Scottish indie pop experimentalists, The Bird And The Monkey
(Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian), pay tribute to Lou Reed with a
song about the Velvets to Voidoids / CBGBs / American Punk scene and
all the boozed up romantics who ever haunted the Bowery from 1645 to
1979. The Bird And The Monkey - Bowery Bums ep
1/ Bowery Bums
2/ Meet The Maelstrom (Temples of Grandeur)
3/ Eat Your Star
4/ We Sing Ourselves To Sleep
RELEASE DATE: 21st Jan 2014
All songs by Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian.
Copyright Athene Noctua Records, 2014.
Bowery Bums – the lead track from the latest EP by Scottish subterranean-pop experimenters, Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian - is a hybrid: a patchwork quilt of a song, stuck together from pieces like a Hannah Hoch photomontage, a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, the lightly toasted remains of Victor Frankenstein's reanimated monster.
Copyright Athene Noctua Records, 2014.
Bowery Bums – the lead track from the latest EP by Scottish subterranean-pop experimenters, Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian - is a hybrid: a patchwork quilt of a song, stuck together from pieces like a Hannah Hoch photomontage, a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, the lightly toasted remains of Victor Frankenstein's reanimated monster.
Scottish
Borders based duo, Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian – aka The Bird
And The Monkey – began collaborating on left-field songs, music
videos, experimental short films and art projects in 2010.
Swan - a
BA (Hons) graduate in Sculpture from Gray's School of Art - had taken
to writing art-house acoustica on a cheap mono cassette recorder with
a Dobro Guitar, and painting herself blue for serpentine-dance
performance videos down by the loch (as can be seen in The Bird And
The Monkey's Daisy James On The Pincushion video). Simian - guitarist
with John Peel favourites,
Dawn Of The Replicants - spent years dabbling with DIY zines,
homemade Dadaist video clips, experimental writing & lo-fi
4-track portastudio home recordings.
Right
from the start, the aim of The Bird And The Monkey was to draw on
these fertile backgrounds to produce left-field mixed-media art,
music & film. The Bird And The Monkey's songs have since been aired on
BBC Radio 1, 6 Music & BBC2 teen soap, The Cut. The video, Do You
Wanna?, was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival 2011 to play on
Edinburgh Big Screen in Festival Square for two weeks. Debut short
film, In The Dark I Sat, premiered at London's Portobello Film
Festival 2012. The pair were later commissioned to create the Sung To
The Crows video-art installation – inspired by the Borders Murder
Ballad, The Twa Corbies - for the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
2012.
On
hearing of the passing of Art-Glam-Punk Poet Laureate, Lou Reed (on
27th
October 2013), Swan and Simian decided it was time to complete and
record their song Bowery Bums for release on Athene Noctua Records.
Simian had written the verses quickly in the late 1990s, right after
reading Clinton Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk
History for a Post-Punk World. He was intending a trashy throwaway
tribute to the 60/70s New York/Detroit punk scene: The New York
Dolls, Velvet Underground, MC5, Iggy & The Stooges, CBGBs, Patti
Smith, Tom Verlaine's Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids,
Blondie and Talking Heads. At the time Simian was playing guitar in
Dawn Of The Replicants. The dumb-punk Sonic Youth style of his latest
song didn't fit with DOTR's quirky set, so Roger's multitrack demo
cassette and scrawled lyric sheet were stuck in a shoebox to collect
dust with all the other Ones That Got Away.
Nearly a decade and a
half later Sarahjane Swan was listening to her collaborator's hissy
recording of the CBGBs song and announced that it was “daft and
delinquent” but that she liked it and wanted to “fix it”. Swan
demanded a new “Patti Smith piano bit in the middle” and got to
work researching the history of New York's Bowery district,
scribbling lyrics in her infamous leather-bound notebook. She was
determined to bring a measure of subtlety and pathos to the song: to
celebrate all the boozed up romantics who have haunted the Bowery
since the 1600s. Swan was fascinated by the Bowery's dichotomy: the
contrast between the upmarket boutiques, fashion and affluence of
today and the district's past as a colony of the nameless down and
outs, those luckless skid-row benefactors of the American
Meritocracy's disregard, whom the punks of '77 were stepping over on
their way to the club.
And
so, in this fashion, The Bird And The Monkey have pieced together
their ode to Lou Reed's city and its inhabitants.
BOWERY BUMS video
Eat Your Star video
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