Bushpilot - Live From Brotherswater
Brotherswater is a lake in the Eastern Lake District.

In the second week of January 1993, we hired a cottage near Brotherswater so the new band could write and record. The second week in January is probably the cheapest week in the year to hire a holiday cottage. Simon Tree drove us up there in his hippy van with our equipment and provisions, and came back for us a week later.

It was cold and there was snow, and being some distance from the village of Hartsop we were pretty isolated the whole time. Only once did we take the long trek out to the pub.

We set up in the living room, and recorded live to a borrowed Tascam 4-track. We also had a vocal effects unit, a holdover from our previous noise band.

Bushpilot had begun when both Purple Eternal and Spectral Alice ended (www.discogs.com/Purple-Eternal-Spectral-Alice-Arthur-Lees-DuvetSecond-Skin/release/2723980). Karl, Daren and Ross came from Purple Eternal, while Phil - later founder of Norman Records - joined from Spectral Alice. Adrian, an old school friend, joined following a return from university in Newcastle.

We wanted to create a new sound, away from heavy noise rock we’d previously dealt in. We put away the distortion pedals and generally slowed things down. We concentrated on rhythm and groove. Records I remember us all listening to at that time were Slint’s Spiderland, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, James Brown’s In the Jungle Groove, and of course everything by Can.

In this setting, away from grubby Hyde Park in Leeds, in the beautiful nature of the Lake District which we all love, a certain nature spirit creeps in.

There was a grand plan to conquer the world by getting all our music in order before placing it in front of the world. The next year we signed a three album deal with Cherry Red, but it wasn’t to be. (In the end we released not a thing on Cherry Red, and a solitary single on the Frog label, which did get a play on John Peel - www.discogs.com/artist/2251848-Bushpilot).

23 years later we revisited the studio work we had done with Richard Formby as producer and later band member, thinking maybe a compilation of our best bits - just for ourselves really.

What we found was so much more than we remembered, and this became a total two albums and two singles, which will be released in the first months of 2020 on God Unknown Records (godunknownrecords.bandcamp.com).

The tapes from the cottage were the last thing we revisited. At some point Richard must have transferred these recordings to a DAT tape and filed them away in the studio where we found them, left undisturbed these many years.

While there are obvious deficiencies in terms of sound quality from being recorded cheaply on an analogue 4-track - though Richard’s sound restoration work does much to address this - these early songs again surprised us. Though these recordings are of a new band just starting to find its way, there is a unique spirit to them

The two tracks in particular stand out for me are At Midnight with it’s incredible locked groove that you maybe only get from being lucky enough to have two incredible drummers - Phil playing drums, and Karl a drummer turned bass player here, with its HP Lovecraft inspired lyric of a boy trapped in a mineshaft.

The other is Telepathic Radio, an acidic jam that obviously channels a groove from Dr John’s Gris Gris album, and allows Adrian to show off his lead guitar chops, again like At Midnight with words culled from bad dreams.

Elsewhere there is Over The Earth I Come, perhaps Bushpilots ur-track, the one that later tracks take their trajectory from. It has a groove that cops a James Brown move, Daren giving it his distinctive guitar ‘ping’. There is a heavier noisier rendition of this track on our first LP proper, Already!, but here this one sounds more proto punk-funk.

Uptight! Is perhaps a half serious homage to Led Zeppelin 3, also recorded in a no doubt much grander country cottage. Wild About Nothing is a phrase we picked up that for some reason seemed to say it all. Our take on Can’s Yoo Doo Right was a late night improvisation, done once and never repeated. Looking back I’m amazed at how well Phil replicates Jaki Leibzeit’s drum fills purely from memory.

Working on this at Richard’s Netherfield Works studio in 2019, Richard commented that there was an overall Velvet Underground vibe, so with this in mind the tracks are sequenced based upon the order of the songs on the Velvet’s White Light White Heat album.

Bushpilot will be playing live in 2020.

Live from Brotherswater is available from the God Unknown Records on Bandcamp and from Norman Records from Friday the 13th December 2019.

Ross Holloway