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Do you remember that kid with the bowl cut … you know, the fishing trip from that
cine-film summer back when. Somehow, no fish were caught and his radio ended
up in the canal … yeah, it’ll come back to you … !
When music is truly special, it shakes out old memories and make the worst days
feel like stepping stones. You’ll wanna have a little bit of happiness with your sadness
and maybe even the other way ‘round.
The Amazing Pilots are two brothers, Paul and Phil Wilkinson, who started playing
music just after tea most nights. They hatched a plan to travel from their small
town in Ireland and record music somewhere up ahead.
Forming a band, they traveled to the sunny and jaded south coast of England where they holed up in a big house quite near the beach. The guitars started ringing, and the journey seemed to play along.
A few months later, with a self-financed EP (“Graduate Blood”) under their belt, the band began playing wherever they were wanted, and some others venues as well! The NME got a demo from somewhere, presumed it was a single and reviewed it as such. They said it was “deserving of no small amount of awe”!
It wasn’t long before the Pilots signed a recording deal with London based Easy!Tiger Records (Calexico, Wheat) and set about demoin over 30 songs for possible inclusion on their debut album.
The band were then invited to record a track for City Slang’s Lee Hazlewood tribute album. And so their first commercial release saw them sit alongside the likes of Evan Dando, Lambchop and Jarvis Cocker- the boys were invited to open up for Lee in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. A publishing contract with Chrysalis Music followed in 2002 and all looked rosy for the band.
It’s a heartbreaker for any young band to find out that their record company has to fold, just two weeks before the release of their first single. The Pilots, however, muttered something about journeys and went off to record their own debut single gaining Single of the Week in London’s The Independent with significant regional and national airplay.
It was soon after this that the brothers heard about a strange studio in a small Midwest town a few hours from Chicago … from a friend of a friend, naturally! A plan was hatched, and they traveled to meet many strange characters, play many strange old instruments and return with knowing grins and strange jackets.
The album was mixed by Mercury-nominated producer David Odlum whose credits include The Frames, Josh Ritter and Gemma Hayes (who also guested some vocals on the record). It was started in Dublin and completed in Black Box Studios in the Loire Valley, France. It’s the songs, melodies and irresistible hooks that the Pilots have made their own, now matched with the weight and darkedged beauty of a truly stunning debut album. Hello my Captor was snapped up by Undertow Records (US and Canada) and Decor records (UK and Europe) with releases scheduled for Spring 2005.
Things come around and journeys turn out to be destinations and it’s always hard to find a small radio in a canal.
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