The Aliens

Tracks by The Aliens

	Sunlamp Show Appears on The Police Box 1 » "We're gonna write another song," they sing. Indeed they are, and then some. Log in to download tracks
	Pernickitty Jack Appears on The Police Box 2 » Classic? Hell yeah! Mad as barrel of trout? That too! Effortless brilliance on this pre-release Ten Tracks exclusive. Log in to download tracks

The Aliens Profile

'By rights, their arrival should create a Day The Earth Stood Still moment, aeons ahead of the competition. Breathless, revelatory & teetering on the brink of total collapse.' - Observer Music Monthly
                                                                                                                                     
These Aliens have history - between them they have been behind some of the most enthralling British music of the last decade. John Maclean and Robin Jones where members of the Beta Band. Gordon Anderson was a founding Beta Band member who went on to record two albums under the Lone Pigeon moniker.

They made a welcome return in September with a brand new album on their own Pet Rock Records label. Entitled Luna, it picks up where their astounding debut Astronomy For Dogs left off, and sees the band continuing to explore the outer limits of sunshine pop, psychedelic rock and acid dipped electronics.  

Luna has taken almost exactly twelve months from inception to completion. The story begins with the dissolution of their contract at EMI records: this left the band free from commitment but, from the strong foundation of Astronomy For Dogs, presented a rare opportunity to build from the ground up (as opposed to underground up – there is a difference. Possibly).

CLOWNS
Picture a stone-built holiday house perched high on a steep brae leading down to a quaint Fife fishing village and commanding panoramic views of the busy Firth of Forth shipping channel: let this be called the school. Into the slightly shabby interior of this home kitted out back in 1982 with roughly 20% love and 80% functionality, add three angry artists keen to imprint their own individually extreme vision onto their latest record: let these be known as the children. Now, on a late July afternoon with no adults or teachers in sight, 1500Gb of recording memory at their mercy, a weighty bag of songs and untold quantities of fine grade salmon on their doorstep – let’s see whether these three musical clowns can create the future of rock’n’roll – or at least another facet to their world acclaimed meandering pastiche of psychedelically tinged bluesy space-folk.

SESSION 1
Hiring the services of friend and publicist the charmingly eccentric and errant engineer John MacWilliamson they embark on a ten day session to try and hammer out a four track EP. MacWilliamson will later commune with death during an enforced pleasure-seeking swim to the infamous Bird Island. After nine-and-a-half days arguing intensely about the delicate issue of salmon preparation, squabbling over the washing-up and endless conjecturing on musical direction, sleep deprived and somewhat demented the band stagger through to the living room and thrash out an astonishing half-hour-long raw, raucous, organ, drums and guitar jam which leaves them feeling smugly relieved and believing that just maybe anything is possible. Before the day is out a sitar has been mysteriously smashed to smithereens.

SESSION 2
Buoyed by their incredible success in the previous episode, the band shun their original concept of breaking the album up into easy-to-manage, carefully considered EPs and instead elect to plough onward laying down the bare bones of as many tracks as possible, with a mind to later embellishment during the cold winter months and, beyond that, a bottomless sea of editing. Assisting on this quest for proliferation is technical wizard and retired all-in wrestling champion Rebus Robinsons – whose unique combination of talents recommend him as the perfect gentleman to oil the wheels of progress whilst at a similar time leap bodily into the fray whenever emotions amongst the group become too physically violent.

INTERLUDE
At this time in late November the band are invited by Damon Albarn and the Africa Express team on a cultural and musical exchange trip to Kinchasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The five day whistle-stop tour of the bullet and pock-marked Congolese capital, deified setting of Ali and Foreman's ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, offers the twenty-five strong travelling party an opportunity to experience and perform alongside a host of the finest and most far-ranging African musicians playing today. It is rewarding and reasserting to see the familiar pomp and ceremony un-cloaked and to hear and to see music, dance and culture celebrated in such a pure, unassuming, natural, yet intricately complex and beautiful way.

