Aeroplane Attack Dot Com

Been a bit quiet here of late, hasn’t it? Well, that’s not because we’ve not been busy, I can assure you… the iLiKETRAiNS/SDOLE show at The Wedge went well, and we played Munroe Effect’s single launch party about a week afterwards. And that show, folks, was my last with the band.

When bands say to the papers and bloggers that “there’s no bad feeling and the departure is amicable”, it’s usually some sort of smokescreen. Unfortunately, we can’t offer you the excitement of a spectacular group dynamics collapse in the Aeroplane Attack camp, no bitter recrimination or internicine sarcasm, no mammoth substance abuse problem tearing through the middle pages of the red-tops for the next six months before the inevitable ill-advised solo project of remonstrative lyrics and foolish cross-genre collaborations. Nothing so dramatic, I’m afraid. Y’see, I’m leaving because I’m moving away… about 250 miles away, in fact, to Stockport – which is a bit to far to travel on a regular enough basis to be in a band. Hell, it’s hard enough making it from Southsea up to Hilsea for practice once a week…

So, yeah – no more delay-drenched acid-flashback noises, or at least not from me. The band are carrying on without me, which is a great thing to know – they’re a top bunch of guys and some of my best mates, and I just know they’re gonna make some awesome new music in the future. Hell, with me out of the way they’ve not only got more room on stage to work with, but also huge expanses of the audible frequency spectrum that were previously cluttered by some guy who heard Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds one too many times as a kid. They can’t fail to sound better, if you ask me.

Aeroplane Attack was my first proper band, because I don’t count the ones that you form ten minutes before closing time at your favourite pub or club (though I love collecting the names of non-existent bands that I’ve joined over the years). This is the only band that actually practiced, wrote songs, and went out and played them at people. It’s a little like losing your virginity, I guess. It was a tough learning experience, a road trip (albeit without the road), and one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my life. The first thing I’ll be doing when I get to Stockport is looking for a new band… but I know that this is the one they’ll all be compared to.

I suspect they’ll always be found a little wanting.

Keep watching the skies…

Back in September we moved into the Old Blacksmiths Studios in Portsmouth for a couple of days to record some songs with Rich Tamblyn. The idea being that we record live in the rooms we use for practice each week.

Rich’s mix of The Subject is Too Dark has already made an appearance on the Pompey Music forum’s 2009 Autumn compilation – Hello, Sailor but this is a version we quickly knocked up for the sake of it. We’re still fiddling with it, so it isn’t perfect but it’s getting there:

Other (short notice) news:

We’re playing the Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea tomorrow (Saturday 24, October) alongside I Like Trains, The Strange Death of Liberal England and SWIMMInG. Tickets are £7 on the door.

Here’s the Facebook event page

Below are a couple of text message reviews received from my housemate, who drafts them between songs and hits ’send’ at the end of our set.

“I think no actual words is a great idea. But I can envisage some vocals: 1st song great intro, add woo-oh-Ooh’s. Rolling style. 2nd song got flute idea. 3rd song needs barking growling and howling. 4th song vocal rest. Very strong. Maybe some gentle sobbing. Bloody brilliant but could be weirder!”
Katie Beerling, Wedgewood Rooms, 26/06/09

Well, this was the gig where we decided to go fully instrumental during soundcheck, when it became clear that not even the Wedge sound system could project Phils voice through the quagmire of screaming guitars. The upside is that Phil became liberated from the shackles of multi-tasking instrument/vocal duties and and can concentrate on more interesting guitar melodies. Following our planned couple of days recording at Blacksmiths next month, we will be in possession of raw multi-track recordings. These will be made available to Kate to add her vocal/flute/gentle sobbing embellishments to create her very own AA vs Katie Beerling remix. Our long-term plan is to release as much source material as possible for remixing and general tinkering to whoever so much as mutters our name.

“Yep that new plectrum’s working well. Not sure how this would affect the sound but rusty should be at the front with u guys behind and 2 the side.”
Katie Beerling, Edge of the Wedge, 27/07/09

The unorthodox V-formation stage setup was planned for our first show at the Havana back in April. Unfortunately, due to awkward fire door placement, venue safety and crowd capacity concerns, we were unable to realise our goal. Common Sense is no fun. Rusty is rather the Drumbing Showman, especially when juxtaposed next to us string-pluckers, so playing him as centre forward makes sense. To further the analogy, Hatter would be the enigmatically outta sight, genius substitute goal-keeper and Raven and I would be non-combative observers, linesmen perhaps. Please bear in mind that a bulk of my minimal football knowledge is derived from inane Half Man, Half Biscuit lyrics. The new plectrum was top notch btw: Jim Dunlop Green (0.88mm).

