‘A commanding dash in Debbie Harry monochrome stripes’
If you’ve been to any of our last few gigs you’ll have noticed an extra person on stage with Hamish and me. If you’re very sharp eyed, you’ll have noticed that she also appears in the video for The Balance Company. She is Laura, and this blog is about her. Here she is singing Cloudbusing with us, in a very ropey video filmed on someone’s phone.
Ever since Hamish and I started Swimmer One, we have wrestled with the problem of how to present our songs on stage. Well, not absolutely ever since. At the beginning we decided we just couldn’t be bothered playing live, inspired by the fact that the Pet Shop Boys barely played live until their second album (and choosing to breezily disregard the fact that 1. that was in the 1980s and 2. they were signed to EMI). Both of us had previously been in the kind of indie bands where you spent endless amounts of time trying to get four people in the same room on the same evening, and then trying to stop them from arguing. And we didn’t much like performing anyway. So instead we just sat at home with a computer, creating songs with incredibly complicated arrangements, lots of samples and parts that, we would come to realise later, were physically impossible to play.
When we finally had a couple of songs we were happy with, we spent several months recording a single. We released it. It got played on daytime Radio One. We got emails from as far away as Mexico. This is EASY, we thought. A woman from a biggish London record label flew up from London to see us. She said we reminded her of the Human League and asked us when we were playing live. We said we weren’t. She went away again. A month later, the radio stopped playing us. We still couldn’t afford a yacht. Something was wrong with our world domination plan.
So, eventually, after spending months painstakingly removing all the parts that were impossible to play from our songs again – and coming up with a set that was more than two songs long – we started playing live. We were totally rubbish. The laptop crashed. The synth broke. I forgot the words. Hamish, on one occasion, realised he’d left his e-bow in the car outside the venue and ACTUALLY WENT OUTSIDE TO GET IT BETWEEN SONGS. Unexpectedly abandoned and on stage alone, I was forced to tell a lengthy joke about dogs. Eventually we got better, but unless you’re the Ting Tings or the White Stripes, two people on stage isn’t much to look at. I wore great shirts and pinstripe trousers in an attempt to compensate, but was never completely happy.
We did get one good gig offer, making a theatre show with a theatre company called Highway Diner. This involved us playing our songs on stage while four actors performed various, often bonkers scenes around us. There was dancing with iPods, shouting, much stuffing of paper into mouths, a fight, a sort of striptease, and a political speech. At one point someone put up a tent on stage next to us, much to Hamish’s surprise. It was like Forced Entertainment putting on a club night. We loved it. We could play our songs really loud, without really having to perform, and because it was theatre we got to soundcheck all afternoon instead of in a mad rush during the evening. Later the show toured to Italy. It was, much to our delight, named after our first single, We Just Make Music For Ourselves.
Highway Diner is Laura’s company. When she’s not in Highway Diner she acts in, or produces, other people’s shows. In the past year she has pretended to be everything from a crazy cook to a member of the Wooster Group. When she’s not doing that she sings in her band, Laura Lewis and the Tea Dance Orchestra. And when she’s not doing that, Laura now plays keyboards and sings backing vocals for our live shows, for which we are extremely grateful to her, since she has so many other things she could be doing. She also put together the visuals for our current show, which you’ll have seen if you were at Neue Liebe in Edinburgh this month (there are some pictures at our MySpace page), and you will see again if you come to see us at Limbo in Edinburgh in June, which you obviously should. If I am wearing make-up and a frilly shirt again, you can probably blame Laura.
We got a live review in the Independent recently. It said that I looked like Bryan Ferry, Laura looked like Debbie Harry, and Hamish looked like Charlie Brown. After I read it I didn’t stop laughing for about an hour. Poor Hamish. Life is deeply unfair to the curly-haired. He should probably start wearing a hat. We all have our crosses to bear though. When people talk to us after gigs, they talk to Hamish about his guitar skills and talk to Laura about her outfits, which I imagine will become a bit annoying after a while.
Of course, adding an extra member to the line-up is always going to change that vital band dynamic. Until now there has always been a healthy ponce/boffin 50-50 balance in the band. Do the ponces now have the boffin outnumbered? Possibly, but luckily Laura is a boffin too. In fact, now I think of it, she is pretty much 50 per cent boffin and 50 per cent ponce. I am entirely ponce and almost zero boffin, although recently I have been learning some boffin skills. And Hamish seems to be starting to unleash his inner ponce. So I feel sure it will all balance out.
The main thing is, when we’re on stage now I feel like I’m in a band, and not one of those not terribly good bands we were in before Swimmer One. Instead I’m in a fucking great band.
You should come and see us. We’re fucking good. Did I mention that already?
Andrew
