Ace Bushy Sell Out
11th March 2010
Good morning! Are you well?
We’ve finally had some copies of our last album, ‘Daniel Ershov Has Been Offered £100,000 By An Eccentric Millionaire To Step Naked From A Car Onto A Busy City Street, Walk 200 Meters And Climb Back Into The Car’ printed up in real life and they look really brill! You can buy a copy from us in real life if yr close to hand but if you live really far away or cannot be bothered with seeing us in real life then we’ve set up a small shop where you may purchase a copy.
In other news, the Pavement compilation we contributed a song to is online now and it sounds really good I think. You can totally download and listen to it all (I recommend the Horowitz song, it’s totally my fave of the lot) at the Filthy Little Angels website. Woah! Exciting!
x
- Simon
Show Me A Word That Rhymes With Pavement
23rd February 2010Good morning guys. Are you well?
Earlier this month, while we were in the studio finishing our next album, we recorded a cover of the Pavement song ‘Secret Knowledge of Backroads’. We’re really happy with it and yeah this coming Monday (1st March) , it’s being released on a lovely free compilation of Pavement covers called, surprisingly, Show Me A Word The Rhymes With Pavement, on the Filthy Little Angels record label. You should totally download it as it features super recordings from Cats and Cats and Cats, Horowitz, Mascot Fight and Birmingham’s finest, Miss Halliwell (who are awesome), as well as us. I am sure we shall shout at you about this again on Monday when it comes out but yeah it’s free and from what we’ve heard sounds amazing.
- Simon
New Album Etc
19th February 2010Good morning folks, it has been a couple of weeks since we last caught up with the happenings here so consider this an update.
Album 3
We have finished recording our third album. We finished last week. Just mixing and sorting the art now and so yeah hopefully that’ll be out on Odd Box Records maybe in April? It is twelve songs and about 22 minute long. We have a title for it but I’m sure we’ll tell you about that in due course.
I think what we’re going to do is put up 4 or so songs from the album as a free taster to download but then when it sells out (I think there are only going to be about 120 physical copies) we’ll put the whole thing up for free download. Hopefully that acts as an incentive for people to support the label by buying it as they’re doing us a huge favour by putting it out. It’ll be cheap to buy and yeah the sooner people get it the sooner we can put it up for free.
That’s the idea anyways…
Other Stuff
In other news, my (Simon) side project, The Tiddlywhips, have just recorded and released a new EP. It’s called ‘Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street’ and it’s amazing probably! Free download as usual natch and yeah you can get it here.
We might be going on tour in the summer/late spring with pretty much our favourite band ever. Fingers crossed it actually happens! We’ll scream at you loads if it does.
- Simon
Ace Bushy Raritease Week | 5. Finishing Move
22nd January 2010Hello again and welcome to the final installment of this Ace Bushy Raritease week. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and yeah hopefully in a year or so when we’ve got a few more choice offcuts we’ll be able to do this again ok?
5. Finishing Move
Finishing Move was born out of a desire to end our live sets nicely. Since we’d dropped The Last Walts (mainly because it was (and still is) dreadful tripe), we had been using the smash hit Mervyn & Isaac Find A CD to finish when we played shows but it never quite seemed right as a song to finish on. We’d been using it as a makeshift for nearly a year so we had to do something to break it up a bit.
Having thought of the Finishing Move title as a fitting finale after declaring “last song kills the audience”, we set about actually writing a song with that title. It took us a while but eventually Bas came up with a little riff and then we really sung “hasta luego” (so long) while the song (and our set) slowly died. The idea to bring back the shouting like we do in the introduction to our live shows was only suggested very late on and the idea was to have us all going in a round and to finish off nicely. We never really go round to it though. The riff was strong but we didn’t think the rest of it was that great really and so it got left behind.
Luckily we’ve now got James and James and James and James that we can finish our sets with. Hoorah!
Download Finishing Move
“Ace!/Bushy!/Strip!/Tease!/hasta luego.”
Bonus Track! – 6. Elephant
Our second ever singer, Irini (who can be heard on our first recordings), wrote a song called Elephant. It was really good but yeah we left it when she had to leave the band. Bas had a really nice chorus guitar part and so we quickly re-learnt it and used it as a practice in the studio just to get comfortable at the start of the Toadstool Ellipsis sessions. Here it is in it’s instrumental form, we were hoping that one day Irini would record her vocals on it but we never got round to sending her the files… Never mind. It was a really good song though. Dunc from Falling & Laughing made a comment about it sounding good on one of the few occasions that we performed it, I am sure of it.
