THE BAND OF THE EYE

For C.M.R. Murray, once a schoolboy in the Dublin suburb of Blackrock to whom ownership of several nice guitars was but Fancy, September was the time for Returning to School.  The onset of autumn befitted the death of hope that was the new term, and demands for What I Did on My Holidays exercises came as thick and fast as merciless quotation from Keats’s poem ‘To Autumn’.

Now it is only the School of Rock – as allegory rather than Richard Linklater film – that compels The Band of the Eye to tuck in its shirt and report for assemblies:

1).  The Melting Pot at The Jericho in Oxford:  Saturday, 6 September, doors 7.30.  Starts at 8PM.  Also playing are The Brent Flood, Censored and Slashed Seat Affair.  £5 entry, or £3 if you can produce a card that says “NUS”.  This looks like a very good line-up.

2).  The Fleece in Bristol: Tuesday, 9 September, doors 8PM.  With Little Black Number and a new act named Hot Fiction.  Free entry and cheap drinks.

In football news, you may soon hear us over the PA at Anfield, home of Liverpool FC, thanks to Tom at Room 21 Management, who gives us all sorts of good leads and is organising a gig in aid of the Ray Kennedy Parkinsons Disease Appeal in the near future, which we hope to be involved in.

Kev will be extending the domain of his antics with a new wireless set that allows him to roam a distance from his amplifier – as far as some way down the road, we’ve discovered – without cables, sending out smooth bass-lines all the while.  Witness the havoc from Saturday.  Additionally, one of Wil's cymbals has cracked and teeters between this life and the next. 

Our show at The Hope & Anchor in London on 30 August should be mentioned.  Few people who have watched The Band of the Eye live have suffered so much as a consequence as the people who made the journey over from Ireland to see us and spent 11 hours trying to get home the next day.  Vowing never again to visit the UK, Dave tells us how his travel agent gave a master-class in how not to travel:

They told us bad weather was the problem. 2 hours waiting for the plane to arrive, 3 hours of sitting on the plane waiting for a take off slot.  There were lots of babies on board and one of them really liked crying.  They couldn't sell any food because of duty free regulations or something like that, and anyway didn't have anything like enough to feed a whole plane's worth of passengers.  A woman sitting in front of us was getting pretty stressed. I was waiting to see if there'd be a bona fide air rage incident but it never materialised.

Due to the length of the delay, all the regular bus services had ceased. The queue for taxis was pretty sizable so Mike caught an Aircoach into town.  JJ and I had to wait for one that would go to Stillorgan.  After we managed to get on one, the driver drove it into a bus shelter and smashed two of the side windows. 

I'm pretty sure we could have taken a train to Holyhead and caught the ferry in less time than we spent travelling home.

We were worth it though, weren’t we?

So, with our drummer in the US for a few weeks, things have gone quiet, you reckon.  Think we're taking a break?  Oh, how wrong you are.  We pity you.

Tonight, Tuesday, 5 August, Chris and Kev will be playing a few tunes at the acoustic night in Bristol venue The Full Moon from 9PM.  It's on Stokes Croft and it's free entry.  It is a rare chance to hear Chris (or anyone) playing a 12-string guitar.

We are pleased to announce the following new allies:
(i) A music lawyer in London is helping us to get noticed by the music-industry suits, attention-sluts that we are.

(ii) An agent in the US has taken us on with the aim of licensing our music for TV and film.  It's probably the only way we'll ever get to feature in MTV's Cribs.

(iii) BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated), who will collect nice royalties for airplay on our behalf, who keep a very nice office on Marylebone St, and who made Chris a nice cup of coffee as they helped him apply for a US taxpayer's number, which is necessary to this influx of hypothetical American funds.

This is the most important show we've had to date, so if you've ever yearned to visit London please make this your time, and if you'd like to come along from the south-west please get in touch and you can get a lift there in one of our cars on condition that you don't heckle.

The Band of the Eye's song 'Dress-Down Day' has been included on the new Panther compilation released by Leaping Cat Records.

The CD includes 18 songs by up-and-coming artists in various genres and is available from Leaping Cat's website.

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We now have an online store selling music and clothing. There is some free content in the form of downloads which we will try to keep updated.

