Return to Scotch Corner

Tuesday

We’re going North!!! Hello M1. We played Sheffield earlier this year for the Tramlines festival and had a really great time. We stumbled into Bungalows & Bears on that day and it was absolutely rammed with people soaking in some free music and plenty of booze. Today the venue is a lot more civilised, although never before have I seen a toilet so aggressively graffiti’d.

B&B Graf Bomb

Victoria & Jacob open up the show, they’ve traveled on the train from London for the gig and therefore did it in half the time we did, however they missed out on the fun of Sheffield’s one-way system, so, you know, we win right? They play incredibly catchy Frou Frou-esq electro pop, the hooks keep coming, we’ll be humming these in our sleep tonight. Sadly local support Annika has pulled out late in the day, so Jeremy (the promoter) plays a few extra tunes between sets and his choice of a stellar Bobby Macferrin remix raises smiles. We’re chuffed to see a swelling crowd by the time we hit the stage and the Turbosound system is pleasingly heavy for the gig. Amazingly we are swamped post-gig with frenzied merch buying, always a sign of things going well. Chatting to people we realise quite a few of them have seen us before at either Tramlines, one of the tours with 65daysofstatic or at a festival, it’s a really pleasing moment on the tour, people are coming again and bringing their friends, slowly but surely we are building a following.

Wednesday

Massive drive to Glasgow today. All pretty uneventful until we hit Scotch Corner and a caravan jack-knife’s in front of us! A lucky escape for all involved. The views from this point onwards are spectacular, we’ve driven this stretch on a previous tour and the landscape is beautiful.

View from the car window

Today there’s a thick mist and we’ve not much time to stop, the Nedrymobile is making some very odd sounds, she’s not happy! The gig at Captain’s Rest is a fun one, it’s a lovely little venue and one that we’d love to fill one day, for today it’s a small crowd, but a dedicated one – with more than one Nedry t-shirt wearer and friendly fans chatting about seeing us over a year ago at Oran Mor. We make a balls up of ‘Apples & Pears’, but share a joke with the audience and the atmosphere feels really relaxed. It was a long way to come, but so worth it, we will return.

Thursday

Another long drive, but this time to a place of unknown pleasures. Of all the dates on the tour Sunderland is the only place we’ve never visited before. We’re welcomed like heroes by venue owner Ben and this is a really pleasing end to the tour. The venue (The Independent’s Little Room) is perfectly formed, with a brilliant sound system and everyone is beyond helpful. Ben walks us into town and points out the bars where BBC’s ‘Booze Britain’ is filmed (a touch of class!) ‘Cash In A Flash’ is the largest shop on this street, let’s hope none of our equipment ends up in there tomorrow. He also mentions that his venue’s days are numbered, Sunderland Council are due to flatten this entire street within months to make way for a new Tesco superstore and apartments, depressing. On returning to the venue we discover there’s a great array of lights and a smoke machine, we attempt to film the gig, but the video mount slips within moments of the start of the set and the entire video is just shots of our feet. Even though this is a small gathering, we amazed to see a man dance so hard to ‘Squid Cat Battle’ that he ends up diving headfirst into the dancefloor, his drink flying up into mid-air, RAW POWER.

After the show, once the venue is empty, we listen into XFM, our live session is being broadcast and Chris does a short phone interview live from the back room of the venue. You can listen again to the session here, we thought it came out pretty well. Tomorrow we drive back to London to repack our bags for Reykjavik, we will be video documenting our experience, no more words for now.

July Round-Up

Nedry live

Just a quick round up of our previous couple of weeks of adventures. Firstly we headed to The Good Weekend Festival in Winchester and found a really pleasant, fun little festival. An amazing 1st year for those guys, selling out the event and putting on loads of quality acts. Late night rain didn’t hamper our enjoyment too much and we enjoyed playing a fairly improvised headline set on the outdoor stage, it was a lot of fun. Thanks to the organisers for asking us to be involved and the people who stood in the rain waiting for us!

Sheffield the next day required a very early morning and long drive, but we were greeted as no less than heroes by the Tramlines staff, who immediately sourced a room in city hall for us, with a stock of beer and towels. The whole event was run with a great degree or professionalism and passion and we were blown away by the sheer amount of people hitting the streets of Sheffield to enjoy some free music. It’s rare that you see such great line ups for free and I’d recommend this festival for future years. We somehow ended up on a huge outdoor stage, playing to one of the biggest crowds we’ve appeared in front of, big thanks to Tramlines for giving us that opportunity, we loved it!

This past weekend we played Leicester for the first time at the legendary Firebug Bar. After 2 and a half years of playing together there’s still many many venues we want to hit and it’s thanks to the lovely John Helps that we managed to tick this one off the list. Thanks to the folks who came down to check it out, another really fun show.

Manchester on Saturday night almost never happened, the Hulme Festival was sadly cancelled at the last minute due to a licensing dispute with the council and it was looking like we’d be at a loose end. However, thanks to some quick thinking from our friends, the Mind On Fire collective, an ad hoc gig was organised at local bar The Gallery. This is the third time we’ve played in Manchester and it’s pretty much our favourite place to play (besides our home turf of London!), the atmosphere is always great, people dance, cheer, listen intently and always give us great support. Thank you so much Manchester, it really makes it worth it. We will be back in October for sure!

Onwards up north for our last gig of the Summer. Sunday afternoon we played on a gigantic sound system at Kendal Calling. Never before have the drops sounded so big! It was a real pleasure to feel the bass hitting so hard and see people dancing to our new material.

We’re now taking some time out, after 6 months of working on (and completing) our new record, punctuated by trips to the US, Romania and around the UK, we are ready for some time off. However, we will return in late September / early October for a UK tour, hopefully playing all new material. Thanks to all who have supported us to this point, we promised to be back, fresh-faced, in a couple of months time!