Download Elephant
- Simon
Ace Bushy Raritease Week | 4. Panda Funk Unit
21st January 2010Good morning! Day four of our Ace Bushy Raritease week is finally upon us.
4. Panda Funk Unit
Panda Funk Unit was essentially a rewrite of our older ‘hit’, Panda Love Unit. The song alterations came about through a need to change our live set around a bit so we’d actually have some songs to sing while Jeremy was scuttling around India. The original was defo lacking something without the drums so we did what any self respecting pop punk would do and made a funky (hence the name) version with less earnest guitars and more drum kit settings on a keyboard.
We only really played this updated version of the song a couple of times live before Jeremy came back but even then it was nice to play through a refreshed version of an old song we’d previously grown rather tired of. If I remember correctly, we performed it a few more times with Jeremy back but it quickly faded in favour of newer more interesting (and less funky) songs.
We recorded it during the Toadstool Ellipsis… sessions more for posterity than anything else and I guess that’s why it’s ended up here. The vocal and bass takes are pretty rough and sketchy but hopefully if you’ve heard the original you’ll be able to have fun times comparing and contrasting the two.
Download Panda Funk Unit
“our oblivion has come and gone/now we’re in limbo/waiting for another one/but in the meantime/we play these love games/so I ask her but she reframes/now she says/keep my secrets/I don’t love him/we are what you see.”
- Simon
Ace Bushy Raritease Week | 3. Fancy Whistle Man, Whistl (Tom Wade)
20th January 2010Hello folks! Hopefully day three of our Ace Bushy Raritease week is finding you well.
3. Fancy Whistle Man, Whistl (Tom Wade)
Fancy Whistle Man, Whistl (Tom Wade) (the misspelling is intentional) was the first song written in the second phase of Ace Bushy Striptease. Between our first concert in February 2008 and our second that May we went to record some of the songs we’d managed to cobble together. Almost straight after getting those recordings back (they can be downloaded from our songs page right at the bottom if you are that way inclined) we quickly let loose and got our song writing sea legs somewhat. Several of the songs we wrote during that heady time (Totally Ice Cream, “Arrogance… and a couple of others) appeared on our first album as you’ve maybe heard but the first of the lot was Fancy Whistle Man, Whistl (Tom Wade).
Written in a band practice on the afternoon of our second show, and then performed for the first time later that evening, it was originally half the length. Our old second guitarist Arjun had some jazz chords (located where the noise moments are in this recorded version) and the song became a mish mash of hand claps, waltz time, drone shouting and part one of a trilogy of spoken verses (the final part is to be heard near the end of Puddle Chasers (A Public Meeting 2 Discuss Recent Flooding In Stirchley & Selly Park), the second part never made it off the paper). It was thus completely logical that it’d be a staple of our live sets for a good six months.
We left the song out of the set for a while during Jeremy’s trip to India as we thought that no drummer = crap song but on his return the song just didn’t seem to have the same sparkle any more, we’d written better songs and it couldn’t hold it’s own amongst them. We recorded it during the Toadstool Ellipsis On The Grass sessions but even with refreshed parts it didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the album flow and so we left it out. We never even got a chance to add the fast hand claps and group vocals in the “where do you” bit…
Download Fancy Whistle Man, Whistl (Tom Wade)
“let’s hop/let’s skip/let take this somewhere/let’s move/let’s twist/let’s take this somewhere/where do you/calm down please/yr taking this too fast/let’s talk movies/and go for a drive in yr car/where do you want to go.”
- Simon
Ace Bushy Raritease Week | 2. Quiverlip
19th January 2010Good morning! Welcome to day two of our Ace Bushy Raritease week.
2. Quiverlip
Quiverlip was late starter. Bas had a melody and chord sequence with not long to go before we started on ‘Daniel Ershov…’. He bought it over and we worked out a structure and our full parts.
Ace Bushy Striptease don’t really do practicing a lot. As Jeremy lives a good few hundred miles away we can only really practice either just before we play a show or on a weekend that Wolverhampton Wanderers are playing at home. It was July so the season was long finished but we were going recording on the Sunday so he popped up for a preparatory practice on the Saturday. Jeremy is totally brilliant at drumming so we got something finished in a short amount of time. One major problem with the song (that you’ll hear for yrself when you listen) is that there was no middle chorus or verse vocals. We figured that seeing as we’d be taking two trips to the studio, we could record it instrumentally on the first day and then think up something to sing by the time we went in for the second time. We didn’t think of anything to sing and so it got abandoned sadly…
I do really like what we had of the song, it was a change of pace but not too much of a departure from what we like playing style wise. If we were to do it again I think we’d cut the middle bit in half to avoid needless repetition and then write a bloody verse to sing over it!
