We’re counting down the weeks now to the release of the new Pulco album ‘The Man Of Lists’ on June 18th. As a big thank you to the musicians involved I’m posting up profiles of each of the 9 collaborators so that you can get to know a bit more about them and find out where they live on the web. Today is the turn of Scotlands greatest exponent of the jail broken chiptune Gameboy – The one and only Unexpected Bowtie.

Unexpected bowtie is the one man musical project of Stephen McLeod Blythe. After a prolonged love-hate relationship with his guitar, a chance encounter on the road inspired him to pick up a banjo and start again. Since then he has assembled a variety of unusual instruments that he can’t really play (such as a musical saw and modified gameboys) which come together in a melodic mish-mash.

As collaborators, Stephen and I found each other by chance. He sent me an email to an account that I never use so that it went ignored for about 3 months. Since then I have also contributed various sounds to his own forthcoming album and we are also involved in another collaborative project called ‘Relycs’ ! but more of that later

Check out the links below for more info

www.unexpectedbowtie.com
www.twitter.com/expectthebowtie

‘The Man Of Lists’ can be heard and pre ordered here

Those kind people at Fresh On The Net  recently interviewed me for their blog. Below is a direct transcript of that piece so that we have it for posterity !!!

Thanks to Johnno and the team for all of their support this year !!! The original posting of the interview can be found here – Pulco interview for  Freshnet

Each week Fresh On The Net invites an Artist/Band to answer a short series of questions in our new feature –

Prick & Ding: the 2 ½ minute interview (convenient & quick like cooking a microwave meal) 

This week-Pulco

1.  What are you up to at the moment?

I’m up to about a  9.0 – 9.9 on the Richter scale (Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across)

2.  Favourite childhood memory?

Watching Scooby Doo after school – something I still do

3.  Hero?

Lou Barlow

4.  Villain?

Needless negativity

5.  What/who makes you laugh?

Good friends, my kids and the movies of Chevy Chase

6.  Describe what you do?

I make music on the move! At home, in cars you name it. Pulco music is lo-fi experimentalism – observational, poignant and at times laugh out loud funny. It includes poetry, found sound, ambient noise as well as songs played nicely on my guitar

7.  Whose hair would you like to have for just one day?

Robert Wyatt – Early soft Machine era – The essential cool Prog Rock image when combined a Polo neck and a pair of sunglasses

8.  Best musical experience to date

Having John Peel pop into the studio to hear tracks from my album !!

9.  What artist inspires you?

At the moment Ducktails & The Woods. British artist Albert Irvine and as always the written works of Brautigan & Bukowski

10.  What does Fresh On The Net mean to you?

Great music and nice people

Pulco (featuring Butchers Prime Cuts)-Biro by the sofa

Pulco is lo-fi Musician/Poet and all round good bloke Ash Cooke.

Based in sunny Wales, Pulco make enchanting,leftfield folk/pop music that beats its own path through this weird & wonderful music community we inhabit.

The music of Pulco relaxes me as if the voice of Ash Cooke has an agreement with my brain to stop and listen every time I hear his music,it makes me think,it makes me smile,it takes me to somewhere I don’t often visit and afterwards I feel pleased I visited; though I couldn’t tell you why that was or what route we took to get there & back.

Ash/Pulco is a serial music collaborator that I have recently had the pleasure of working with and I have been won over by the talent,charm & genuine warmth of the man.

Now we at FOTN ain’t going to pretend that the sounds of Pulco are going to win over every single passing punter but if you stop and give this music a chance we think a great many of you will find yourselves very pleasantly surprised.

Pulco‘s next release is the album ‘The Man of Lists‘ on Folkwit Records

Go on-Get surprised!

As you may be aware, Pulco’s new album ’The Man Of Lists’ is due for release on June 18 and features contributions from a load of my musical pals. Next up in my ongoing series of  profiles of these collaborators is the excellent Picturebox!!! I love Picturebox not just because I love their tunes (which I do loads!!) but because the project also involves Dave Hirst. Some of you my remember that we used to be in a band together called Derrero. :0)

Sturry, an unspectacular village outside Canterbury, is best known to pop history as the place where Kevin Ayers went to school, very unhappily so. It is also the cradle of Canterbury Lo-Fi, a new clandestine pop movement encapsulating all the charm but none of the noodling of the legendary old Canterbury Scene, led by and mostly consisting of resident home-recordist Robert Halcrow, the core member of Picturebox.

