The Lobster Boat sails again!

Anyone who's on their mailing list will no know The Lobster Boat band are touring in July in the UK. I can't help wondering if this means they are making a new record. Either way I'll still get the chance to see Jean smash the shit out of his 3 drums. Hooray!

July 1st - London (The Lexington)

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/163498

July 2nd - Manchester (The Castle)

July 3rd - Birmingham (Station Inn)

July 4th - Nottingham (The Malt Cross)

Free entry

July 5th - Cardiff (Undertone)

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/170134

In Your Own Sweet Time

Great video here from yesterday's acoustic show in London. New(?) tune called In Your Own Sweet Time. I love the songs where Tattersall self-mythologises.

Daytrotter Session

The WP's have recently done a Daytrotter Session which is available here:

http://www.daytrotter.com/#!/concert/the-wave-pictures/20055651-37382867

If you don't know, Daytrotter is a website that has daily sessions for download from known and lesser known bands. The downloads were free for a number of years but now seem to be for payment, although their is a free trial so should you want just the Wave Pics you can get it.

The 4 tracks include a song called "It Doesn't Matter Now What Was Said" which I don't recognise. Perhaps a newie?

“It’s not 100 percent fun anymore,” he says. “But it’s still a fantastic job.”

Amusingly curmudgeonly interview with Franic here: http://www.mapanare.us/5/post/2012/05/the-wave-pictures-come-from-a-long-tradition-of-uk-music-mostly-unrelated-to-bagging-on-coldplay.html

The Wave Pictures Come From A Long Tradition Of UK Music (Mostly Unrelated To Bagging On Coldplay

 

by Wade Millward

The Wave Pictures may be an indie band, but they’re not an indie band.

That’s what Franic Rzycki wants critics and listeners of his Wymeswold, England, pop rock trio to understand. He says the band, now touring the U.S., is more influenced by the classic rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones and early Fleetwood Mac than any safe, modern rock band.

What’s more, the bassist boasts about the group’s instrumental prowess. Knowing how to play your instrument is distinctly non-indie, Rzycki says. Rzycki is disappointed by the snobby hipsters his band attracts, especially in the U.K. He rejects bands such as alt-rockers Coldplay, who are “pissing away time and money for something mediocre.”

“That music doesn’t interest me at all,” he says.

Instead, Rzycki and his bandmates — drummer Jonny Helm and singer-guitarist Dave Tattersall, Rzycki’s friend of more than 20 years — prefer to entertain crowds with a musicianship overlooked from the group’s prolific collection of albums. The Wave Pictures’ twelfth album, Long Black Cars, was released April 17.

Rzycki says he and Tattersall are known as the group’s curmudgeons by drummer Helm. Though Rzycki considers Helm’s rationality grounding for the band, he finds his and Tattersall’s complaining justified and an important perspective for living. 

“If you don’t dislike something, how can you fall in love with something else,” he reasons.

He speaks from Austin, Texas, while his mates enjoy an outdoor pool fueled by the Barton Springs. The band is taking a break from its April-May tour with pop quartet Allo Darlin’. Rzycki says attendance for the tour has been on and off. The bands sold out a show at New York’s Mercury Lounge while a gig at the Spanish Moon in Baton Rouge, La., only attracted about 10 people.

Crowd enthusiasm is key for a Wave Pictures show, as the band doesn’t use setlists. Frontman Tattersall picks songs based on how he feels in the moment.

“I think it’s important that when you go to a live show,” Rzycki says, “you see something that’s different.”

Despite the band’s mixed reception, the 29-year-old says the Americans he’s met are “very polite.” He considers this tour much more successful than the band’s previous one in North America, which Rzycki called “disheartening” for its poor organization and poor promotion.

“We got the worst impression of America,” he says. “This tour is really changing that.”Rzycki says the best audiences are in Spain, where crowds go wild with partying and drinking. The craziest fan encounter he’s had while touring was with a Spanish girl who offered to sodomize him.

“She was kind of shy about it,” he says. “You don’t get offered to get sodomized every day.”

In the band’s native U.K., audiences are colder. Rzycki says this is because the band attracts a crowd of indie snobs turned off by the band’s non-indie appearance and most certainly non-indie guitar solos.

Rzycki expresses disappointment at how the band’s rocker side is ignored by critics and reviews. He says the problem with indie crowds is they frown on instrumental ability, such as his beloved soloing. He names New York act The Wows, French act Coming Soon and Stanley Brinks as artists whose live shows actually impress him.

The Wave Pictures have existed for 14 years, but Rzycki met singer Tattersall when they were 4. They’ve played guitars, moved to and from London and got a record deal together.

The difference now that the band is a career is worrying about making money and compromising with necessary evils instead of playing purely for pleasure.

“It’s not 100 percent fun anymore,” he says. “But it’s still a fantastic job.”The evils the Pictures deal with concern their needed Internet presence. The amount of time Rzycki must spend on online promotion frustrates the bassist, particularly the emphasis on social networking and making music videos. He runs the band’s website while a friend maintains its Facebook page.