Hope you like anyways.
Download Quiverlip
“we are one man/and one woman here”
- Simon
Ace Bushy Raritease Week | 1. Topless Pushups
18th January 2010Good evening folks, today marks the beginning of a week of posts detailing some of the songs that very nearly made it onto our albums. They obviously didn’t in the end and that’s why we’re doing this, so yeah I thought you might like to hear them with a bit of talk about how they came to be and why they didn’t make the final cut. Maybe you’ll find it boring.
1.Topless Pushups
Topless Pushups was one of the earliest songs that we wrote on deciding that we needed to make a second album. We had a few new songs leading up to that point but had just dropped two (one called Gone Fishing and another untitled Sky Larkin aping tune) and so new songs were desperately needed to help populate the record. Topless Pushups (nee Paradiddle Reference, interesting fact #1: it was previously named that because Jeremy plays paradiddles for the duration; interesting fact #2: it was written on the same day as worldwide smash hit Whirlwind Regulations…) was scratched out in a single afternoon sitting before being fleshed out slightly somewhat by individual band members in solitude over the course of the next few weeks. This was probably the start of the end for the song as we do tend to favour songs that have been conceived and bought up by the lot of us but anyways we continued until we had what we believed to be a finished song before resting up hard.
We descended upon the studio with Topless Pushups in the middle of our arsenal, ready to lay down some steam. We discovered after recording it on the first day however that it defo needed something extra so during on our next assault we tried to shoehorn in a verse (which is included in the lyrics below but not in the record we’re putting up). It didn’t work really and so the song got left behind. It was sad as the drum part was really brill I thought. Never mind though. You can’t get too attached to songs or else!
Download Topless Pushups
“eye oh eye oh/go yr own/yr on yr own way/I had you covered up/go yr own/yr on yr own way/I had you covered up/it’s gone/go yr own/yr on yr own way/these words are not enough/go yr own/yr on yr own way/I had you covered up/it’s gone/you’ve got a face a boy’s mother would love/not too pretty/but pretty enough/as if he could do better/but he’s better playing safe/like a giant walrus/fighting a grass snake.”
- Simon
A Little More Suspicion In Our Fairytales Plz
14th January 2010
Hello!
We are going to be supporting Johnny Foreigner at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham on Friday 5th February!
This was pretty much our ultimate goal when we started the band as they inspired us so much when we were starting out. We recorded our first songs with the same person that they did some of theirs with because they did and yeah. On band car journeys we only ever listen to the Johnny Foreigner albums (and the occasional pop punk mixx cd). We love Johnny Foreigner so hard so this is going to be the best moment of our lives probably. There is a Facebook event thing here so you can get all the details you need to secure yr attendance. You should come for sure.
THEN!
We’ve probably already told this, but the following Monday (8th February (day before my birthday fact fans)), we will be supporting Tap Tap and Air Waves at an Odd Box show at Brixton Windmill in London. If you live in London you should come to this one rather than the Birmingham show as it will likely be more convenient for you. More event deets here yeah?
We’re also preparing a special week of posts next week with downloads and essays on each of our unreleased studio recordings. You will either find it very interesting or very not interesting as we’ll go through each song that nearly made it onto one of our albums and then explain why they didn’t and the circumstances surrounding them. Hopefully you should be left with a nice little EP of offcuts and curiosities that you can listen to when yr feeling less mainstream. Ace Bushy Raritease (you see what we’ve done there lol) week will begin with ‘Topless Pushups’ on Monday.
Also! We are going recording on Sunday to start on our new album. We have 14 songs ready to go and I think it’s going to be amazing, if slight emo.
- Simon
Getting Ready For Album Three | Free Demo Download
6th January 2010
We are just in the process of readying ourselves and the new songs we have before we go into the studio to record our third record. There are 11 songs that will defo be on the album and we have another 4 or so which could go either way. Are you excited? We’re excited! It’s quite hard to think of a title but we have a few ideas already and I am sure we shall let you know when we decide on one.
Anyways…
We thought you might have gotten a bit bored of it being winter and all that so here is a demo you can download of a new song which is going to be on the record. It has a tentative title of ‘It’s A Race’ at the moment. Have a lovely afternoon!
- Simon