TUESDAY 26th AUGUST - YELLOW BENTINES + HMNAHMNA + JETFLY - FREE ENTRY + DRINKS PROMOS
YELLOW BENTINES Alternative / Rock / Pop
 Martin - Piano, Vocals
Sorren - Guitar, Vocals
Sarah - Trumpet, Vocals
Helen - Trumpet, Vocals
Jonathan - Bass
Lewis - Drums
Formed in Glasgow, from the ashes of The Devotions, in 2004 Yellow Bentines have evolved to become one of Glasgow's premier acts. Their energetic and fun-filled performances have built up a huge local following. Their melodic compositions comprise of a strong piano-trumpet framework that draws inspiration from bands such as Ben Folds Five, The Divine Comedy and Cake. Amongst their achievements Yellow Bentines' have been filmed by STV Versacoustic which features Scotland's brightest talents, reached the finals of T in the Park's T break competition, have received a session on Xfm and have been played on numerous other radio stations. They have also supported bands such as Arctic Monkeys, Editors and Brakes.
Last year itself saw the Yellow Bentines play at festivals including Dunstaffnage, Connect, and Indian Summer. This year the band has already played at CockRock 08 and Dunstaffnage, are still to play at Solfest, and Greenbelt, and have also just completed their first UK tour.
Although still unsigned, Yellow Bentines have been in talks with several record companies. They have not however committed themselves and their music to any one label as of yet.
Reviews:
"There's always a place in the Bluesbunny's heart for some perfect pop music. Glasgow's Yellow Bentines provide us with a fine selection of songs to satisfy our appetite with their self titled album.
A jolly little album, whilst always welcome, would not necessarily impress us. However, properly constructed songs that twist, turn and grab our attention will. There are plenty of those to enjoy here.
Opening with the ska flavoured "Down and Up", the tone is set for an upbeat 10 tracks. Like all self respecting albums, there is even a song about a girl (called "Francesca"). A delightfully dark tale of a relationship that has hit the end of the tracks, its bouncy rhythm proves to be the perfect counterpoint. "Freelance Hippy Girl" is, in contrast, a delicate and melancholy song driven by some affecting trumpet playing. "Pay Cheque" worked best for us with its dramatic, sweeping introduction, laconic vocals and the kind of lyrics that would make Ray Davies proud. Ending on "Hope" we get a commentary on the dysfunctional nature of modern life.
The interplay between piano and trumpet gives the Yellow Bentines their unique sonic identity but it is the song writing that makes them special. It is harder than you might think to write a commercial pop song and keep it fresh and interesting. Martin Hay's pen is certainly coming up with the goods in that department. In fact, we would go as far as comparing him with the gods of the intelligent pop song, Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook. Even better than that, you can even download the album for free from their website. Deal of the week, without a doubt! " - The Bluesbunny Independent Music Reviews
"SKA is a dirty word when you put it into the same breath as The Ordinary Boys. Thankfully, Scotland keeps Two-Tone music alive through bands such as The Amphetameanies and also the Yellow Bentines. The first three songs on the Glaswegian four-piece's album use the ska rhythm on Down And Up, Madness doing Oasissounding Francesca and The Bangles tinged And Then There's You, as well as at the end of the album on Anger!
But it's not all piano and trumpet that makes this album far more interesting. The Person You Want Me To Be has the melancholy of Athlete, while the band go all folky on Freelance Hippy Girl. " - Album review Rick Fulton, Daily Record .
"Take one gentle Scottish indie band. Send away (some of) the guitars and draft in some brass, ivory and ebony. Sing about everything in a cheery manner so that elegies to lost relationships and the general injustices of life sound like good things. Congratulations: you are now Yellow Bentines. You can range from ska pop to bittersweet balladry with occasional digressions into fruity jazz, all with extreme articulacy. You can use piano, bass and drums to delimit the boundaries in which two exuberant trumpets and wavering vocals rollick about. You can charm with soulful, playful tunes. But can you prove that you are more than the sum of your parts?" *** Suzanne Black The List
"Glasgow's Yellow Bentines are down as a quartet on their MySpace site but various pictures reveal at least five people involved.
