The Bays: city rollers?

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will this do?
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The Bays: city rollers?

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I was reading the Idler (issue 33) and saw an article about a band with Spiritualized connexions (although I am not sure that this is terribly relevant). I wondered if anyone here had heard of them, or would be intrigued at all…you can download stuff at their website, but I havan’t done this yet – I’ll let you know what it’s like if I ever do (hell, I may just see them somewhere). Likesay, I think it’s pretty intriguing (the following is scanned from Idler 33, words by Matt Munday, sorry if copyright, but you know…)

“Last summer at The Big Chill, The Bays made my festival - then they ruined it. It was Saturday night, and a friend dragged me towards the big, open-air stage where they were playing. "You've got to hear this band!" he said. Now, in my capacity as a music journalist, this is a plea I tend to hear rather a lot. Most days, my email in-tray is full of similar entreaties from a coterie of major label PRs. And most months, 95 per cent of the new music they send me finds its way onto the already overcrowded racks at the Record and Tape Exchange. The older you get, the harder you are to please. Or so I thought; little did I suspect that my gnarly London cynicism was about to be vaporised.

The weird thing was, this band had no product to push. They had never sought a record deal, nor even made a record together. Yet there they were, headlining a major music festival. "What does this mean?" they yelled at the start of their set. "There are no longer any rules!"

I was starting to become intrigued.

We pushed our way into the middle of the field. Something intense was brewing -all thundering tribal drums; warm chunky basslines and layered, filmic effects. This was live dance music -grimy, peak-time festival funk with a spatial, spiritual twist -played by four "proper" musicians without facing it. And this was the knowledge that, for the next hour, The Bays were making it all up as they went along. Every single note.

But this wasn't about standing and applauding onanistic solos. This wasn't jazz: these were thunderous dance loops; the sound of humans replicating machines. And each time the component parts gelled and anew groove kicked in -as it did with amazing regularity - the crowd roared like football fans, knowing that these tunes had never been heard before, and would never be again. We were utterly in the moment. We danced and hollered and felt alive. Sixty minutes later, after an incendiary drum nd
bass finale, the entire field pogoing to drummer Andy Gangadeen's nuclear beats and bass player Chris
Taylor's wigged-out b-lines, it was all over.

And that's how The Bays made, then ruined, my festival: after witnessing that, everything else sounded about as authentic as an episode of Fame Academy.

"The wave of energy that hit us onstage that night -I've never felt anything like that in more than a decade of playing live," says The Bays' genial effects guru Simon Richmond, when I eventually meet the band several months later. "It was physical! It was like a bottle filling up. And I'm not sure It was because people were thinking, 'How clever! They're improvising!' It was more because they were thinking, 'Aaarrgh! This music is brilliant!'…

Formed three-and-a-half years ago initially as nothing more than an experiment, each of The Bays belongs to one of two camps within the band, 'music' or 'science'. In the former are the conventional musicians: drummer Andy Gangadeen (who has played for Massive Attack –he appeared on Mezzanine - Terry Callier and Soul II Soul) and bass player Chris Taylor (formerly of punk band Poison Girls, who has also worked with Spiritualized). In the latter, armed with keyboards and sample-laden G4 laptops are Jamie Odell (who also records deep electronic grooves as Jimpster and Audio Montage) and Simon Richmond (who used to be signed to Mo-Wax as Palmskin Productions).

It's Monday lunch time, and we're sitting in an otherwise customer-free curry house in the West End. As gigging is their main source of income, The Bays tend to spend a lot of time on the road, ergo they frequent a lot of curry houses. The foursome are recovering from a typically extreme weekend that began with a whistle-stop gig in Bratislava, then a further two days on the road back in Blighty, a broken-down van (they hired another), further adrenaline-jangling performances in Glasgow
and Dundee and heroic quantities of alcohol -climaxing in a Sunday night booze-up back in an East
End "crooner's pub", which, avers the deadpan Chris Taylor, "levelled things off nicely”.

“We have a pattern where we never drink anything before a gig, so everyone’s just pacing around”, says Simon. "We're usually a bit introverted and stressed. We never discuss ideas beforehand about what direction to take. So when we finish, it just explodes! Backstage, everyone's got a bottle of wine open, and we're looking around at each other and we've pulled it off again and, you know, what else would we want to do? We could carry on like this for the rest of our lives."

And that's pretty much the plan. Not that the Bays are without ambition. "We want to go all the way; says the softly spoken Andy Gangadeen, his gentle, soulful persona almost irreconcilable with the titanic rhythms he hammers out onstage. "We want to become the biggest band around –but without selling records. It might take another five or ten years of treading the boards because it'll be purely by word of mouth. People can't just burn off a CD. They have to be there, or they won't fully get it.”

This, I venture, is quite a radical statement of intent. Are they so disillusioned with the moribund old music biz that they've decided to simply avoid it altogether? The Bays grin at each other knowingly. They've…”


(I won’t scan anymore – it’s too boring to do: buy “the Idler” if you want to know more)

EXCEPT, there is a couple of lines at the end of the article which may ring a bell:

“Even the bulletin board (on their website) has taken on a life of its own. “You go to other bands’ sites and it’s full of earnest discussion about favoutite band members, or rare tracks,” says Jamie. “On ours, it’s become more of a social thing. We looked at it yesterday and people were discussing their skiing holidays! We were like ‘er…hello? Remember us?””

Sound familiar?
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