Unthinkably, Dorset pop-psych misfits Gothic Chicken started writing and recording many of the basic tracks for Lift The Cobweb Veil nearly 10 years ago. And then stuff intervened, as stuff so often does. Bassist/vocalist Alan Strawbridge moved to Bristol and formed the remarkable prog-pop visionaries Schnauser, drummer Luke Adams raised a brace of children, keyboardist Tom Hughes started juggling a parallel career as a startlingly original video-maker with musical tours of duty including The Selecter and Nektar - who almost rhyme, we've only just realised - and guitarist/vocalist Marco Rossi fired up Microsoft Word on a borrowed laptop and fell backwards into the arms of the magazines Shindig! and Record Collector.
However, Gothic Chicken never went away. The band still gigged intermittently, and still do, and always will, but it wasn't until this year that they re-addressed and finally finished the songs they began so many years ago. In so doing, they realised that the irreverent psych homage they'd originally intended had turned into something altogether darker, more personal and less codified when they weren't looking.
To everyone's surprise, the human condition has ended up daubed all over it: disappointment (‘Westward Ho?'), abandoned hope (‘It's All Up To You, St Jude'), the indignity of thankless, repetitive labour (‘Pitta Bread Man', ‘The Mousetrap'), the omnipresent fear of being perceived as an inadequate tool with an inadequate tool (‘And As For Me'). However, all of this is delineated with swirls of colour (notwithstanding an obsidian seam of bleak humour), and set to conspicuously sunny, vertical melodies.
Formed, very loosely indeed, somewhere between Greenhill and Ferndale Road in Weymouth in the mid-to-late 1990s, Gothic Chicken originally fell together as a drunken side-trip. At that time, Alan, Luke and Tom held down day-jobs with The Lucky Bishops, while Alan also pulled double-duty in Cheese with Marco (late of The Kevin McDermott Orchestra). The initial idea, if indeed there was one, was to bemuse and ideally uplift Dorset pubgoers by hosing them down with an evening's worth of unruly '60s psychedelic covers beloved of the band, whose early tendency was to convert insalubrious lager dens into candlelit caves draped in cheap, lurid and worryingly flammable 1960s curtains. While there was an evangelical aspect in bringing songs by the likes of Blossom Toes, Shy Limbs, Timebox and Geranium Pond to (marginally) wider attention - and while the incongruity of playing roseate fare such as ‘Paper Sun' or ‘The Porpoise Song' within noseshot of pub toilets was undeniably significant - the basic fact was that the music was hugely enjoyable to perform. Essentially, the band existed as a means of ensuring they could have a convivial evening out with the ideal soundtrack playing in the background and foreground, even if they were forced to generate it themselves.
Over time, the idea of writing and recording original material in a broadly psychedelic idiom began to appeal, hence the long-deferred songs on Lift The Cobweb Veil. Alan now fronts Schnauser while Marco and Tom constitute The Gathering Grey, but Gothic Chicken continue to fitfully exist, like an immutable mutating virus, whenever all four members are in the same dimension at the same time.
If all of this seems too factual by half, an indefensibly fanciful account - honestly, purest bollocks, which didn't even seem like a good idea at the time - can be found beneath the ‘info' tab at the band's moth-eaten and sorely neglected Facebook page, www.facebook.com/gothicchicken
![News Added Sep 12, 2015 "God, is that the time already? We started recording these songs years ago, but owing to a combination of circumstance and fecklessness, they ended up on the back burner for all eternity. However! At the prompting of the very fine gentlemen Simon Felton and Stewart Osborne, we dived back in […]](https://hasitleaked.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/GC-320x320.jpg "Gothic Chicken : Lift The Cobweb Veil")
I can’t find this on newalbumreleases?