Using the Bizmo store means more styles and sizes will be available than we could provide if we handled manufacturing orders and distribution ourselves.

There's an article about us in the new issue of Fuse zine.  Click on it a few times to get a readable size:

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Fresh Neo-Grunge antics ahead:
 
If you don’t have any plans this AmericanIndependenceDayEve, you might spend Thursday, 3 July at the Wunder Bar in Midsomer Norton where we will be playing with the fine band Two Day Rule.  Wunder Bar is a great venue and we’re all excited about playing there again.  Music commences at the sensible time of 9PM.

Friday, 11 July at The Brunswick in Gloucester with our talented Welsh friends Milano.  Entry, once again, is free, and showtime is 9ish.

 We’re continuing to amass various kinds of airplay around the world, but we were particularly pleased to be asked for music by leftfield Canadian broadcasters Punk Radio Cast, especially as they have over 20 million listeners.  Appreciators of high culture The Belgians have also been newly acquainted with TBOTE recently.

We’ve just completed a gruelling interview with The Fuse and will announce publication details when the resultant piece emerges. 

Some of you may notice that our 11 July date has been moved from Bath.  There is a story behind this.  We were due to play at the Invention Live night, a relatively new evening, but, as the promoter has stated, the residents of the new 2.5million quid executive apartments they've just built behind the venue would like the city to be quiet at night.  We’re unaware of whether previous Invention nights were violating noise laws as has been suggested, but we do think it’s disheartening that the situation wasn’t reparable, and were sorry to hear that the night was terminated in the melodramatic manner of a police raid before a show.  Invention may be permitted to stagger along, surviving with The Law’s blessing by staging a few acoustic nights, but The Band of the Eye can’t help there at all at all.  However, we’ll make sure to get back to Moles in the near future. 

Holiday time is upon us and Wil is off to California soon, which we hope he enjoys very much on condition that he remembers to bring back some chocolate-covered blueberries from the gift shop in Yosemite.  Of course, we’re lining up some gigs for when he gets back – no mucking about, this lot – including an enticing show at The Hope and Anchor in Islington on Saturday, 30 August.  More details as they come… 

Our Mouse Awareness night in Bristol in June was excellent and we thank all those who performed and attended.  I have been bombarded with questions about Why Kev Destroyed His Bass.  I can only answer that, having wandered into the audience during the last song, Kev did not intend to kill the object, but he thought it would make an exciting, abrupt climax to dispatch his instrument stagewards at high speed, and his alcohol intake impeded his realization that throwing and preserving the bass were not compatible impulses.   

The Band of the Eye: we live, we learn.

1. If you live in the south-west of the UK, you can read a review of our latest recordings in Venue magazine.  Go buy.

2. The website Live Music Scene reviews the 'Dress-Down Day' single.

3.  Visionary/madman Mark Pettit has made a video for Dress-Down Day.  It is about stalking The Band of the Eye.  We are scared now.

With glimpses of summer in evidence, The Band of the Eye sees fit to remind you that its hopes are all hopeless and its skies have no sun.  In further foretellings of misfortune, and in addition to pestering people time and again about our single, we offer the following:

MOUSE AWARENESS night at The Croft, Bristol, on Sunday, 1 June: headlined by us, this will include sets by Bristol’s Kodiak, Dig For Fire, Frontline Ghosts and, from nearby Gloucester, The Divine Secret.  Chris is organising this with Matt from Kodiak, so expect them to have picked a selection of actually good bands whose sounds are not entirely dissonant.  In addition to music, there’ll be video games on the projector screen in the front bar, with Mario Kart high on the agenda.    Doors open at 6 and it’s only £3 entry, for heaven’s sake. 

A set in Rockers Live, Taunton on Saturday, 7 June: with support from Two Day Rule and Dig For Fire.  Be there after 8 to witness antics.

That's right, our debut single is released today by Shifty Disco.

Check it out here

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We're pleased to announce that our rock barrage 'Dress-Down Day' will be released as a single by UK indie-label Shifty Disco on Friday, 16 May at midday.  The song will be available for download from Shifty Disco's website.

Home to Seagull Strange, The Young Knives, Paperlung and others, Shifty Disco is an excellent label and we're excited about working with them.