Actually, it’s not a movement at all, just the title of one of his instrumentals. But if it were, anyone would be welcome to join. After all, here is a man whose refreshing take on doing a local gig is to set up in a local Salvation Army building and serve tea and biscuits to anyone dropping round to listen to his music.

When Halcrow sings a song like “Ruth Bakes a Cake”, he is neither being ironic nor twee nor coquettishly kitchen sink. There is a light-hearted, profoundly uncynical love for humanity running through his lyrics that can sometimes remind you of the way Syd Barrett used to sing about the lost idea of simple kindness.

“The idea,” says Halcrow, “is to write songs about anything at all.” Anything such as errant butlers, the lurgy, having crushes, a love of French pop or those long Canterbury nights (and days, as work for supply teachers has dried up thanks to government cuts) spent watching ladies’ tennis on TV.

Over the years, his musical vehicles for these tales have moved from a conventional guitar band backing to incorporating found sounds, crude cut-ups, home keyboards and looped beats, a colourful melange that belongs in a parallel universe where the Tornadoes are widely recognised as a proto hip hop act, where Belle and Seb never went all quality on us (though Robert is still a fan), and where Robert Wyatt’s Kentish vocal delivery is the established language of pop.

A bedroom in a row of Sturry bungalows, unbothered by any pop-cultural to-dos, would seem a perfect place as any to imagine and build such a world. The fact that Robert Halcrow has engaged in little more promotional activity than to open the door to the Salvation Army Annexe on a Wednesday night might explain why the music of Picturebox has so far remained an undiscovered treasure. But it chimes with his music’s spirit, which is as far removed from any pretensions of speculative careerist hipsterism as it could possibly be.

Special things don’t always hit you over the head with a mallet, and neither will Picturebox. But you just never know, sometimes a movement can start with an instrumental named in allusion to a little hi-fi shop next to a supermarket car-park in Canterbury, some heartfelt tributes to tennis girls, and lots of tea and cake.  

Click on the link to find out more about this most charming of groups - Picturebox Bandcamp

‘The Man Of Lists’ can be heard and pre ordered here

Picturebox information kindly provided and worded by Robert Rotifer & Ian Button

Adam Leonard and myself have previously worked together on the Redlip project which last year yeilded an album called ‘Dan & Headless Bill’. When asked, he was more than happy to contribute a track to the new Pulco album ‘The Man Of Lists’ which is released on June 18th. Here Adam introduces himself, in his own words, all by himself.

“His singing and songs are imbued with the same wonderful eccentric characteristics as people like Roy Harper and Michael Chapman, but in a similar fashion to the aforementioned greats, he never loses sight of ‘the song’ in a quest to be quirky. In other words, he’s what all good singer/songwriters should be in an age when so few are.” ~ Steven Collins, The Owl Service

Hello. I am Adam Leonard and I release home-recorded songs and music myself, or via small labels. It’s kind of folky, sometimes a bit electronic. In an ideal world I’d be the shaded intersection on a Venn diagram of Roy Harper and The Human League.

Recent projects included a 200-copy vinyl LP which sold out in a month (soon to be issued on CD by The Northwestern Series), singing – both live and on record – with Leigh-on-sea folk-rock septet The Owl Service, and recording a soundtrack for an award-winning short film (‘Lucky Seven’) which premiered at The Raindance Film Festival in London in 2011.

I’m currently working on 5 different projects, one of which is a re-soundtracking of ’70s disaster film The Poseidon Adventure.

My website / blog thing is here: http://www.themessagetapes.com/

Nature Records is also available here http://www.northwesternrecordings.com/

‘The Man Of Lists’ can be heard and pre ordered here

Some of you may remember that a few years ago I used to be in a great little band called Derrero. When the group finished the bass player Dave Hirst moved to Kent and quietly began a family.

He didn’t stop playing however and has recently built a studio to satisfy his love of recording & mastering (a fact that I didn’t know until he offered to master my Sketchbook Season EP last year).

Dave has kindly put a few words together to bring us up to date with his music activities

“For 15 years or so I played with bands that recorded their music in professional recording studios but I got interested in recording onto my laptop about 3 years ago when I realised that it was now possible to record and edit multiple tracks in quality as good as a pro studio. I started buying mics and recording gear and then set up a small studio which is constantly evolving as I learn more about sound recording.

