Gig report / New Year Plans

Well, the gig went a lot better than the last. We weren't exactly note-perfect but that's not really the point. We sounded better thanks in no small part to the engineer at The Louisiana who did a great job, and we performed pretty well I think. We had a decent audience and loads of people I'd never seen before (who I imagine were there for the headliner). The other bands (The Exhibition, and The Corrections) were both really good and well worth staying for.

This time we can offer no photos, or video - WAG and official photographer Chloe was off sick and I forgot my video camera. However, at some stage we should be getting a recording of the gig and will no doubt post the results here and update our woeful Myspace.

This is most likely it for 2007. Plans for the new year include studio time, a charity gig (plus as many other gigs as we can get), and a video (I have a killer idea for a cheap pop-promo). Yanu has been great fun this year and incredibly rewarding to get on stage - thanks to everyone who's encouraged us to persevere and for letting us know that they think our music is good.

Have a lovely Christmas and a happy new year.

Love, Yanu

Doors and set time tonight

We go on stage at 8.45. Doors at 8.30 but the bar below is cheap and open all day/evening, so come and join us for pre-rock drink.

Yanu is Broke / Gig Looming / New Song / Guitar Trivia

Sadly the £50 that Yanu has so far earned in its vainglorious career has run out. We spent the last tenner yesterday at our regular practice room The Muse Rooms. We had an excellent practice in which we sounded tight, and ready for the Louisiana gig on Thursday. As mentioned before we will be supporting EMI-signed The Corrections.

It should be a good gig - we've always wanted to play the Louie as a band. The other band Ali drums in, Kabuki Mono, played there a week or two ago and he said that the sound-desk did a wonderful job - so we should be sounding good - for those of you who were dissapointed at the aural soup on offer at the Fleece gig.

We also worked up a new song yesterday, working title: "Ben's Pop." It's based around an arpeggiated A Minor with a traditional verse chorus structure and Yanu's trademark dynamic build. It then breaks down to an unexpected A Minor/F Major 'chill out room' before vamping out on an equally surprising A Minor / D7/11 curve-ball. As yet, no lyrics.

In other news, I've reinstated a my blonde Telecaster as my guitar of choice, having replaced the unwieldy 11-gauge strings with some 10s.



Blonde Tele

I'm now putting the whole guitar and pedal board through my ART Tube pre-amp, which is giving it warmth, tonal fullness, and a little overdrive. It was sounding really good.



ART Tube Pre-Amp

Video - Fleece Gig

Well, here is a little bit of video footage from our fleece gig. Hopefully we will pu the propper sound over it soon. In the meantime enjoy this:
3over4

Oh

As ever, thanks to friends for coming along - there was a lot of supoort for us (or morbid curiosity) and I'm sorry we didn't reward it with a better set. We started off pretty well but it went downhill from there... our least good performance too date. Ben gave it a generous 6/10, while I gave it 4. Simon declared it 'awful,' but Ali, no doubt deafened by years of drum abuse, seemed to think it was okay.

We're not really sure what went wrong. The mix coming out of the monitors was just weird. I couldn't hear my guitar at all at some moments and then at others just heard drums and loads of me. Rather confusing.

I think we need to learn how to set up our pedals properly and trust that the house sound is better than the monitors. If you come to the Louisiana gig on the 20th I promise we will be much better. We may even have some new material.

No doubt photos and any salvageable video will follow soon.

Mean but funny

I found this today. Well it made me laugh.

Just in case the people at wikipedia get wind of it, here is a copy of the text:

"Conor McNicholas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Conor McNicholas is a revolting, spoilt, middle-class dullard, who is editor of IPC-run music magazine The New Musical Express, better known as the NME. He sold the magazine down the river in the early 2000s by focusing on inconsequential tabloid rubbish and loads of boring identikit, indie-schmindley, pseudo-rebellious bands. He also bears an uncanny resemblance to a rodent, but has never let this get in the way of his magazine's worship of groundbreaking artists such as Dominic Masters.

His first professional post on a magazine was on a fledgling Manchester publication called Sub where he wrote a spoof horoscope under the pen name of Snufkin, which was not all funny. McNicholas went on to write for the dance press holding senior positions at both Ministry and Mixmag magazines before going on to edit Muzik.

In recent years he has turned the NME into a mainstream pop-magazine, with Lily Allen and The Mighty Boosh appearing on the front cover.