I value this constructive feedback and the SMS format enforces a brevity and concise use of language; which I have clearly disregarded in my drawn-out reponses.

Please feel free to post your post-show comments at your choice of the following locations:

Facebook:    http://band.to/aeroplaneattack/
Twitter:         http://twitter.com/aeroplaneattack
Website:        http://www.aeroplaneattack.com
My Mobile:  [available on request]

The title says it all really. We’re playing the Vision Incision show at the Edge alongside Crocus and Lavotchkin on the 27th and we’ll be first on so if you do want to catch us then it’s best to turn up early (doors are 8pm).

Fresh from judging at the Wedgewood Rooms Showcase with KO tonight, I’ve returned to find footage of my appearance at the National Drumb Off, this year in Birmingham. The creme de la creme of the drumb world were there, and we battled it out to the end. Apparently there was a record set for the largest collective drumb, most of which I take full credit for.

Greatest. Ever.

In 1983 I stood upon RAF Sealand, North Wales with my parents, watching some kind of aircraft display – not uncommon for the territory. My father worked at the base back then, and we’d been to other open days and get togethers. This one was different because I cried.

Aged 4, experiencing the Vulcan fly past for the first time was completely terrifying. Not its aesthetic appearance, but the sound of four Bristol Siddeley Olympus engines scorching the sky above, that was more than enough to make this four year old boy cry his eyes out…

Fast forward 25 years and three bleary-eyed members of Aeroplane Attack are on route to the Yeovilton Air Show with high hopes of seeing this beast of an aeroplane in the sky again. As a band we adopted the silhouette of the Vulcan as our logo and branded ourselves with this iconic bomber that only in recent years retired from service.

It was a big day for Phil, K.O. and I as we’d been following the single remaining airborne Vulcan on Twitter for the last few months. The XH558 is funded and maintained by the Vulcan to the Sky Trust who first got her back in the air in 2007.
The Twitter updates by the crew of XH558 read like some kind of soap opera, will she fly? What technical problem next? Cleared for flight. Awaiting taxiing. Etc, etc..
We planned on checking their updates using our phones during the course of the day, as the weather had the potential to get a little sketchy later on.

Upon arrival we checked out a lot of the static aircraft on display, notable mentions include the Dutch aircrew of the F-16 (really not too bothered about anything, simply passing UN peace resolutions left right and centre! ), A range of Harriers, Sea kings, Aquatic planes, and military vehicles.

The Red Arrows put in a minor display, visibility was an issue as the cloud dropped lower. Then there were appearances from a range of aircraft, The Eurofighter Typhoon certainly sounded the best, and the F-16 pulled some slick manoeuvres too. The Apache and Sea kings did a nice routine too which was all very reminiscent of Vietnam!

Around this point we decided that vantage point for the XH558 take off was paramount and we didn’t want to miss any of it. We gaily skipped though the crowds of observers laughing at the music from other display teams until we saw her in the distance. Things were looking good, the Olympus engines were turning over nicely, warning lights on and flashing, Twitter even told us the team were crewing in – all looked good… It almost drew a tear from K.O.’s eye! (Not Phil’s though!)

Moments later the engines power down, the lights go out, and we start looking at each other for answers. The announcer says there’s a problem of some sort and the crew are working on it. We fear the worst and go for a walk around the site again. Coffee and pasty later, we check the Twitter…

Gutting. Especially knowing we got this close. Hoards of people start leaving the site, as the rain picks up and the cloud lowers. Later on we found out that the ground crew had managed to fix the problem (brake hydraulics) but it was indeed the poor weather conditions that had scuppered the flight. Dang.

They towed XH558 to crowd side which was a nice touch. She looked resplendent in her coat of camouflage paint colours, and oddly shorter in length than I had expected. We took photos from every conceivable angle, bothered the pilots by giving them handshakes and Aeroplane Attack pin badges, and generally got in the way of aircraft enthusiasts!

So we left Yeovilton saddened that we didn’t get to see our precious XH558 Vulcan in the sky, but enjoyed the aircraft geekary that the day presented.

We won’t stop chasing the Vulcan; we have plans to follow her to another show in Bournemouth this summer…

VULCAN TO THE SKY!

Those who’ve seen us play will have noticed that we don’t sound a great deal like the songs that currently sit on our MySpace page (other than the Youtube vid of Joseph), so I thought I’d explain why as it crops up in conversation from time to time.

The songs in question (9×9=81, I Am Always Here, Fall: A Satellite Transmisison, Mercury Atlas Five and I Don’t Care If I’m Wrong Because I Know I’m Right About You) were recorded mostly by me on my own between 2004 and 2008, with Matt writing and playing with me on 9×9=81.

