Introducing Team Horse

Boosted by recent higher profile gigs with ASIWYFA I found myself supporting the legendary Japanese psyche band Acid Mothers Temple, in the Pavilion bar. The gig was put on by the lovely Darren Smyth of Strange Victory. I’d never heard of these dudes before and was intrigued to find a group of long bearded gentlemen ensconced in this tiny upstairs bar prepping themselves for the show. The prepping consisted of burning off CDRs of their back catalogue, which matched my own recorded output of being vast and numerous. So we had something in common! I had a special ‘treat’ for the audience that night. I had lined up the piece of music by David Rose, known as “The Stripper”, to play over the PA as I collected up my gear. This also included me putting on a ridiculous dance routine of swinging leads and instruments about as I packed up my stuff. It got the biggest cheer of the night. I never did it again mind you!

I also found myself supporting the American artist Josh T Pearson, for his acoustic gig in Lavery’s. Also on the bill were Desert Hearts and Eamonn McNamee. There’s a lovely poster somewhere of this show. I was in awe of getting to meet Josh as I loved his previous band Lift To Experience. But he was carrying a hefty cold. Despite being unwell, he sat chatting to me pre-show, with his black Stetson pulled down low. He was a lovely man, despite his appearance.

Mentions in the press (including a full-page interview in Hot Press-courtesy of the lovely Colin Carberry) and dalliances with upcoming new bands, 2008 was an extremely prolific year for me. The way people had reacted to my diversion into instrumental post rock had given me impetus to make more music as Cruz. I wanted to expand the palette and introduced some keyboards into the mix for the follow up album entitled ‘Nuevo Reino’, which translates as New Kingdom. (I had to google that there to find out!) The blueprint of extra-long tracks that would reach epic finishes was still employed, this time I’d embellish the end blowout with strings. It was progression and I think in terms of musicality, was one of my best albums. To this day I still get the odd message from a lovely chap from Liverpool, Jason Royle, who I have never met in person,  but ‘Nuevo Reino’ is one of his all-time favourite albums. It’s little things like this that make me feel like my time spent making music was worth it.

On a roll, I also recorded another Cruz album, ‘Esperanza’, which took the new twist of having big booming beats rather than the clipped electro style beats of the drum machine. The music was increasingly encroaching into a new dynamic of quicker songs with shorter time spans. This was probably a nod to my inspiration ASIWYFA moving into a more mathematical style. For the cover I used a Banksy artwork, albeit I didn’t know that at the time.

There was also going to be a new enterprise on the go. I’d been listening to the extreme noise rock of the American band Lightning Bolt. They featured two members, one of whom was a masked drummer and a guy playing an oddly stringed bass making it sound like a guitar. For some reason, this struck a chord with me, and I wanted to start making ugly twisted aggressive music. A trip to the Belfast Guitar Emporium found me fall in love with a matching blue Mexican Fender bass. I also acquired a Whammy pedal, which was the key component in making the bass sound like a guitar. The new ‘band’ would be called Team Horse, a slight play on the Chino Moreno side project Team Sleep. The artwork was a black and white close up of a horse’s face. I decided to call the debut album ‘Team Horse’ and it was a crackers collection of songs that were nothing like anything I had done before. Every song had a reference to horses too.

Bizarrely, there were people interested in this cacophony. I was finding myself being invited to play on bills in venues I hadn’t played before with a new breed of bands doing all sorts of exciting new things. This included a band called Birthday Sex and Documenta, which featured a guy who Al used to know from Lurgan, Joe Greene. Joe had previously turned up at one of our practice nights, and talked about one day having his own band. I found Joe a very likeable fella, but he seemed more interested in partying than being serious about making music. Little did I know of his life to date around Lurgan/Craigavon and he would go on to make some lovely music and play some fabulous gigs, long after I would put my guitars away. That Documenta gig was in the Menagerie and was one of my favourite shows. The vibe was like nothing I had ever experience as that venue had its own special layout and the people in it where extraordinary cool, but not in a hipster way, just really sound. The actual sound man for the show was an old buddy too, Simon Mateer, our old drummer. He had moved on to become quite the expert behind a mixing desk and it was amazing to see him again. This was also my first gig performing in front of Lee, my soon to be Wife.

A local film director, the brilliant Tristan Crowe, took it upon himself to make a video for the song ‘Mustang’. It was a brilliant hyper motion cpature of his own face, twisted and contorted, much like the music. Check it out on Youtube.

AND I also managed to put out another Foamboy Deluxe Arkestra album. Referencing a lyric from Tom Waits, the ‘Go Ahead And Call The Cops, You Don’t Meet Nice Girls In Coffee Shops’ album featured some swooning dreamy pop songs, resplendent with gorgeous strings and some of my finest melodies. It’s one of my few albums to reside on streaming services. I didn’t put them there, that’s another story in itself. So yes, everything seemed to be falling into place for me, both musically and in my personal life. At last…