The main thing this year was the writing (half of)/recording/preparing/releasing and touring Volume 4, our favourite album so far. The touring we did was totally cool, with great audiences and a lot of laughs.
We have been mostly playing Volume 4 material this year which I've enjoyed a lot, in particular numbers like Tryna Lean A Ladder Up Against The Wind and more recently Glad. We went round England with Slovenia's Nikki Louder in April, and Frenchsters Pneu in September. We played with some really great bands for the first time - Cotton Ponies (Germany), Pilotz (Germany), Deceased Squirrel on the Phone (Czech Rep), Model Boat and Kidnapped Kids, as well as some old faves like Depakine Chrono, The Jellas, That Fucking Tank, Illness, Falenizza Horsepower, Don Vito, Hired Muscle, Nope, and of course Nitkowski and Silent Front. Aside from Shield Your Eyes stuff, I did a lot more Guns Or Knives solo stuff, with quite a few single dates and a couple of tours too, and a few songs wrote themselves in the meantime. My Guns Or Knives album also finally came out, now on Function Records. I also started a new band with some friends called Brass, and played our first couple of gigs with that. Henri and Nick have also been gigging more as the Bottlenose Dolphins, and they have written quite a lot of new material with plans to record an album.
As well as the week we spent recording Volume 4 in February, the Shield Your Eyes European tour in November was my highlight of the year. We visited Germany, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Austria, France and Luxembourg, all countries we have played in the past and we noticed in most towns our audiences getting bigger, which is really nice to see. Bands like us only really operate through word of mouth and it means the world to us to see our audiences grow, especially out on the Continent. The German and Czech gigs were particularily cool, and I'm hoping it's not too long before we find time to go out there again.
We have quite a lot of plans over the next couple of months. We are touring the UK between 12th-21st January, and will be taking equipment with us to record the gigs for a planned live album. Our current set involves a lot of improvisation and interpretation which is what we hope to capture. It will be a truthful recording with no post-production beyond mixing. The nature of recording these gigs to as high a standard as is practical will require a fair bit of understanding on the promoters/venues/sound engineers part, in that we will actually require soundchecks, and will need early load-ins, more set-up time and cannot lend any gear at all. We are also hoping a find someone who can engineer the recordings. If you can do it, and would like to, and are free on any of those dates (it doesn't have to be the whole tour) please get in touch. If you live in England and like coming to gigs, please come and see us play.
After that we are off to tour in France and Spain for most of February. We still have quite a few gigs still to arrange for that so please get in touch if you can help.
After that, our plans are to get Cotton Ponies and Depakine Chrono over to tour the UK with us, both bands being totally great. We haven't arranged when those tours will be, but I'm looking forward to it.
Thanks loads again for paying our music attention and to anybody that has done anything to help us or similarly-minded bands this last year. Take care and have a nice January.
Stef
