Song writing was Mainly a collaborative effort between Kie and Jen, although other people and band members did help out at various points along the way.
Influences
Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Oasis and all the other 90's britpop bands, Eels, Tracy Chapman, The Fairport Convention, Thea Gilmore, Bright Eyes, Janis Joplin, Sting, Radiohead, PJ Harvey, The Magnetic Fields, Nick Drake, Alanis Morrissette, Belle and Sabastian, Joan Baez, Carol King, Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel, 10,000 maniacs.
Sounds Like
A badly recorded, poorly orchestrated indie folk band who are nervous and a bit pissed.
SomeOldLady were a semi acoustic band operating from various smoke filled terraced houses in Lancaster at the start of the millennium. Based around the longstanding song writing partnership of Jennifer Clayton (vocals) and Kieran Hazell (guitar) the band had various members throughout its existence but when Lead guitarist Tim Gifford joined up along with viola player Jessica Bensted the line up became a solid formation that endured till the very end.
The members of SomeOldLady fought many battles in order to make their ‘art’: most notably a chronic lack of money and the extreme mood swings of their lead singer. They also fought constant temptation to spend valuable rehearsal time pissing around playing Oasis covers in four part harmonies and devising operatic versions of Radiohead songs. Many of their performances and rehearsals took place through a haze of chemicals which usually resulted in a general air of forgetfulness; be it lyrics, harmonies or, to hell with it; just entire songs. However, nothing was quite so problematic as the general ethos held by the band that anything that involved getting up before 3pm wasn’t worth doing, even if that thing was a sound check for a gig that would have paid £50 into the kitty.
All this resulted in SomeOldLady being considered by their friends (and handful of fans) as the underachievers of the Lancaster music scene. Yet most people would concede that when they showed up on time and had the sobriety and mental faculties to string a chord progression together they could actually bang out a decent tune and work a crowd.
Due to the above disorganisation and general slapdash attitude, a lot of the band’s material never got recorded. To this date, there are only 3 known pictures of the band in action and the recordings found here are the ‘highlights’ from their one and only rushed and very drunken recording session.
So all in all, this material is maybe an unfair representation of SomeOldLady and unfortunately many great songs, harmonies and riffs never got recorded (particularly the catalogue of cover versions we had a lot of fun reworking). However, another way of looking at the recorded material is to concede that it did, nevertheless, capture the spirit and ethos of the band. What shines through on the recordings is a group of musicians who are reasonably talented in a lazy kind of way. A band who are rough round the edges but happy to be playing together and with a few thousand more rehearsals and the purchase of an alarm clock might just have got somewhere
SomeOldLady performed and wrote together for four years (2000-2004) and disbanded amicably when the members gradually relocated after University and left for ‘proper jobs’ in offices, libraries and Schools. Kie and Jen still hang together and secretly plan in nerdy detail how to take over the world with their next band, one in which they actually, like, do stuff. They would never admit it to you in person, but ideas for writing ‘Radiohead the Opera’ still haunt them, as does the idea of being interviewed by the ghost of John Peel.
We hope you enjoy the songs of SomeOldLady in the spirit they were intended, as a bit of fun that might make you smile and hum along or at the very least raise your glass and have a drink to the band who enjoyed nothing better than a singalong over a roaring campfire and a bottle or two.
