ARTiST: Tall Pony
TiTLE: I'm Your Boyfriend Now
LABEL: Cherryade Records
GENRE: Indie
TiME: 13:26 min
SiZE: 13,6 MB
BiTRATE: VBRkbps
RiP DATE: Jul-20-2007
RELEASE DATE: Jul-02-2007
WEBSiTE: www.myspace.com/tallpony
Track List:
01. I'm Your Boyfriend Now 05:56
02. Big Guns 02:52
03. I Hate Your Family 04:38
Release Notes:
CD Times Review
In an era defined by the constant and never ending
availability of music on phones, in shops and
online, it's a rare thing to find yourself
scrabbling around like a 1980s teenager, trying to
tape something off the radio because it's so damn
good you can't risk leaving it for a rainy day. But
this is exactly what happened when I first heard
Tall Pony's I'm Your Boyfriend Now
Over a haunting lo-fi backdrop of dread and fear, a
deadpan voice details a list of expectations of
behaviour and standards required of ones girlfriend.
With the tongue firmly in the cheek, Tony Gage
commands lines such as
"When we go into town on Saturdays I will not
accompany you into high street fashion stores or any
kind of clothes shops
I will go to Halfords, Dixons, HSS Tool Hire
You can meet me later having bought sandwiches,
sandwiches which are large and filling and do not
contain tuna or prawns
I'm your boyfriend now"
Frankly, it's a masterpiece of modern male honesty
and lyrical wit and after receiving a tonne of
airplay and intense audience response courtesy of
Huw Stephens excellent Radio 1 show I'm Your
Boyfriend Now is finally set for it's first major
release on July 1st on Cherryade Records.
So who the hell are Tall Pony? And what do they
think they're doing spreading all this venomous
grist to the feminists sawmill whilst splitting
everyone else's less serious sides?
Well, Tall Pony are Tony and Paul hence Tall Pony.
They hail from the middle of England and they've
been making music together for 6 years largely for
the pure hell of it.
Says Paul "We both write lyrics, both sing, both
play music. It's a 50/50 partnership, and I think
we're lucky that we have very similar ideas about
what we want to do and what interests us with pop
music."
Pop music in the Tall Pony sense is, thus far at
least, distinctly lo-fi and lacking the compressed
sheen of most weeks top 40 hits. Yes, for Tall Pony,
the right musical equipment is everything and their
equipment isn't the sort of thing likely to impress
super producers like Mutt Lang one little bit.
Though the 2007 IYBN mix has been snazzed up on a
Mac, the original was recorded on the pre-digital
handbag of any self-respecting band: a four-track
portastudio.
Tall Pony clearly love the physical manipulation of
analogue instruments and the use of budget guitars
and tape and who can blame them?
Says Paul, "We always try to doing things
differently from how we think things would normally
be done. Mic placement is a big thing with us -
wandering around my house with mics stands to set a
good ambient sound is typical."
Like so many who see sitting in front of a computer
making music to be the very office job they'd rather
avoid, Tall Pony didn't particularly enjoy working
on the Mac 'It allowed a huge amount of flexibility,
but i find the process of sat at a monitor for hours
soul destroying and miss the smell and the chaos of
magnetic tape'
This enthusiasm for tape has produced a mound of
recordings that has mainly been contained inside
Tall Pony Towers. Indeed until last year, Tall
Pony's archive of material rarely saw the light of
day at all. So how did IYBN find it's way out of the
portastudio and end up in Huw Stephens hands to
become the most requested track of 2006?
Says Paul, "I was just cataloguing the stuff Tony
and I had been doing over the past few years, and
someone mentioned to me to send it into Radio 1
where there was a guy who listened to unsigned
acts."s
Unbeknownst to Tony, Paul sent it in and two weeks
later Huw texted to tell them they'd made a hit.
IYBN went on to become a hugely requested song for
weeks on end, splitting the audience between the in
awe and the just too plain serious to enjoy it. I
mean it is a joke isn't it?
Paul deadpans "It's based on real life. Tony wrote
the words and delivered them perfectly. Some
relationships are particularly fertile as
inspiration for writing lyrics. I think we write
emotional songs about real things."
Amen to that..