During his editorship Conor has won several industry awards including Consumer Magazine Editor of the Year (Periodical Publishers Association Editorial and Publishing Excellence Awards, May 2005), Entertainment Magazine Editor of the Year (British Society of Magazine Editors, November 2005), Tour of the Year for the NME Awards Tour 2006 (Vodafone Live Music Awards, October 2006), Editor of the Year and Music Magazine of the Year (Record of the Day Music Journalism and PR Awards, November 2006 ) and Brand Building Initiative of the Year for Club NME (British Society of Magazine Editors, November 2006). In October 2007 Conor was listed as one of the 1000 most influential people in London by the Evening Standard.

In 2007 Conor was one of the judges for the Mercury Music Prize. The winning album was Myths Of The Near Future by Klaxons.

However, there has been some criticism over McNicholas's reign as editor, especially over claims that the quality of writing had slipped, the genres of music covered have become less broad and that the magazine now contains less content than in previous years. He's a cunt.

If destroyed still true."

Happy Birthday Simon

Have a great day Mr.

Another Video

There's another video on our youtube account - YanuRock
Broken Clocks Video
This one is 'Broken Clocks' (WT) - again taken from our inaugural gig at Oppo. Don't forget to rate it if you like it.
All out videos will also appear int he navigation bar of this blog.
Hopefully we'll sort out some video at the Fleece gig tomorrow as well as decent recording of the music itself. All will be posted here so stay in touch.

Gig News

We've got a couple of gigs lined up to see out the year.
The first is a local band showcase sponsored by local, reactionary, rag The Evening Post at The Fleece - one of the cornerstones of the Bristol indie/rock scene - on Tuesday, December 4th (which, I should mention, is Simon's birthday), and it's free to get in.

Here's the poster:



Yes we are bottom of the bill - it's run a bit like a league table. If you get loads of people to come along to the gig you get to play higher on the bill next time.

The second gig is supporting EMI signed London and Bristol based band The Corrections - who sound pretty good from what little I've heard - on thursday, 20th December at The Louisiana (which we've wanted to play for ages). Once again we are second support, but we are not precious and are just enjoying the experience of playing to an audience and getting more comfortable on stage.

Come along to either or both - but the plan is to have some new material ready for the gig on the 20th. Hope to see you there.

Photos from Qui gig

Still Alive

Once again thanks to friends for coming along - we hope you enjoyed it. It was good for us to play a venue that big with a proper stage, and the band well-miced. We'd practised once in the last month, so it probably wasn't our best performance but hopefully we sounded good.



Ready to Rock

Qui was pretty wild, and also pretty nice guys. We chatted with them backstage and discussed rather rock'n'roll things: the use of the word 'twat,' Gibson Guitars, the merits of Slint, the peculiarities of bourbon, and the ready availability of cocaine (I'm not sure who was sadder, David Yow for not getting his 'pick me up' or Yanu for not knowing where to get any and failing the big man).



Qui - According to David this was 'just going through the motions'

We also encountered some of the most heinous liggers. Ben dubbed them 'arse lickers international.' Choice quote, "David Yow I'd like you to meet my friend Susie - Susie, this is David Yow... he is an awesome person."

More pictures to follow.

Gig, this Thursday!

We've just lined up a gig at the Thekla supporting Qui on their UK tour. It's on Thursday 15th November, and cost £7 to get in. I guess we're on about 7:30. More details on Facebook.

Per diem pedals

I've been out in Chicago for work this past week, meetings and political intrigue galore. What fun. Decided to take yesterday afternoon off for some shopping. Accidentally ended up in a guitar store and bought two new sweet effects pedals. First of I got the classic Nano Clone:



It's a beaut, does a really nice range of chorus, from nice subtle doubling to wacked out of tune fat madness. Ace.

Second up I got a Holy Stain (huh huh Stain):



This little bad boy does two reverbs (one kind of normal, one really dubby), pitch shift (fun, but never that useful imho) and a tremelo (which is really nice). Also has two really fat meaty distortions - mmmmm.

Hopefully we'll be back in the studio next week so I can try them out. We've been trying to organise some gigs for December (yes, you read that right, plural!), and a charity night thing for the Malawi Education Project for the new year, so we'd better get our skates on!

Another Video - 'Jimma's Pop'

We've uploaded another video from our Oppo Gig. This one is 'Jimma's Pop.' Once again, listen with headphones or decent speakers if you can to get the best sound.



Still more to come - keep coming back.

Gig Video

We've got a few videos of our debut gig to upload in the next few days - here is the first. It's an extract from '3over4' - the show openner. I beseech you to use earphones or decent speakers to watch and listen as the sound quality isn't great (recorded through handycam mic) and will sound awful on tinny computer speakers. Alas, Ali's drums, Ben's bass, and my guitar are barely audible in this clip - but you may get the idea.



A huge thanks to Jody for bringing his camera along and shooting it.

