9. New KingdomParadise Don’t Come Cheap
This album should have been massive shouldn’t it? Yet it’s largely forgotten.
I’m not sure about massive but certainly it should’ve been notable. I saw them at the Reading Festival in nineteen-ninety-Google-it and they were a live band and in my late teens and early twenties I was firmly in the "proper music" camp before I met anybody else who was in the camp. "Proper music" is definitely one of those camps where it seems like a good thing and then you meet other people who think the same thing as you and you go, "Nah. Maybe that’s not the way to go with our lives." If only some of the more poptimist people around these days had a similar way of looking at the world.
The radio was on in our student kitchen and I heard Steve Lamacq play the song ‘Unicorns Were Horses’. It blew my mind at the time. I thought it was absolutely incredible. And I can honestly say that’s the only thing Steve Lamacq’s ever done for me.
Mclusky was played a lot on the John Peel show. To this day, I don’t think Mclusky or Future Of The Left were ever played on a Zane Lowe show or on Steve Lamacq. Future Of The Left won the Welsh Music Prize for our third record [2012’s The Plot Against Common Sense] and let me tell you that was quite a night (I wasn’t there). But later on I went out for a drink and Steve Lamacq was there and he said, "I just want to congratulate you on the prize". That was very nice to congratulate me. Then he said, "I just want to say I think you’re one of the best lyricists working in Britain at the minute". To which I replied, "Why have you literally never played my band then?" He didn’t have an answer for that. But there you go. There’s the music business in a conversation.
It’s happened to me before. I’ve been stood in queues at South By Southwest and some guy who works for the worst record company in the world will come over and go, "I just wanna say, man, I’m a huge fan your band." Why do you spend your whole time signing such shit then? There’s never an answer for that. "Well… people like shit." Yep. I suppose they do. South By Southwest is great for those conversations and by "great" I mean something else. "Hey, were you guys in MacClowsky?" You learn not to disagree. Absolutely, MacClowsky. That was the band I was in. Great days.
