2010: The Year We Make Contact

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Well, here we are again my friends…

Happy New Year from all of us at Bombskare HQ, we hope you all had a good time. Now that the bevvy has worn off and the snow seems to be melting it’s time to start getting our heads back in the game. We hope you have been having as much success with your New Year Resolutions as we have. My own personal resolution is to try and be more like Ross Kemp of TV fame. He’s so tough. As a band though have decided that this year we are going to put more Ska into our music. We feel that last year we were skimping with the pure stuff, mainly because if you take your Ska too pure, it can actually be quite dangerous. Most of the stuff we were putting out was cut with all sorts of impurities; rock, jazz, blues. None of that this year, no watering down. It’s going to be 100% clean. Pure rocket fuel. You were warned.

2010 is going to be a big year, massive, according to Arthur C Clarke. I’m hoping that the planet Jupiter explodes creating a second sun in the solar system, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on space with our new-patented telescope. However just in case it doesn’t we’ll probably finish and release our second album, a close second by Arthur C Clarke’s standards. Our working title is ‘Blue Harvest’; just to fool Tim who’s recording us. The real title is ‘The Day The Earth Stood Stupid’, but don’t tell him. We have fourteen songs in various stages of completion, and another five or six songs almost written and arranged. In addition to our second album we have been working on a live recording too. It’s sounding pretty good, based primarily on the recording of our album launch party last year at Studio 24, the hottest gig on record. Listening back to it is quite strange, a form of time travel really, especially when we start editing the audio; it’s like messing with history, like an episode of Star Trek. I hope we don’t upset the Space/Time Continuum. We’ve also recorded a Beatles tribute EP that should see the light of day soon, probably on iTunes.

I guess there is no easy way to say it so I’ll just say it. We wish to announce the departure from our ranks of our beloved sax man, Mr Jay Mackenzie Sloan. He will be missed by us, and I’m sure, by all of you. Jay has been with us since The Postillion in 1999, and has been part of the bands core since almost the beginning. He can still be seen performing with Big Fat Panda of course and I’m sure he will be making guest appearances with us in the future. So at the minute we are officially a nine piece.

That’s not the only man down. Our Matt broke his collarbone in December whilst snowboarding in France. His left arm is useless. We still dragged him to the last gig of 2009 over in Leslie with Joe Viterbo. He protested but once we doped him to the eyeballs, he did the gig sitting down with one hand. But he’ll be out of action till at least the end of January. That’s not all. Colin had a tooth knocked out and a burst lip whilst brawling at New Year so he can’t play the trumpet until he’s fixed, whenever that might be. Apparently your mouth is quite important when you play wind instruments. Also in starting fights. So it’s fair to say that we won’t be match fit for a few weeks, at least for live playing, but we won’t stay quiet. You may not know this but is a little over ten years ago when Big Hand played their first gig, which was supporting Bombskare not long after Bombskare started, in 1999. Over the years we have evolved significantly to the majestic institution that we are today. Big Hand are not bad either. So to that end we are organising a celebration of over a decade of Bombskare and Big Hand here in Edinburgh. It will definitely be a full night; none of this out by twelve o clock nonsense, so mark your calendar for February 26^th and make sure you don’t have to work on the 27^th because it’s going to be one hell of a party. Watch this space.