More to come very soon.

Oppo Gig - Photos and Lowdown

As first gigs go that was a pretty decent one. We shared a bill with punk-band Seven State (also their first gig as a band) and nu-metallers Merrick - I think this was due to the fact that Ben described our music as satanic rock on our myspace page... a joke that backfired when we ended being billed as "Yanu (satanic rock)."

The other acts were all very polished and set the bar quite high, but we managed not to drop the ball and pulled off our headline slot playing and sounding pretty good to our ears at least.



WAGS and friends and members of the other bands added numbers to the audience, not to mention goodwill. We rattled through our set in just over half an hour.






With two songs left to go we were told that the council were complaining that we were making too much noise - naturally we turned up for the finale - suitably a song called 'Noisy' (also trades under the name 'Fuck You).'





People seemed to genuinely like our brand of satanic rock - one drunk man tried to join the band.

We're trying to sort out some more gigs and have irons in some pretty healthy fires.

Gig went good

Just a quick one to say that the gig went well - thanks to friends for coming down and to strangers for listening. Photos and and even video footage will be be posted here soon, so you can relive the magic that was Yanu's first gig. In the meantime, here is the sweetest sight - Yanu at the top of a bill:

G-Day

The day has come - the 10th of October 2007 will not just go down in history as the day Radiohead hammerred another nail to into the coffin of the record industry - in just over twelve hours Yanu will be taking to the stage for its inaugural gig.

We had one last, frantic, practice last night and sort of settled on a set list which has now been lost. With new amps, we played loud and hard - so much so that as Simon summoned a wall of feedback for the intro to what will be our set closer, I was forced to say "you just can't do that to people." He promises to be good tonight - but it may just have been me feeling grouchy and stuffy with a hideous cold. I'm going to have a box of man-size Kleenex at the end of my pedal-board this evening.

It turns out that our set may be a little shorter than the allocated 45 mins - but size isn't everything. Not only do we have fewer tunes, that the world is ready for, than we thought but we played them rather fast, such is our pre-gig excitement.

Whether it lasts 15 minutes or half an hour, it should be a lot of fun, so see you later!

Gig Time Announced / New Amps

The details of our gig have now been made public and we can tell you that we will be going on stage at 2300. The place is Oppo on Park St and the day is tomorrow, Weds 10th Oct 2007 (but you already knew that last bit).

Simon and Ben have been busy buying amps and bass cabs, both of which will be on display at the show. Simon settled for a Laney LC30 MKII combi amp to replace his Marshall half stack:



While Ben opted for the Hartke 115 cab for extra bass weight:

Pratices Going Well / New Pedal

Last night we had our penultimate session in rehearsal rooms before our gig next week. It went pretty well - we're not perfect yet but are sounding better than we ever have done.



Simon, Ali, and Ben rehearse 'No Reply'

I resolved my pedal deilema and have ended up buying a Danelectro 'DanEcho.' It sounds really nice and analoguey - very warm, rich tone not found on digital models. It works really well with some of the YANU tunes like 'threeoverfour' and 'Iceberg Girl.'



DanEcho

Debut Gig - 10th Oct 2007 - Oppo

The YANUs have been booked to play Oppo. This will be our first gig. Oppo doubles as a poetry venue and coffee shop, but apparently we can be as loud as we want.

Having spent the summer doing everything apart from jamming and practising we are making last minute efforts to get match fit. We got together for the first time in months last night at Muse Rooms and found that a summer of slacking had matured our sound and lent a certain tightness. Hopefully this will last until the 10th.

We are due to go on stage at 2300Hrs.

We are very excited.

Indie Love-in

Found on the internet:

Peter Bjorn and John are joined on stage by Satomi of Deerhoof and Sean of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to perform Thatcher's-favouite 'Young Folks.'



I think it is at Fuji Rock - all three of those bands were supposed to be playing there.

Join Us

We are now a Facebook group called 'Yanu'

Yanu On Virb - New Song

We made a Virb Account. So far we have only uploaded one song to it. It is a rehearsed Jam in five called FiveJam - a pretty little arpegiated groove that spirals into psychadelia before resolving.

Yanu Reviews

I was asked to write a few reviews for the new Tuborg Music website. Browse the archive - articles are creditted to Boz Roberts and James Martin so far. Some of the gigs mentioned below are reviewed. You can also read regular previews and such like that I've written in Venue Magazine.

New pedal dilemma

I am thinking of buying this:



At £70 it is way cheaper than a Boss DD6, but being analogue it doesn't have the loop feature that it's digital counterparts do. It was also voted product of the year by Guitar and Bass magazine... I think. I had a go today at Jam Guitars and it was pretty nice. Incidently, if you are ever in Bristol and you visit only one shop, make it Jam - such a lovely place.

