Emily Alexander: I was out of work and totally miserable. I'd had a wonderful six months with Pete Davies, who you probably know as the lead singer of the Blood Roses back in the 80's, and who was my first ever client and also a great friend. But I felt like the fact that we were working together was just out of an incredible stroke of luck, and it was really hard to find clients again after the album started getting bad reviews—Pitchfork, if you're listening, you know Pete didn't really deserve that 6.5. Come on guys, you can't expect everything a Blood Rose touches to be All Saints Day, can't you give us a little slack? Anyway, we were in bad straits, and by we I mean I, and it was out of sheer desperation that I agreed to listen to this demo tape Pete sent me.
I actually figured that he wanted me to review it. I was writing reviews for an independent magazine at the time, so I didn't have to feel bad about going shopping and, like, eating, from time to time. With my family situation being the way it is, bumming off my parents wasn't exactly an option. So I listened to the CD, and I thought it was pretty good, so I called Pete and he started telling me that he'd spoken to the singer of the band and was really impressed by her business practices, and little by little I was realizing that he wanted me to do something with the band itself.
Alan Léonin: Allow me a moment to be a cliché: the Blood Roses were a band that really resonated with me when I was just getting to be a teenager. Like everything else, I discovered them about fifteen years too late, but music that really does something to you on an emotional level is timeless, and so that shouldn't matter. I mean, they really were one of those classic English bands, a little bit melancholic in a way that feels somehow comforting. As one might expect, I first discovered them because "Sarah Jean" was one of those songs that gets played on the radio all the time, and eventually out of sheer curiosity you do a bit of investigating to find out who the song belonged to. And what I found was a band that didn't keep writing tens of "Sarah Jeans" but rather wrote songs like "Telephone Wires, Four in the Morning, and My Guilty Conscience" or "The Green Country", and when you were fourteen that was a gift from fucking Providence.
Emma Marx-Hall: We love the Blood Roses, always have, and so Pete Davies was one of the many hapless musicians who got our demo CD in the post. I think maybe our letter to him was just somehow really special, although I seem to recall it was a bit more boot-licking than anything else. We went on about his authenticity, which is actually how we felt, so maybe the fact that we were just so god damned honest about our desire to kiss arse that it came across as adorable rather than pathetic.
Because, like, he phoned me! I nearly died. I did my best to stay calm, and I put Alan on conference call but he had a panic attack or something and hung up, so it was up to me, and I don't really understand how it came to be but somehow it did, and Pete said he would pass the CD on to his manager, who was, he said, really lovely, and maybe we could all meet some time.
At that point I more or less had a panic attack. I rang up everyone in the band and cried down the phone. I'd thought that when something like that finally happened, I'd feel a sense of superiority, of having always known, of 'everything finally falling into place', but instead there was this amazing lightness, this amazing sense that the world had been pulled out from under my feet and I was in free fall.
Pete Davies: I don't want to make any outlandish claims regarding my own psychic abilities, but I think the simple truth of the matter is that the longer one spends in the industry, the more one gets an idea of what works, both in a musical sense and in the sense that I think to be a band you have to have a certain persistence. Perhaps it's just the fact of being a glutton for punishment, because it can be a deeply unsatisfying endeavor, being in a rock band, but there's also this sheer stubbornness to give up on your ideals.
It can be a bit dangerous, as well, I think. There's a fine line. It's quite interesting how it worked out for Knave of Hearts.
Anyway, that's how I knew I had to introduce them to Emily. I knew it might be a bit of a challenge for everyone, but I thought they were up for it.
Emily Alexander: When I first met the band, it was for dinner at Pete's flat. We cooked it ourselves, and everyone got a bit tipsy, and it was overall very pleasant. I was excited about seeing one of their performances—and then I saw something in Alan's face that reminded me of...an old friend, I guess I could say.
Tom Thorogood: I had actually looked up Emily on Google, because I'm apparently that awful a person, and I discovered that she'd been in a band herself when she was younger, which was called Quoth the Raven Nevermore. Like Knave of Hearts they had a bit of a dark stroke glamorous image, and they were all university educated. They'd released one EP and one full-length album on an independent label with fairly low circulation. They did a cover of the Police's "King of Pain", which I remembered seeing on the BBC, and enjoyed a bit of attention, and then it seems that their frontman committed suicide. They had a small but devoted fanbase at the time but a few years down the line they seemed to have been forgotten.
Emily Alexander: I looked at them, and I listened to them talk about what they wanted to accomplish, and I knew that they were the chance to...to pay my debt to the past. To make up for my mistakes.
I went to see one of their at-home performances, I met with them individually and we talked about plans for the future, finances, putting together press packages—the usual thing. And we shook hands, and all of a sudden I had a job to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment