority of us who took advantage of the celebration of his life it was wicked once again, paying homage to the big boy in true inebriated fashion perhaps.

Thanks to everyone who supported us at Sugarhill and the Bear, I have to say they were both the funnest shows we’ve all played in aggeessss. It was muddy but we absorbed the muddy brown-ness and life got better. We saw some great bands, namely Broken Records; they were amazing. I loved the strings. I also enjoyed Johnny Foreigner, they were pretty sweet also..


So make sure you continue supporting us like the wicked people you are and buy Drifting Away! If not just buy to get the b-side which sounds quite nice I think. It’s out on the internet now, from our myspace or the website in CD format. Next you’ll be able to get it a week from now in itunes on the 22nd of Sept.

finally thanks everyone for your ongoing support, see you next week in Bristol, Camden or Marlborough!

team sion sion xxx

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Recording Shenanigans... posted 6.08.08

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DEBUT SINGLE: DRIFTING AWAY posted 17.07.08

‘Drifting Away’ will be Sion’s very first single. It will be out in September on CD and also on itunes. You will know the exact release date as soon as the finalities are dealt with.We now have the artwork for the single, you can view it in full hi-res shiny-ness here. The release party for the single is going to be a show at Dublin Castle in Camden on the 17th of September. We’re going to be doing a FREE coach up there so stick that date in your diary, on your forehead and engrave it into your skull as it’s really important that we get lots of people up there! The B side for the single is going to be an acoustic version of the song, recorded at Oakcuts Studios.

We want the airwaves back… In other news we’ve been play listed on our local 106.4 Andover FM so if you’re about our way you can catch us on the radio.

See you soon
Sion x

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Single soming soon! Recording done... posted 8.06.08







So after a nice little sunny weekend break to Paris for me, last week we were in the studio.

Recording our debut single.

Exciting stuff.

And it sounds good.

It will be out in around a couple of months, the release date will be confirmed soon but the artwork looks cool.

We recorded near Tower Bridge in London with producers Ville and Matt Leppanen in their very nice studio (if you had been there you would have seen me pining over much recording gear I can’t afford. Ah well). Hopefully we should be on tour again (it’s been too long) just after it’s been released in promotion of it so you will be able to catch us live again soon..

After a couple of days recording we played a couple of shows last week also, one in London and one in Bristol. London was good but I really enjoyed the Bristol show a lot more; all the bands were good and it was a really nice atmosphere, the Louisiana is a nice little venue too.


So at the moment now we are preparing to put out our first single and writing more material for our album. We’re building a recording studio into the flat where we practice at the moment and so will put some new demos up of new and unrecorded Sion stuff. I just need some more gear but I’m jobless currently so if anyone would like to send some money into the Sion charity or help us win the lottery we’ll buy you a beer and an ice cream. At the moment songs we have are ‘Laced’, one called ‘Tokyo’, a slow Sigur Ros style one and more mish mash of tunes. It’s different and getting there towards being something we’re quite proud of and you will hear them soon. Or we’ll scrap them and you’ll hear something with the lyrics ‘‘she’s so lovely’‘ 100 times. Because that sells. Apparently…


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