Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire Relight Fans With Posthumous Release
By Adam Clery on January 4, 2012 in Music
Wonderful news my lovelies, Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire have announced a posthumous release!
After forming in 2005, the part-melodic, part-hardcore fivesome called it quits about a year ago in a frenzy of tears and farewells at The Cluny. But now they’ve condensed singles, b-sides, rarities, live tracks and remixes into one stunning release, with all the proceeds going to charitable causes.
Giddy with nostalgic merriment, I headed down to the sight of their farewell show, The Cluny, to chat to Bob Allan about how and why this all came together.
How do you put 5 years into one release?
We spent a bit of time emailing back and forth about how to approach the track-listing. Just before we disbanded, we had a song called ‘President’ that we’d mastered and recorded a video for, and we were planning to release that as a single just before we decided to call it a day. We had planned to just release that but we decided if we were going to do it, why not just get together everything and make it a bit more definitive.
So it starts with ‘President’, then the b-side, then the remix, then the preceding two singles right back to the early demos and so on. That was you really get a grasp of what those 5 years were like.
The second last song is a live track, which we thought was really important to get in there somewhere. We always considered ourselves more of a live band than a studio band, but I don’t think we ever really captured our live sound very well. Ironically, the best live recording of us is the cover we did of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’…
How did you decide what made it on and what got cut?
We tried to make it a mix of the stuff we really liked, and the stuff everyone else really liked. The singles sort of chose themselves, for obvious reasons, but we had a canny few demos and things that were half-finished to choose from. Collectively, we all loved a song called ‘Pieces Of The Argument’ which we just recorded ourselves in a practice room, so that had to go on. Everything else was sort of decided on in all the back and forths we had about it.
There were a few tracks we really wanted on that didn’t make it. Like the first ever recording we did as a band, which was just this two track demo we would hand out at gigs, ‘Kaihoro’ and ‘Did You Hear That?’, as well as this track which was actually called ‘Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire’. The only problem was that none of us actually have those recordings anymore, so we couldn’t. Oh well.
We actually bumped a track in favour of the live version. We liked the studio recording, but the live version’s a good representation of what we were like on stage, really loud and radge.
What gave you the idea to do the release?
I think there was an element of leaving things unfinished, especially in regards to the President single. We had a meeting where we decided to call Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire a day, but we agreed we had to put something out as well, like a cheesy ‘Best Of’ compilation thing.
At that point we were still going to carry on as a band, but start from scratch under another name. Obviously that didn’t work out, but we still knew we wanted to get something out there, more for ourselves than anything else because it’s really nice to have something you can look at and say “yeah, that was us, that’s what we did for 5 years”, so it’s kind of like a full stop I suppose.
So we talked about it and thought, it’ll be great to stick it up online, charge a few quid and hopefully some of our fans will buy it. But realistically, after we’d split the money between us, it wouldn’t really be that much, so we’d be as well trying to do something more positive with it, that’s where the idea of donating it to charity came from. One of the lads has been directly affected by cancer in the family, so he suggested giving the money to Cancer Research.
Plus it means we can get the cover version on there without having to ring up the publisher and beg them for permission to sell it.
Have you been tempted to put a show on for the release?
We’ve talked about it, but one of the reasons it came to an end was because everyone was off doing different things. We’ve actually recorded new stuff since we separated, which we’ll probably put out at some point, but when we did it we were never all in the same room at the same time.
It’s a nightmare trying to organise around everyone’s schedules, so to do a show would mean actually getting everyone together for long enough to rehearse and play. We’d love to do it though, give all the money to charity again, put on some bands we all love, so we’d never rule it out.
I mean, the last song we ever played live was ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, which none of us think is a particularity fitting end to Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire. We’ll see.
The twenty track record, released through The Calico Print, is available to download from Bandcamp and costs a partly £2. More info here.
Related Posts:
- Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire Play Intimate Tynemouth Gig
Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire Love The Sea, And We Love Them
6 Responses
Leave a Reply
Music News | Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire Relight Fans With Posthumous Release | http://t.co/Fqb782kL
RT @kyeotv: Ever Since The Lake Caught Fire Relight Fans With Posthumous Release http://t.co/SIstuelm
Thanks to @AdamClery for interviewing me for @kyeotv re: the ESTLCF charity release, read my hungover ramblings here http://t.co/FmRP8otq
KYEO.tv interviewed Bob about the compilation, have a read inside about how it came together.
Thanks to everyone… http://t.co/R6B37ftw
Best news I've had today so far: http://t.co/wZ3jnC5Y
That link I posted – go to it, listen to Warden Rock and despair that ESTLCF split up a year ago. http://t.co/wZ3jnC5Y