Autumn 2009 - Feb 2010... the beginning!

Perhaps it is of little interest to any of you, but here is a wee history of MOTM from a Bing's eye view...

Basically, Luke and Ron had been jamming since before time began, and later, the Jimothy started to jam with ‘em too…

The exact dates are obscure to me now, but at some point in Autumn 2009 – say September time – I was allowed in for a sing-song and as none of the boys told me to ‘fuck right off’ I became the singist. Around 6 weeks later, Chris rocked up…

…by December we decided to do some recording and so the boys spent one evening doing the drums and then another couple of evenings doing the guitars… Ecks tracked his bass at his and then last, and very much least, I popped over to Barnsley Town to track my noise…

We did piss about with mixing for ages, primarily because the ‘speed recording’ approach had worked well on some levels and not so well on others… Ecks had a go, the Jimothy had a go… anyone in a band knows that mixing is the shittiest part of the recording process… finally we got mi bruva from anuva muva Greg T. from Hiram to mix and master it… a band should never underestimate the benefit of objective ears…

What we got was a cracking wee recording… sure, there are some gross technical issues, and there ain’t one of us who are totally happy with it, but the tunes themselves cannot be argued with in my opinion… and for a band that is less than 6 months old… well…

So then it was time for giggage… I’d not done a show since the final show of the 2006 Twin Zero/Textures tour (not counting the guest vocal spot with Heroes For Sale in Wath in 2008) and Ecks hadn’t been on stage for 8 years or so by his own reckoning… Luke and Ron hadn’t been too busy either… there was only Jimothy who’d got his gig ego intact…

We soon got a few gigs booked, but as the first gig lumbered on to the foreseeable horizon, an opportunity presented itself… West Street Live put out a SOS call for a show… totally off the cuff we decided to jump on to the show… not as MOTM… but as the elusive and mysterious Madolf Shitler…

Despite being on a line-up whereby we were preceded by a band that were, essentially, the Beautiful South, the show itself was good - given that the purpose of the exercise was to get our gig-stilts on and exorcise any bad-gig gremlins…

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And so…

4the Feb 2010… our first proper gig. Second on at the Dickins Bar in Mighty Roth on a bill with Catharsis Collapse, Redmist Destruction and Suffer the Branks… yeah we had a good time… yeah we did… there were people there and everything… they were even nice enough to cheer for us after our songs… amazing… and seeing as the other bands were mint as fuck too, a quite special inauguration came to pass…

A week later we returned to the West Street Live, this time as ourselves, though the passing of Madolf Shitler didn’t go unnoticed… Put On The Brakes went on first… then us, then Viperous... cracking show… and thanks largely to the efforts of the other bands, we played to people we did not know, which was very nice… unbidden, people approached the stage to see better what we were up to… very cool…

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And so…

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Well, Monday (22/02) will see us playing in Hull with Exhibit A (a Rising Records signing), Batallions (there is some confusion about the spelling of the name) and Hang Them (whose Myspace address is; .com/HTFUCK YOU – mint)…

We’ve been very lucky so far… we’ve got gigs booked all over the place, Leeds, Leicester, Wakefield… and in the pipeline we’ve got a Notts and a Birmingham show and hopefully a Manchester show too… we’ve had a couple of cancellations, but fair’s fair… if people are willing to take us on the strength of a recording we’ve got to be grateful and keep pressing on…

Plan is, at the mo, to make March gig free and write a couple more tunes to beef up the set and prepare another recording, and then spend April, May and June playing shows… if it was down to me, we’d do one a week… but then I’m on the dole!!! I’ll take what I can get…

MOTM are cool… I’d listen to ‘em…

Catch you out and about!

b!x