SESSION 3
Culturally warmed and determined to demand more from themselves our three intrepid jokers return to the alarming discovery of four carbonized potatoes in the roasting oven of the Aga. As ever unphased by this potentially ominous warning from the higher powers the lads read it as a sure sign that all is well and trip gaily into session three.
The session passes with little remark – the ongoing stockpiling of skeleton tracks for later fleshing and clothing – but draws dramatically to a premature end with the crippling dislocation of Rebus's right eyebrow during the particularly vicious recording of an acoustic love ballad.

The very next day and with no obvious or reasonable explanation a ‘Davender’ upright piano is found to have moved from the conservatory into the corner of the kitchen. It is Christmas.

THE DARK WINTER MONTHS
With the serious depletion of local salmon stocks the band are forced to subsist on a diet of raw shellfish and look forward longingly to late April when the first tender stalks of rhubarb will nudge their gentle way through the permafrost. It is during these dark winter months that our trinity of budding professor Frankensteins sequester themselves in their private chambers and set about the embellishment of, and the breathing of life into, the bones of their accumulated tracks. The upside to their high-protein mineral-rich diet is an abundance of long, flowing, wonderfully healthy hair - the cultivation of which becomes a matter of fanatical personal pride. Furiously competitive, the trio of buffoons beaver away in their respective secret laboratories, meeting up face-to-face only sporadically and then with the sole intent of rubbishing one-and-other's work and comparing each other's efflorescent barnets.

AVERAGE LAWS
Come late April and the tentative first few freezing rains of summer the boys emerge as if from a heavily sedated dream realising the law of averages command that after eight months of recording thousands of gigabytes of audio, with several versions of every song and absolutely no money in the bank – the album must be close to completion. Taking a calculated gamble at this point the band, putting up as collateral their coveted, loyal and highly polished bass player, secure a half-million pound loan and decide to hire David Gray to perform a four bar saxophone solo on the closing track. In a touching moment of bizarre emotion, with misty eyes and clutching an empty bottle of famous grouse, Gray waives his fee – explaining that his love of saxophone is deep enough to transcend money. An authentic 1970s walk in shower is rented together with a portable street lamp and a full length PVC rain Mac, and the rest – after a brief spell in the future – will be history.

CORNISH PASTIES
With the all recording done, attentions turn to mixing. After stumbling upon archive YouTube footage of him performing a subtle bass EQ from a remote unit whilst simultaneously attempting to jump the Thames estuary at Gravesend on a lawnmower – the band are convinced that legendary producer and ace stunt motorcyclist Johannes Cornwielder is the man for the job. After tracking him down to a traction ward in Exeter – Cornwielder initially demands £600,000 in cash and that the project be undertaken from the world's largest ever ramp at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Mysteriously, after heavy sedation and a week of daily serenading from our gallant and aspiring barbershop trio, he completely recants – slashing his fee and asking only that the chaps perform a gig on his allotment and that furthermore they produce and market a commemorative haggis in his name.

Three fine June weeks in the verdant surroundings of secluded Sawmills in Cornwall allows the band a chance to really develop their botanical sketches and to bag a few more specimens for their moth collection. For Cornwielder it is a relentless daily existence of pasties, twenty-three hour days and the logistical nightmare of how to create clarity in a song with sixty vocal tracks whilst at the same time maintain smooth power all the way to the apex of the take-off ramp.
Somehow, despite Cornwielder blowing a cylinder head gasket, over two hundred minutes of mixed music is finally complete. What happens next is an unprecedented everything-must-go-edit-mania resulting in close to a year of fiercely protected, precious and hard-fought music being whimsically butchered in the space of about an hour.

A sixty-eight minute Luna is complete.

THE END
Luna toddles an intoxicated path described along two axes – one ranging from Abba to Zimmerman and the other from The Chuckle Brothers to Larry David.

A local hermit and friend of the band had these strange words to say: “At very least the lads have created a stolid testament to the stubborn pursuit of an unattainable perfection - but just maybe those clowns have created the great pyramid. Spare fifty pence for a cup of tea please mate?”

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