I started learning to ‘master’ my recordings as I wanted the songs I recorded to sit better alongside commercial recordings. I love the recording process but it is a continual learning curve and I consider myself a self-taught newcomer with a lot to learn!

Recently I have recorded drum and backing tracks with Canterbury based ‘Picturebox’ and Ian Button (Death in Vegas) and I collaborated with ‘Picturebox’ for tracks on the Pulco ‘Man of Lists’ record.

My other recording projects at the moment include a rock’n’roll band called ‘Swamp Duck’ who I also play bass for. Swamp Duck are I are continually recording new material and gigging.

I’m due to be moving to a larger studio space in the near future and will continue gigging and recording music as much as I can”

Dave is a genius and has recently mastered the new Pulco album ‘The Man Of Lists’

Check our kid out on Soundcloud

http://m.soundcloud.com/david-hirst

Ted at  O(h)rtlos blog as written an excellent and well concidered review of the Sketchbook Season EP

Click Here to read it in it’s original form

But mainly just click to find out what a great blog he writes !!

‘Suddenly finding yourself making significant revisions to your personal conception of the pop music canon can be simultaneously exhilarating, embarrassing and humbling, at once a delightful reminder that there remains ever more wonderful music to discover, and a reason to chide yourself (if you’re the right sort of obsessive) for not encountering something earlier.

Ash Cooke, alias Pulco, once with defunct Welsh band Derrero can quite reasonably be canonized next to a number of  established UK pop music figures I’ve long been particularly attached to, Guff Rhys, Alasdair MacLean and Steve Mason among them. To use his most recent work, the five track Sketchbook Season from November last, as an example, “Whistle Frog Finds A Way” opening with an amiable spoken-word introduction, leads to a hypnotic guitar and bass figure ornamented with tape effects and lo-fi bells and (literal) whistles that would feel at home on The Beta Band’s earliest records. “Don’t Stand Down” is every bit as dreamy as a song by The Clientele, but its mood runs more towards the reassuring than the melancholy, and it replaces well-turned out pop-classicist arrangements with a synth choral voice, acoustic guitar, and a bit of gently tapping percussion. “Party Started,” would, if it were from the Super Furry Animals, qualify as their most relaxed groove in history. “Hair,” as an insistently catchy (its aesthetic could be described as “cheerful alarm clock”) mediation on the hirsute condition, serves as an exemplar for the whimsical strain that runs through Cooke’s material, the last decade of which is all easily accessible via bandcamp.

Perhaps that hearthstone warmth and intimacy, as well as being so charming, is some of the reason that Pulco isn’t so well-known outside of the UK (if that’s not just my ignorance at work.) Cooke’s first-class pop craft is up to the standards of his above-mentioned, but doesn’t bring with it the spacey mystery of the Beta Band, the all-enveloping emotional sweep of The Clientele, or the Paul McCartney-eating-a-carrot quality of Rhys’ time spent being a Big Deal. The lo-fi quality, ramshackle instrumentation, exuberant doodlings, free experimentation and lyrical friendliness displayed in a decade of home recording bespeak a holistic hominess that proves extremely inviting, yet isn’t so conducive to filling arenas or doing record store magic tricks.

Fortunately, we can all make up for late introductions by spending some quality time enveloped in the Pulco sound. Away you go!’

I recently gave an interview to the excellent people at ‘A Musical Priority’ mag

Click here to read the interview in it’s original form ( please visit this excellent site )

There is also a feature on Pulco too

_________________________________________________________________

‘You’ve been releasing music for the best part of fifteen years. What are the biggest changes you have seen during that time?

Music and bands themselves are pretty much the same. The creativity that drives people to make music hasn’t changed but the context in which music is presented and consumed has altered radically.

10 years ago we relied on the opinion makers such as radio and mainstream press to alert us to new music and Bands couldn’t get to the opinion makers without a record label and pluggers etc. Buying a CD sometimes gained mythic status as you searched around trying to find that elusive album you’d heard about and our access to music was kind of restricted to our own record collections and that of our mates.

These days I think that we have all the music we need. Most of us have large digital collections of tunes and web access to stream pretty much anything we want to hear. The process of getting music to a new listener has changed.