Aeroplane Attack was the band name but it was just me recording things while on the lookout for people to play with and for much of that time Myspace was the outlet for the noise I made.  I couldn’t really play them live without a band and so I just threw them onto the site for people to chance upon.

Surprisingly, people from various parts of the world found the songs and went as far as to write with encouragement but finding like-minded people was still tricky.  I ended up teaming up with Matt, who I’d played with before and we proceeded to lark around and record some little songs, still in the hope of stumbling across other musicians who wanted to do similar things.

Eventually we found KO, Paul and Rusty; we headed down to the practice rooms, played the songs too loudly and too quickly and the sound of Aeroplane Attack changed dramatically.

Ultimately, the songs with vocals (including Remote and Speed Limt Enforced By Aircraft) turned out to not work in this context and although we played some of them live in the first few gigs it soon became apparent that my voice wasn’t going to compete with the sheer volume level caused by massive bass and guitar amps and a drumber (see Rusty’s earlier post about the term) who was going to give all or nothing when it came to impact.

Getting someone else in to sing wasn’t an option; vocal intensity wasn’t what we were after and we’d sooner not play than turn down the volume.  We simply had to change our approach to songwriting.

And here we are today, as a largely instrumental band.  Speed Limit…, Remote and 9×9=81 will probably be recorded when we head into the studio in August but I doubt they’ll be played live too often.  The other songs won’t be re-recorded or performed and they probably won’t stay on the MySpace player.  Mercury Atlas Five might survive but the others aren’t really that representative of who we are or what we sound like, so their time will soon be up and in time I won’t have to explain why we sound nothing like the music on our site.

Unless we have another dramatic shift, of course…

Filip

PRESENT/FUTURE

Well, these past few months have been pretty busy for me, especially after a few years break in the musical wilderness. Our live debut in April seems like a distant memory, and we’ve found our strengths and weaknesses along the way. Being a band still in our infancy, we’re in a constant state of development and slowly carving our own musical path. We never intended to be playing so many shows initially, but the offers kept coming in and we’ve been enjoying it too much to say no. Our priority for the next few months is to redefine ourselves as an instrumental band and get some proper recordings under our belt.

HISTORY/SHOUTS

Matt Emson is an old acquaintance of mine from the Horseshoe days of old, we were in a short-lived hardcore band together with Peachey (later of Six Foot Ditch) but lost touch for many years. When contact was re-established (all praise social networking), he introduced me to the original core of Aeroplane Attack, Phil and Matt. We developed from there, and picked up additional flight crew on the way. Matt is our most ardent supporter and champion live documentor. He can be spotted at all of our live shows as the tall fella videoing our set with not one, but two mobile phones. StereoVision is coming.

Abbie & Sarah of Hong Kong Gardeners Club totally sorted out our debut live performace at The Havana having not heard anything but mumblings of intense volume and a distinct ’90’s shoegaze influence. They took a chance on having us headline our first show. It paid off, as the gig with Orphans & Vandals and Le Plat Du Jour was just shy off capacity and one mystery individual was sufficiently moved to wholeheartedly proclaim us as “Better live than Sonic Youth” afterwards. [Phil and I were totally gobsmacked]

Spikey Mark has probably assisted more local bands than he cares to remember over the years, and we are no exception. Spikey regularly ferries us noiseniks and our noise-making machinery to and from band practice on a weekly basis. This saves us a great deal of ball-ache and allows the rhythm section to get more than a little merry, thus lubricating the wheels of creativity. Mark’s visceral road rage belies his soft speaking voice, and has developed into one of the regular comedy aspects of Sunday nights.

Tom Hussey of Attack Vipers! has also helped us out with van transport/loan when Spikey’s unavailable and one day I will own a bass rig better than his Ampeg monolith. He’s damn good at Guitar Hero and his special move is parking a large van on a narrow residential Southsea street.

DD Ball @Awesome Noise
Myke Eales @Gridlock
Ben Drew @Wedgewood Rooms
These guys have all put us on since our debut show, and together with HKGC, are all part of the reason why the Pompey live music scene is as vibrant as it is today. Things have changed for the better since those days at The Horseshoe a whole decade ago. The passion and drive are the same, but the diversity of music genres and venues has improved ten-fold.

The Strange Death Of Liberal England rehearse on the same night as us and we share banter at Blacksmiths. If we have an unscreened guitar held at a certain angle, Adams distinctive vocals bleed through our guitar amps, which sometimes makes up for our lack of vocals. TSDOLE have kindly gone out of their way to invite us as Special Guests for their double-headliner Wedgewood Rooms show with iLikeTrains on Oct 24th.

Please complete the following sentence:

Strange Death offered Aeroplane Attack a quality support slot with them and iLikeTrains because:
a) …we bribed Kelly with a Dime Bar.
b) …we black-mailed Summerly with a recorded embarrassing drunken rant.
c) …we beat them at car park football.

