THIS WEEK:SILENT SLEEP

Silent Sleep is the current music project of Liverpool based Christopher McIntosh.

Christopher played in Liverpool bands 28 Costumes and Hallo…I Love You! Until April 2010, when he moved himself to Berlin. He returned to Liverpool at the start of 2012 and set about putting together a merry band of good folk.

Silent Sleep have released 2 e.p’s hatched from demos recorded in Berlin – ‘This Scissor Disaster Parts 1 and 2. & a debut album ‘Walk Me To The Sea’ which was released in May of this year.

I like the mix of melancholy & heartfelt melody,their appreciation for space & slow burning arrival & the understated yet poignant voice of Mr Christopher McIntosh.

I also like their choice of hats & facial hair-pictures & music,a lethal combination.What would we do without music? We are so blessed to have so many great artists coming out of the margins & jumping in our ears & into our hearts & souls.

You will likely find something special here with Silent Sleep & indeed many of the artists we cover on FOTN.

If you do then please spread the word on the fine & the good coming out of this here music community we all inhabit,your love for what they deliver is essential.

Thanks for dropping by,over to you Silent Sleep

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1. What are you up to at the moment?
Right now, I’m sat in my room which is in the attic and I’m with Graham who plays bass in the band and also my girlfriend, Louise who sings with us too. There are two couples in the band, Graham and his girlfriend Claire, who plays Glockenspiel and myself and Louise. Our drummer Olly’s girlfriend played piano with us once too so there were 3 at one point. There are no fallouts though. Not yet anyway. We’re certainly not Fleetwood Mac. David, our guitar player has a sister called Lucy and she once played Flute with us…trying to think of anything else like that…I think that’s it. Completely off topic. So I’m sat with Graham and Louise and we’re posting out records and sorting out the next release on our label, Rekordmeister Music, which is an incredible LP by a band called Voo (who you should check out as soon as you’ve finished reading this and listening to our album!

2. Favourite childhood memory?
Sometime in the early 90s. It was Saturday morning and my mum was making me stay in until I’d finished my homework. It was the start of the summer holidays. There was a knock at the door and it was a parcel delivery from Freeman’s Catalogue. My mum started opening it in front of me and I asked what it was, ‘Just some clothes I ordered for myself ages ago,’ was the reply. But then she started singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme tune and really slowly started lifting out the figures, one by one, of every single god damn turtle character. It was totally out of the blue – it wasn’t my birthday, it certainly wasn’t Christmas and I hadn’t even been a particularly  good boy. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up and retrospectively I know my mum went above her means to get them – they were dead scarce at the time, nobody could get them and I suddenly, out of nowhere, I had them all. It was without a doubt the best day of my life.

3. Hero?
So many. Elliot Smith, Wayne Coyne, Vic Reeves, Steve Coogan,

4. Villain?
So many. Alan Fairclough, David Cameron, the Go Compare adverts, Alan Carr,

5. What/who makes you laugh?
I like watching dogs and cats do funny things. My favourite programme is You’ve Been Framed. I’m not even joking, I love it.

6. Describe what you do?
Well basically, I write some songs and in the case of this album they’re mostly pretty melancholic affairs (won’t always be the case though I’m sure) and I think about how I’d like them to sound and then I ask a load of my friends who are way better than me at playing music to come and help me make the songs sound like that. At the moment the line up is pretty big, we sometimes have 2 drummers, 2 trumpet players, a violin player, 2 guitarists, a bassist, a glockenspiel player and sometimes we have somebody to play the piano. We sometimes sing with a 15 strong choir. It sounds mental and whacky but it definitely isn’t. It’s supposed to be moving like a beautiful and powerful movie.

7. Who’s hair would you like to have for just one day?
I’d like to go back to 2004 and have my own hair. I’ve had a shaven head for about 5 years now but I wouldn’t mind if just for a day I had a big, full head of wild hair. I feel like I didn’t make the most of having all that hair. Now my beard is the closest thing I have to that feeling.

8. Best musical experience to date?
We played at Glastonbury with my old band 28 Costumes and that was pretty brilliant. We played really high octane indie-rock and we were on in this really small tent that held about 600 people and just before we started playing it began to rain to everybody piled on in and it was really steamy and hot and wild. We didn’t go to bed for about 3 days after that – it was beautiful and I’d love to play there again. That said, I went to Australia list week and I managed to rope Karl Kennedy from Neighbours into playing on one of my songs with his band (there were only two of our band over there). That is definitely up there too.

9. What artist inspires you?
I like artists that evolve and are prolific like Bowie or Tom Waits or David Byrne, people that are in it for the long haul, people who just can’t help but write great songs because that’s just what they do. If I die a lonely, broke old man I’ll die happy as long as I leave a ton of music that I’ve made behind.

10. What does Fresh On The Net mean to you?
Fresh On The Net to me is a fantastic platform to have people like yourself find music that they like and try to help put the artist in touch with an audience they might not have otherwise been able to reach. Is that way too serious?