Although bass and guitars are present on this really compelling album, the core of the band revolves around a rather unique configuration of drummer, keyboard player and two lady trumpeters. It all makes for a collection of songs immersed in erstwhile classic Scottish indie pop, flavoured by the bookish seriousness of their sometimes epic excursions. It's the vibrancy of the brass though that creates the magnificent crescendos and exciting hooklines. The keyboard is used effectively too, switching between piano, organ, synth and all sorts of interesting and diverse sounds. "The Person You Want Me To Be" is a superb song, exploiting the high production values to create a slower trip carried by piano and B. Wilson styled vocals. "The Secret Of Betrayal" starts off in much the same way, before galloping off into a dark, excitable second half with growling fuzztones and vaudeville styled highlights. Amazing stuff it is and the jolly indie ska pop of "Another Day" takes the band from serious melodrama to upbeat light hearted melodies with just the flick of a beat.
Their eponymous album is a creative delight, illuminated by an original sound and more than enough ideas to mark them very much apart from normal record release trends. It's also free - which is all the more bewildering as it equals if not surpasses the efforts of most signed acts - highly recommended" - Manchester Music
HMNAHMNA Alternative / Lounge 
Liz - The polymath
Chris - Guitars, keyboards, vocals
Andy - guitar, vocals
Dan- bass
Very busy Bristol-based band featured in session on BBC Bristol Introducing at the beginning of 2008.
Interesting off-beat references in their music to other aspects of art, including a curious link on their MySpace page to Lithuanian musician/painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis. This evening could prove to be also educational!
Reviews:
"Hmnahmna excite us. They present stories of vivisectionists, performance poets, and canine defenestration. A Bristol based multi-instrumental five-piece with music that draws on the best of Lounge, English lyricism, Pop and Alt Folk." - Qu Junktions
JETFLY Other
Jetfly has been playing in Bristol for three years and likes cheap beer and handstands.
Jetfly has written hundreds of songs. some of which, for lack of careful attention, have escaped and now live wild in the New Forest.
The band Jetfly is Jet on guitar, Hannah on Violin, Flute, Melodica and Si on bass. Joe on drums and percussion.
Tonight though, as the rest of the band are on their holidays, Jetfly is coming along for an acoustic set, with maybe some percussive support from Joe.
The Fleece will be open from 8pm.
IMPORTANT - THE FLEECE IS STRICTLY 18+ WITH A ’CHALLENGE 21’ POLICY. THIS IS TO PROTECT THEIR LICENSE. IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO LOOK UNDER 21, THEN BRING SOME PICTURE ID.
WEDNESDAY 10th SEPTEMBER - AUDIOPORN + LABASHEEDA - £6 DOOR / £5 ADV
 Adrien Munden (aka Ade Man) - Vocals, guitar
Lucy Underhill (aka Lucy 9mm) - Keyboards, vocals and sax
Pete Coombs (aka Deep Pete) - Bass guitar
Che Albrington (aka Che Man) - Drums, percussion.
Looking backwards to a musical era when the word ‘maverick’ meant more than dentally-blessed jet pilots taking your breath away, artists like Alex Harvey and Talking Heads were capable of inducing mass audience hyperventilation through the sheer sense of conviction in their art and the passionate lack of restraint they poured into every sweat-soaked chord. London-based Audioporn are mavericks for today.
From their genesis as Bloom in the late '90s through their time as Desirable Genes, producing 5 albums and two tours of Germany, they discovered a sonic seed of apocalyptic genre-splicing aural architecture buried within themselves and planted it. After their second tour of Germany, they returned to England and became Audioporn.
It was the summer of 2002 and the seed had germinated. Audioporn started work on the material that became their debut album, ‘Tank’, and began airing it at their increasingly dynamic live shows. Lucy Underhill replaced Simon Abbot in 2004.
‘Tank’ is the realisation of Audioporn’s disparate dreams. Frontman, guitarist and lyricist, Adrien Munden’s thought/story/operetta songs are fables for a generation lost in magazines and product placement solitaire. Like a messianic gatecrasher at a punk-poet summit, Munden could raise his glass to the manic energy of the punk explosion while stealing sips from the Beat generation’s peyote cocktails. Drummer, Che Albrington (his real revolutionary name) and subterranean bassist Pete Coombs (Deep Pete) are a dance/double-dub/epic soundscape of heretical rhythm; imagine Chic jamming with The Eels with Lee Perry producing.
