Music: August 2007 Archives

The Great Pete Ashton made The Scaremongers' Combined Days when he wrote the first online review - in fact, the first review of any kind - of The Scaremongers. Pete has always been a Diviner of the Zeitgeist and an Online Legend in my book, and he further wrote himself into The Scaremongers Story by also winning The Glorious Scaremongers' Facebook Group First Friend Challenge, for which he wins a bespoke t-shirt.

And The Scaremongers entered the national media for the first time in an interview Armitage gave to The Guardian Travel Section. To quote:

I've always been as interested in music as in literature. I'm just putting the finishing touches to a book called Gig, which is about growing up listening to music. I was a punk, a mod, a new romantic. The basic premise is that I became a writer through failing to become a rock star. I formed a band with an old school friend, Craig Smith, about two months ago, called The Scaremongers. Our single is out next week. That's given me the opportunity to live out some of these daydreams.

In this case, 'old school friend' is shorthand for 'a bloke at met at Peter Sansom's Poetry Workshops who was on the dole at the same time as me so we dossed about in the Merrye Englande together'!

In other news, Matt Padmore, Forest Fan and Darling of All Osaka, has become the first person to do The Scaremongers' MySpace/Facebook Friendship Double, an achievement of which even his hero Brian Clough would have been proud.

The CD which will heretofore be known as The Scaremongers' First Double A-Side has gone to the pressing plant! We should get it back within the next week. This is exciting stuff for us - we're finally real!

There are two songs on there:

You Can Do Nothing Wrong (In My Eyes)
Nodding Dog

Both are Armitage/Smith compositions, and both are released under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike/Derivative/Non-commercial license, which means you can do what you want with them as long as you aren't making money from them, and you give us credit as the creators of the songs.

The cover image is taken from a painting called Mum Takes Photograph by the great Lyndon Hayes, and should look something like this, provided we've got the artwork right:

We're printing 1000 copies, which seems like plenty to me. Our friends at Vinyl Tap in Huddersfield are going to distribute the CD for us, which is very kind of them.

Personally, I can't wait to hold a copy in my paws! I've been making music for 30-odd years, if you count playing the recorder at primary school, and the only thing I have to show for it is a contribution to the choir on a Middle School LP. This is the first time something tangible has come from anything I've significantly helped make, and the fact I'm doing it with my long time pal is just the best!