Thatcher's Children ROCK Timbuk2

Simon "had and hangover" and didn't come, Ben "had nightmares" and couldn't come - both at the last minute, leaving Jem and I, dressed as farmers, to fill a prime-time slot in the less than prime back room of T2 for Hijack's bank holiday party.


Djing with no records... or hands

Having turned up in the wrong room, spending 15 minutes trying to kick people off the decks who had every right to be there, we eventually found our way to the pitch-black, back room. With no light, even less of a clue of how to use the mixer, and wondering how to make the transition from old-skool to rock/pop, things didn't start too well. Couple of clangs, couple of missed cues, and then we were back. Lots of friends were very nice and came and danced, and even some people we didn't know.


Pooped


Jem and Mr Tropical Hotdog


Friend of Thatcher, Jack, laying down bare minimal


Fans

Thatchers Children to Hijack Timbuk2

Thatchers Children will be making a triumphant return to the Hijack August bank holiday bonanza at Timbuk2 on Sunday 26th August. The theme this year is "Barn Dance", time to break out the Country and Western!! Lol. And indeed ROFL.

You still Are Not Us

Deehoof Gig

Deerhoof rocked. Such a cool show - some of the best drumming and guitar playing I have ever seen live.
'+81' and 'Look Away' might just be my favouite songs of the year.


Deerhoof

Concert Fun

Simon, James and Jem (of Thantcher's Children) were at Louisiana to see Gravenhurst support Charlotte Hatherley. A solo performance involving a Les Paul and a modest pedal board, it was the first time I'd seen him play since Ashton Court a few years ago - a really nice gig; 'Black Holes In The Sand' wrapping things up very nicely.

It got us thinking about our favourite recent gigs and bands (I can exclusively reveal that Simon does not like Keane). So, in no partcular order, gigs we've enjoyed recently:

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at Birminghm Academy
Broken Family Band at the Thekla
Peter, Bjorn, and John at Koko
Gravenhurst at Louisiana
Shellac, Isis, Trans Am, The Woods and The Thermals at ATP
Joan As Policewoman


Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
(Incidently, the dude facing away from the stage (bottom left) was easily the nicest gig-cop I have ever encountered)


Gravenhurst

James and Jem are off to see Deerhoof in Cardiff this weekend - we are very excited about this.
Ben is going to see Brad Meldau and Pat Metheny the weekend after. The rest of Yanu is jealous.

Gig Cancelled

Yup - our promoter lost the venue and now we don't have a gig. He is promising us one later in the year. In the meantime we are looking into other venues.

We got a gig!

We have a gig on 28th June. At the moment we are not exactly sure where it is or who we are playing for, but we know that it is in Bristol on 28th June. We need to write lyrics, practice, repair amps, and come up with a set list and a 'look' in the interim. The clock is ticking.

More details soon.

Thatcher's Children make a lot of noise in The Thekla

Thatcher's Children owned the top room of the Thekla Social last weekend. Simon, Ben and James from YANU were joined by another member of DJ troupe Thatcher's Children, Jemma. We all filled our records bags and CD wallets with lots of edgy rock and leftfield gems with the intention of proving to people that we are just as cool as Diplo who was playing in the hold of the ship, below.


Simon drops some solid rock


Jem gets a bad-meaning-good case of the funk thanks to Prince


Ben feels the effects of more Brazilian sunshine folk-pop

We started with a pretty thin and disinterested audience. We did one round of two-tracks each, back-to-back, which failed to move the punters in anyway. It was only when Peter, Bjorn and John's 'Young Folks' whistled a few revellers onto the dancefloor that we realised what was needed. It quickly degenerated into a right old indie disco, and we had a chocker dance-floor eating out of the palm of our hands until chucking out time at 3AM (with one moment of mis-judgement from Ben that saw Dizzee Rascal clearing the floor like pepper spray).



Free beers and an unexpected tenner each were ample reward, and we hope to be doing it again soon. Dates will be announced here.



So hot right now...



James lends a hand by pushing the light on an unused 1210....

Re-housed

We have found new shelter in Room 4 studios:
Room 4 Studios
We have to pay for our jam/practices now which is a new one for us, but after two visits we are very happy. The people are friendly and the clientel varied. We nearly burnt them down last week - Ben's bass amp began to smell and smoke - very rock'n'roll.

Homeless

YANU have been rendered homeless. If you know of a decent practice room up for grabs let us know!

New guitar for Simon

This blog is becoming an archive of guitar porn. Oh well, here is my shiny new red one.