The process of making videos is a “pain in the ass” to Rzycki for its slowness. This contrasts with the band’s work in the studio, where, to capture true rock ‘n’ roll spirit, it records and produces music as quickly as possible.

“It’s hard to understand how some bands are very slow, unproductive,” Rzycki says.

Yet he recognizes that the band’s most popular songs are from videos and special online releases.

“We’d be screwed without it,” he says.

Even as career musicians, Rzycki and Tattersall make sure they get in a game of pool at every town and in every venue they play. Rzycki, addicted to the game since both men got cheap, foldout pool tables as boys, says they can play for 3 hours straight and into the wee hours of the morning.

After the spring tour, the Pictures will play festivals, including NYC Pop Festival and Green Man Festival in Powys, U.K. Rzycki doesn’t look forward to this leg of the tour.  He much prefers local venues and smaller festivals — such as End of the Road in North Dorset, U.K., and Indietracks in Derbyshire, U.K. — to “unenjoyable,” “depressing” big-name festivals, where the sound quality is poor and the stage separates and disconnects the band from its audience.

And despite the “indie” mislabel, Rzycki likes the positive traits that come with the scene. He says nothing’s more punk than people becoming artists through home recordings.

Not that the Pictures stay at home or are glued to their computers. In addition to the ongoing tour, Tattersall has a solo album coming out, and he and Rzycki will put out an album as the Lobster Boat Band, a rock ‘n’ roll act featuring Coming Soon.

While the best punks can be the most crotchety, Rzycki shares some satisfaction hiding behind his cynical demeanor.

“Even if I complain about a lot of stuff, the truth is I’m living a great life at the moment.”

"The Best Band You've Never Heard Of..."

Nice little bit of press here from the current US tour:

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/leave-the-scene-behind/Content?oid=6064864

Leave the Scene Behind 

The Wave Pictures' Perfectly Imperfect Precision

by Ned Lannamann

THE WAVE PICTURES They’re from Wymeswold! Party time! Excellent!

 

3939 N Mississippi

THE WAVE PICTURES are the best band you've never heard of.
I know, I know—music writers love to say shit like this, so you're no doubt skeptical. Or maybe you have heard of the Wave Pictures, and are already enamored with the countless pleasures of their spindly, sprawling discography. Or perhaps you're a fan of Portland songwriter Jack Lewis and are aware that the Wave Pictures covered his "Polar Bear." Still, with an "indifferent" following in their home country of England (according to guitarist/singer David Tattersall) and only a smattering of US shows thus far under their belts—most of them in New York—it's more than likely that the Wave Pictures have escaped your notice.
It's time for that to change. Their sound is a willful marriage of brawny classic rock (like the Stones and CCR) with shambling American indie folk-rock (à la Silver Jews, Violent Femmes, and Jonathan Richman)—with Tattersall's swooning voice and off-kilter lyrics making romantic melodrama out of it all. The number of the Wave Pictures full-length albums now tips into the double digits, surrounded by a flurry of singles and EPs and compilation tracks. Their catalog is excellent across the board, bearing crisp and concise consistency and addictively imperfect precision.
"We've always been pretty focused on the same thing," Tattersall says. "Trying to write songs with interesting words and then play them in a natural way, or what we think of as a natural way, and try to improvise a little bit. And to sound like what we would hope a rock 'n' roll band would sound like, I suppose. Not too pristine."
Tattersall and bassist Franic Rozycki were childhood friends in Wymeswold, a village in England's Midlands, and started playing music together in their teens in the late '90s. Drummer Jonny Helm joined a few years after. "We've been a band for a very long time," says Tattersall of the band's stability, "but I don't know if it's because we've never had a tremendous amount of pressure or outside influence on what we do or anything. Generally we've just enjoyed ourselves more of the time than not, and mainly done what we wanted."
Their latest, Long Black Cars, continues their string of lean, taut rock with oddball lyrics—which Tattersall maintains are written purely for self-amusement. "I may sound confessional, but I'm never in an emotional state when I write these songs," he says. The new record is both sprightlier and nastier than previous efforts, cutting the music down to its raw elements (although not without a few virtuosic guitar solos from Tattersall).
"I think Long Black Cars does sound leaner and more direct, and better than previous albums. We produced that one ourselves a bit more, and spent a lot more time on the sound ourselves—mixing it on our own without anyone else around, mic'ing everything the way we wanted to. We mic'ed the drums with just one microphone. We mixed everything in mono, and we didn't put in reverb on anything, didn't compress anything. We didn't EQ anything unless we absolutely had to. It really sounds much more direct and much more like we wanted it to sound," Tattersall says. "But the live shows are less lean and less direct than they used to be. They're more, probably, more loose and, um, what's the word..."
Jammy?
"Maybe a little more jammy, yeah!" he laughs. "But we're not like Phish or anything. We don't want to sound tight and perfect."
They certainly don't—and thank goodness for that.

Meanwhile, word on the street is the two-fer vinyl of BITB and LBC actually exists and is out there. First person to comment they have their hands on it wins!