Since the advent of social networking and blogging platforms anyone now can be an opinion maker and music can be promoted, sold and bought independently of record shops and labels. As a consequence there is a lot more noise out there and folks are fighting for an audience which is a shame but at the same time it is a perfect situation for the DIY musician.

I dream of what else may have been possible for us to achieve with Derrero had we had been able to utilize today’s technology!
I love the holistic online environment that you can create around yourself which enables you to reach out and personally interact with your supporters because that’s how records are sold now. There seems to be little money in music for someone at my level though because I don’t tour and flog merchandise and I ain’t interested in being on the X factor!
It’s all about the conversation.

What are your thoughts on the current music scene?

I live up a mountain in North Wales so I’m well out of the politics and goings on in places like Cardiff. I’m not sure who the top dogs are at the moment and I don’t really care.

Wales seems to have a strong balance of bands though as always and I do try and keep up with what’s happening but with my love of lofi, if it’s not been recorded on a Dictaphone in someone’s toilet then it may well pass me by.

My brother in law is in Y Niwl and they have had a great year playing with Gruff Rhys. I love H Hawkline too as do my kids.
Actually I’m one of the selectors for this year’s Welsh Music Prize so I better start listening!!!

What advice would you give to a young aspiring musician?

1. Try to find your own voice and don’t compare yourself to anyone! You can never be like anyone else but yourself.
2. Based on that exploit your weaknesses as well as your strengths. They are the things that make you different.
3. Focus on your music and not your hair and clothes etc. an image comes from within.
4. I think that these days if you want to rise above the digital noise then you probably have to get out on the road and meet real people, be an old fashioned entertainer.
5. Finally, be professional!

How did it feel when you heard John Peel play your music? Can you remember where you were when he played your record?

Wow! I don’t remember where I was when he played Derrero for the first time but I know where I was when I heard he had died. We were in the car waiting at traffic lights down by the old Ninian Park footy ground in Cardiff and it came on the radio. I met him a few times too.

We loved doing the three sessions that we recorded for his shows; you would get to Maida Vale early cause you didn’t want to miss a second even though recording never started until lunchtime!! Peel never went to the sessions himself which was funny. The last time I saw him he popped in to the Studio when we were mixing Derrero’s last album cause he was big pals with Welsh band Melys who owned the place. We played him a few songs and he grinned a lot!! Then he told us some of his stories about when he was evacuated to Wales during the war!

What was touring with Super Furry Animals like?

Derrero’s manager was also Gruff’s guitar tech so we got to know SFA socially first because they rehearsed in the same place as us. Playing gigs with them was great; the situation taught us a lot about how things worked for bands who were on that next level. We also got to borrow bits of their gear to record with which was ace!

You abandoned the traditional way of music with Pulco, was that a conscious decision?

No, not to begin with because recording at home was all I could afford, but 4 track recorders are in my blood so I couldn’t have seen me wanting to take Pulco into a studio anyway. In the years since I’ve had kids the opportunity and the need to somehow let domestic sounds into Pulco records has become much more central to my way of working. Also, as I have less time I tend to have portable equipment that allows me to work on tunes as and when I can. I feel it important for me to let everyday sounds into my music. It’s a bit like taking photos.

If you could recommend one album/EP to someone new to your music, which would it be?

I’m into the last EP Sketchbook Season as it represents where I am at the moment and it has all of the elements of my sound. Spoken word tunes, homemade drum loops and my shitty guitar.

The last album Small Thoughts would be a good choice too!

What are your plans for the future for Pulco?

At the end of last year I asked a load of mates to set my poetry to music. It was an open brief and everyone’s contributions have been different. The result is an album called ‘The Man of Lists’ which is due to be released by Folkwit Records in June. It’s been really nice to indulge myself in the spoken word side of Pulco again. During the run up to the album coming out I will be posting profiles of the folks that have helped me on my website (www.pulcomusic.com). There are some quick links up there now if anyone is interested. They are all excellent musicians and the world deserves to hear them.

I’m also finishing up another Pulco album inspired by a chap called Lionel Mapleson who recorded opera singers to wax cylinders in the early 1900′s. He is the godfather of home recording!! I feel good about the new tunes. You never know, after 10 years it could be my breakthrough album!!! Not.

Thank you very much for talking to us and good luck with the new album.

A pleasure. Thank you.