To capture and augment the ferocious live Audioporn sound for the recording of ‘Tank’, the band decamped to Britannia Row studios with producer Brian Tench (chosen for his pristine engineering work on Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’) and, using the same microphones and mixing consoles that illuminated The Dark Side Of The Moon, etched their vision on mirrored plastic.
 Audioporn are currently working closely with the Alien Frequencies team on the worldwide release of "A Message From Our Sponsors", distributed by Universal. The album has been entered for this years Mercury Prize.
Audioporn are also writing and rehearsing new material for their 3rd album (current working title "The Edge Of Unrest").
The band have appeared at this year's Glastonbury and Gig In The Park. There have been a few low key gigs to road test some of the new material as well: Ipswich in May and Wimbledon in June. More news, music and video’s on the Audioporn MySpace site.
QUOTES
“Audioporn are one of the best bands I've ever seen…”
Sunday Mail *****
"Audioporn were one of the major high lights of the festival...a unique and thrilling performance that left the main stage crowd hot, happy and wanting more..."
John Marshall Potter- Producer Gig In The Park Festival
"Incendiary four-piece" *****
Evening Standard, London
“Imagine you walked into a room and unexpectedly found a group of people swaying to tight, heavy, sweaty, funky music. Then you realised that the strange man speaking and singing words over the top of it was being waspish and witty and - damn it - telling it like it really is in this strange, warped world today. You would feel like you had found something special. You would want to share the secret. That's what happened to me, and it's why I'm telling you. Get some Audioporn in your life.”
Cole Moreton, journalist with the Independent on Sunday
"This band are going to be absolutely huge…I'm going to end the show with Audioporn's "Alien Frequencies”…this is probably the most electrifying track of all time, and I can't see how it is going to be surpassed... “
DJ Crumpet Claire ICR FM
"There is no band doing anything even half as original with half the passion... ...they are a one-off and this perhaps explains why they are still the best kept secret in the music business."
Mert V Rich WSO Review
"Audioporn's energetic and incredibly tight 21st Century Roxy Music sci-fi sound could see them elevated to the higher levels of the "Bizarre Rock" landscape...Muse should book their perfect support act before U2 do."
Daily Record ****
REVIEWS
Weird and wacky hosts for the night - The Argus, Brighton Publication
 Anxious that nothing should detract from the visceral power of their live shows - performances which have already led one critic to describe them as "the best band I've ever seen" - frontman Adrien Munden would "prefer it if you didn't mention that I used to be an actor".
But if Audioporn's melodramatic showmanship and spoken monologues don't give the game away tonight, their stage garb might - the band's live wardrobe consists largely of costumes nicked from the Royal Shakespeare Company, including a white fur coat once sported by the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Having grown up obsessed with the likes of Clash and Bowie, Munden insists he only got into acting in order to "get the money to buy a guitar". It proved a solid game plan.
While accompanying the RSC on their first ever tour of South Africa, he was offered a weekly slot at the national theatre, playing his songs in the bar and eventually winding up on TV. While others were setting their sights on Hamlet, Munden returned convinced he had to form a band.
So he teamed up with bassist Pete Coombs, drummer Che Albrighton and keyboardist Simon Abbot and, sensing they weren't the only ones bored by "bands following the three-minute formula of verse, chorus, verse, middle eight", set about creating something that was "more of a performance, a slightly other world. Music with the balls of punk and the cleverness of the Seventies stuff".
The result is, to be frank, a concept album. But not in the sense of "pixies and fairies and wizards and goblins", and not in the sense of Mansun's The Attack Of The Grey Lantern (God rest its soul). Played from start to finish, Tank is a sci-fi dub-rock opus which, in a bizarre collision of Beat poetry, Blur's Parklife and Charles Dickens, charts the journey of a Tank - left to the hero in a will, uncovered in a cavernous underground warehouse and used, in the finale, to crush the TV sets children throw in its path. It's conceptual for sure (unlike Super Furry Animals, Audioporn's tank is purely metaphorical). But it's done with sleazy panache, quirky danceability and lashings of dark humour.
"The record companies told us it was commercial suicide to do a concept album with no singles," says Munden. "But we decided to throw the rule book away, to make something a bit cutting edge that wasn't pandering to the music industry. We made a big f*** off piece of art. And the minute we did that the world turned for us."