Welcome to the first of hopefully, many ‘drumb stools’ – a brief view from behind the traps at the rest of Aeroplane Attack with a percussive skew.
I should begin with a glossary of sorts. Drumb comes from a term coined in 1996, when Dale Crover of legendary Melvins fame released a solo EP entitled Drumb. The term has since been mimicked by Michel Gondry on his Drumb and Drumber YouTube video and has also made it to the urban dictionary:
1. Drumb

A person who really sucks at playing the drums.

“That guy sucks on the drums. He Drumb.”

With all that cleared up we should be able to move on.

Aeroplane Attack has developed a fair bit since drumbs were added to the equation. Previously, founder members of the band, Phil and Matt played faux drumbs using some form of pad control and computer wizardry. This resulted in a controlled if not soulful sound that reflected the quieter recordings they’d made. Since then Messers K.O. and Paul joined adding more ‘umph’ (technical drumb term) and in turn/time I joined and changed everything forever. The pad control has since become relegated to the space in Phil’s front room that contains the most dust, and only gets aired for Deacon Blue covers when Matt is feeling fruity.
Y’see, you can’t take drumbs lightly. Well I can’t. Before joining this group of dishevelled men I’d been imposed in a drumb hiatus, lasting almost 11 years. I’d driven my musical projects down many cul de sacs without drumb involvement, teaching myself how to scratch, DJ, produce, hound musicians and produce varied types of noise. In the 30th year of my life it has become apparent that a man cannot live his life without drumb. The feeling is almost hypodermic. Playing provides the player (hate the game, not the player) with a feeling of euphoria, a sort of existential being I’d missed in other projects.
Since joining, rehearsing and debuting our songs things haven’t slowed down at all. After playing 3 smaller shows we found ourselves in the nice position of being offered a slot at The Wedgewood Rooms, and the opportunity to really go for it and play loud. It’s important to consider the loud dynamic in Aeroplane Attack. Our axe-minsters play through large cabs on stage providing a nice girth to our aesthetic. In the drumb department there is only one dynamic: On/Off, or Loud/Nothing.
To get to this stage of drumbing there have been sacrifices on route, not Elton John type sacrifices, more physical and mental barriers to overcome. My knuckles now bleed on a weekly basis which was initially a bit of a shock, but now just down to poor technique. I have a strange pad-like appearance on my palms where I have worn the skin down to suit the ergonomics of my sticks (played backwards, naturally) and finally I have developed a drumb rim shaped profile in the bone of my right little finger, this is still bruised and fresh from last Sundays practice.
This brings us up to speed in the present day. Sundays practice was essentially getting ready for recording in August, and finishing off some newer material. In the background we’re also preparing for shows in the future, notably our slot at Southsea Fest in September and our support slot with The Strange Death of Liberal England and Iliketrains in October. Aeroplane Attack and TSDOLE tend to practice at the same time on Sundays at Blacksmiths, Hilsea so it was nice of them to ask us to play the gig. TSDOLE have helped us on our route to become the men we are today. Sunday was no exception to this, as fellow drumb stooler Andrew Summerly shared his life experiences with us, notably a football shaped game originating from Gosport called ‘Wembley Willy’. Oddly, and surprisingly enough the loser has to get their Willy out.
Aeroplane Attack politely declined to play.

Picture the scene: there we were, out on a band mission to buy (among other things) some latticework MDF, Araldite and some genuine Gibson machine heads*, and it was mentioned that yours truly still hadn’t gotten his arse in gear and set up the proper website he’d been promising to his bandmates for hell knows how long…

So after some well-deserved not-quite-drive-through munchies and some shuttling around of an electronic drumkit, I got home and fitted a new machine head to my Les Paul, made some French bread pizza (it’s all about the pickled jalapenos), cracked a bottle of Peroni and fired up my FTP client. Or to put it another way, I faffed about for a bit and then put my butt in the swivel chair to get some work done. The end result: Aeroplane Attack Dot Com is now a proper website!

Everything’s a bit rough and ready at the moment, and there’s loads of functional stuff I need to tinker with (not to mention interesting content to add – gotta give the fans a reason to pop back, after all), but you gotta start somewhere – and this is where we’re starting.

Over the weeks ahead, this could well become a progressively opening window on the life and times of Southsea’s loudest band that don’t wear masks and robes… or it could be somewhere we just batter on about music equipment we can’t afford to buy, and gigs we’ve been to, and Matt’s ongoing love affair with a certain well-known fast-food chain. Either way, it should be a bit of a laugh for you, and a lot of a laugh for us.

Keep watching the skies…

[* Do we know how to party on a Saturday or what? ]