Member Since: 4/28/2006
Band Website: myspace.com/parkbenchfromthechinamen
Band Members: "If you need more than yourself/To hold down a groove/You’re dancing for somebody else/No matter how you move." I like mixing music and firendships, so Parkbench recordings are often a collaboration between lots of different people at various times - acquiantences, friends, family members (where sometimes the difference is subtle): John King (www.myspace.com/lofiman) The Chinamen (www.myspace.com/thechinamenmusic) Tom Rodwell (www.tomrodwell.com) Franck Alba (www.myspace.com/franckjeanalba) Jim Kimberley (www.myspace.com/bruiseuk), Herb Phelps, Dave Sugarbeet, and many other blue-toed, battling & blossoming young musos (and old!). My other "band members" include those that help me behind the scenes - my publisher Annie Reed from Air to Air (EMI Records), Jane Glitre, Director of Spitz Records, and Tony from EGEA Alternative Music Distribution. Without them I wouldn't quite know what the heck to do apart from just keep recording and performing! So; I say "bless....: )"
Influences: What You Get Is What You See... Blues, Dub, New School Hip-Hop (my first record was "It Takes A Nation of Millions..." - which I bought at “Funk You†Records, back in Copenhagen when I was 12) Flamenco / Flamenco-Hip-Hop, Tex-Mex sounds from Ennio to Calexico, twangy Surf and Instrumentals (I moved to Spain at 13) Ethnic Fusion, High-Life (and spent some of my childhood in Nigeria) Afro-Beat, Gnawa, Alt-Folk/Country, Russian Vespers, Bill Bryson (then I was a late teenager in Minnesota - but who doesn't love to laugh out loud and learn something fancy simultaneously?) Goth, Punkabilly, Darkwave, Dub Step (and finally a bemused promoter in East-London, with your typical crash-pad sofa-share off Dalston Market - but the garden was next to the eternally and hilariously PUMPIN' Ridley Road Jamaican & Nigerian music stalls - Reggae, Christian Country, Gospel, Ragga!!!) but my new loves were Punk-Jazz, Electro, Dancehall, Post-Jazz, Post-Rock, Ska-Hop...and (if edgy) Soul, Funk and R&B (quite a rarity but pretty special when it happens) and also, once I moved from playing in full bands myself to doing solo gigs, I WORSHIPPED ALL One-Man-Bands - even booked a festival of those genius soundniks once, the rule of which was that everyone had to play at least 2 instruments and sing at the same time. It climaxed with a One-Man-Band-DUO!!! (called Deltahead - they still tour in an old Swedish ambulance: "Automatic Drive, For The People") - 1920s Swing, and certain forms of Doom / Nu Metal (oh yes - I studied in Oslo once upon a home-sick time - brushing up on my Viking credentials and listening to Emperor and Mayhem)... As to people? Sound Carriers? A musician is the true meaning of a "conductor"- not in the directorial sense, but as in making ways of trapping and transforming HUMAN ELECTRICITY into demonstrative patterns for yourself and everyone to feel the natural and awesome beauty - the raw material of which is otherwise known as EMOTION...(If you like robots, there might be something wrong with you - I never got the musical link: "The machine teaches the human to produce more machines" - still scribbled in the men's at The Ten Bells in Spitalfields - the pub opposite the Spitz, where so many things came and went; music and friendships, and good stockists and bad, where even the safe was not safe and a broken toilet mirror could hang, like a dusty stag’s head, for long enough to become a comforting feature, a delight even (see, things like that takes years, years of a certain kind too) but yeah, so, why screw robots when you can have humans instead? And speaking of humans, well, gotta mention them too; not heroes or icons but CULPRITS - guilty as charged of voodooing my whole life (off to 'Somewhere'), maybe if I finally understand it, leaving some things more solid than solid air, that not all things have to go up and evaporate, that music can keep a memory or a soul alive if you really want it - which is pure magic of course - so here's to the time conductors: Waits, 16 Horsepower, Martyn, Cave, Ultramagnetic, Poveda, Old Dirty, Robin (not the chick, the Flamenco guitarist) Dowd, Hooker, Wolf, Dalton, Songdog, Eric B, Williams, Laswell, Necks, Deadbeat, Capleton, posthuman, Nephillim, Hopkins, Cranes, everyone on 4AD in the 1980s, Southern & Bella Union Records (more recently) Babar Luck, Lucha Libre, Frisell, Beefheart, Lord Buckley, Modeselektor, Hardin, Holiday, Dhafer Youssef, Lhasa, Chuck D, the Bomb Squad and Flava (before he went off to make that fucked up TV show; possibly the only thing he could do that was WORSE than crack!), Busta Rhymes, 08001, Cake, El Ultimo de la Fila, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Old Time Relijun, Django Reinhardt, TOOB, William Burroughs (funny how its never "Bill") xploding plastix, Bregovic & Kusturica, Erkan Ugur (cos Turks are so stunningly SERIOUS), Thee Swank Bastards, Dead Plants, Marley, Need New Body, Waters, Hawkins, Chao, Los Banditos, Julien Jacob, Iron Horse........WARNING!!! WARNING!!! - This list is a neutron in an atom inside a molecule of a speck of snow upon the tip of an iceberg lodged across a sea in the canyon of a planet infinitely larger than Earth...or at least that's how I feel after all this time, always listening, in light or dark...When did you last go even for one single day without hearing music of some kind? Its been years probably, maybe a lifetime? That's the power we have inherited today - a force of nature, science and spirit all at once. Maybe THAT is God. Im not a believer but I'd believe in THAT. God with a small 'g' love & special FORCE..."Aint It Skunky????†Peace - m.
Sounds Like: Moods and moments burning bright or smouldering quietly; words like white-hot cinders stoked by the tension and drama of REAL LIFE.
Record Label: Spitz Records / EMI Publishing / EGEA Distribution
Type of Label: Indie