After witnessing the album's first play-through, Richard Daws of Komedia Entertainment took on the band's management. And now Audioporn are fresh from a tour with ex-strangler Hugh Cornwell, set to play Glastonbury's Lost Vagueness, and working on their first DVD. Alongside footage of tonight's gig, it will include an album trailer, filmed in Brighton, which takes the form of a fake documentary and includes a scene of Munden "skate-boarding down rolling hills wearing a boiler suit with UN written on it".
There's no denying Audioporn are clever little so-and-so's. But we'd advise you simply to kick back and enjoy the ride. After tonight, Audioporn will be as big a secret as that mag under your mattress.
Bella Todd
Catriona Killin Daily Record 
AUDIOPORN'S frontman Adrien Munden cut a suitably theatrical figure for a former thespian as he sashayed into the surrealist fable Tank.
Like a visual cross between Clockwork Orange-era Malcolm McDowall and Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman and a musical hybrid of Bowie and The Electric Six, Munden dominated the tiny Edinburgh Underbelly.
Ploughing the same self-conscious furrow as The Dandy Warhols (but with a more mischievous sense of fun) the London four-piece brought a potentially arena-filling blend of scuzzy funk and Talking Heads-like danceable quirkiness to a delighted Edinburgh Festival crowd. Driven by the propulsive drumming of Che Albrington and ignited by their frontman, Audioporn looked able to provide the soundtrack to a crazed night at Hugh Hefner's Arty Party House (should it exist). Their mish-mash of Beefheart-like shaggy-dog-tale lyrics and 21st century Roxy Music sci-fi sound could see them elevated to the higher levels of the 'bizarre-rock' landscape. Muse should book their perfect support act before U2 do.
Barry Gordon, Sunday Mail 
Don't let the silly name put you off - Audioporn are one of the best bands I've ever seen. A cross between Frank Zappa and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, this super-cool quartet effortlessly fuse different genres without sounding like a train wreck.
Their intertwining songs are colourful, highly disciplined and attention-grabbing. From sizzling opener Welcome To The World to the sublime Turn Me On, Audio Porn are a sexy band well worth listening to.
LABASHEEDA
 Saskia van der Giessen - vocals, violin, guitars
Arne Wolfswinkel - guitar
Pascal Hallibert - bass
Paolo Panza - drums
The Amsterdam-based Labasheeda is a band of contrasts: poppy melodies are suddenly interrupted by weird outbursts of noise. The frequent use of electric violin and Saskia’s striking voice also contribute to the band’s distinctive sound.
Founded in 2004, the band’s drive and intensity rapidly gave the band a growing reputation in the live underground circuit in Holland and abroad. In December 2006 the band released their first CD, Charity Box, which was well received in the press.
After original bass-player David Jackson moved to London in 2007, the band became a four-piece, rocking out with the catchy riffs and distorted guitar work of Arne Wolfswinkel (ex-Chimney Brothers) and bassist Pascal Hallibert (also singer/guitarist in Templo Diez and White Sands). The band is currently working on new material, which they plan to record for a new album in the summer
Bruce Turnbull - God is in the tv zine 2007
".......fans of 90s flavoured gen-x metal will find much to assimilate here. Cresting the rise of modern inferiority, the Dutch three-piece can safely empty their saddlebags, and casually mosey on into town. Filled to the brim with caustic glee, opener “99% Woman” pours through the stereo with a droning, derisive disposition. Musically closer to bands like Cay and Sonic Youth, there is a touch of progressive rock steaming its way through the notes, particularly in the time signatures employed by drummer Paolo Panza. Incessant, scornful and irritatingly high quality, Saskia v.d. Giessen’s melodic swoon penetrates the songs with the luxuriant whine this sort of thing craves.
There are plenty of highlights to be enjoyed: the dirty mud-slap of “My City, Your Hometown” and the experimental atmospherics of “Opaque” are very commendable on both performance and execution. In contrast, the snappy head-banger “Black Blood” will no doubt become a live favourite, and the disturbing, confessionary “Taking Pills” is as mind swallowing as the title suggests. A nice introduction into the dynamic world of Labasheeda, with a production that not only recalls the days bygone, but stands on its own as an honest piece of work without an inch of pretension. "
The Fleece will be open from 8pm.
IMPORTANT - THE FLEECE IS STRICTLY 18+ WITH A ’CHALLENGE 21’ POLICY. THIS IS TO PROTECT THEIR LICENSE. IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO LOOK UNDER 21, THEN BRING SOME PICTURE ID.
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