TeamHorseTales

  My listening habits are wide ranging, always have been. I grew up listening to a lot of indie, rock music and metal. In the early 90s I found myself being drawn to edgier bands like Jane’s Addiction and Ministry. I also loved hip-hop and funk and soul. There were three bands that would shape my recording output remarkably. First, The Magnetic Fields. Their triple album ‘69 Love Songs’ was the inspiration for the double albums I’d put out over the years. The main man behind that group was Stephin Merritt, who had been recording under various names over the years (The Hyacinths, Future Bible Heroes to name a few). I thought this was a brilliant idea and there was scope for me to do that, given my desire to make music from genres that I’d never tried before. The second band I found myself listening to around this time was Jesu. Justin Broadrick was part of the industrial metal band Godflesh and I came across his work from his remix of a Pelican track that was just stunning. Droning ...

The year is 2006 and the creative juices are in full flow. Feeling strong and inventive, fully in charge of what direction I wanted to progress into, the latest album looked towards Tom Waits for inspiration, entitled ‘Innocent When You Dream’, after one of his songs. This was a full-on Dream Pop album, heavy on keyboards and slamming distorted beats with a shoegaze element. The harmonising I had employed on ‘…Our Black Hearts’ still appeared on some tracks. I’d started to use the violin bow on the guitar now which was an added feature making for a lovely fuzzy tone. The resin powder clogged up the strings something rotten though! The track ‘Baby I’m A Star’ not only nabbed a Prince title, I decided to sing in a falsetto/Camille voice. Another new trick I developed in this album to go along with the “shimmer” (see earlier blogs) was the “twinkle”. This trick consisted of firing high piano notes through a delay pedal to make lovely Disney magic sounds. These sounds went to create a very...

I guess my ever expanding collection of guitar effects pedals and absolute necessity to focus on them, put me into the genre known as shoegaze. I loved guitar bands like Ride, Jesus and Mary Chain, Nirvana, Mogwai and for the next album, I was determined to create a homage to one album in particular. The ultimate shoegaze band is of course My Bloody Valentine. Their classic album 'Loveless' featured guitars that sounded feck all like guitars for the most part. The magical waves of swerving warped distorted guitars absolutely bled all over my next album '...Our Black Hearts'. Still coming to terms with my Dad's passing there was still an air of sadness to my music, yet the title track of the album has a wondrously uplifting feel to it.  The other unique selling point of OBH was my decision to harmonise with myself on every song. It's a strong album in terms of song writing, I'd abandoned the sampling in favour of a drum machine, bass, keyboards and guitars la...

  My Father passed away in 2004, aged 72. I was aged just 32. Not a lot of time to have spent with a loved one when you think about it. He had been sick with Cancer since his retirement 7 years earlier and after working for over 50 years in a factory only to take unwell mere weeks into his retirement still makes me very angry to this day. My previous album had been released only a few weeks before my Dad’s death. The first album to come out after his passing was going to be a double CD collection called ‘Gloryland’. I loved my Dad very much. He was a tenor in the Portadown Male Voice Choir and also sang in a barbershop style quartet. He, along with my musical Mother, gave me and my brothers and sisters all a passion for music. We all sang and played in different bands, albeit the music I would listen to and create would be miles away from what they all did. For this album there’d be a new sound. A recently acquired electric violin would make a tentative foray into the recordings....

  With the Foamboy debut album out there and a panoramic soundscape to inhabit, what would be my next move? I’m not sure why but my mind has terrible brain fog for what happened in these years. As I mentioned in my last blog I found my wee logbook of releases, so that helped me determine what I did for the purposes of the next few blogs. I found some old press clippings too, but they don’t date back to the foggy years! I know I played my only gig in Belfast’s Front Page bar somewhere around this time. I’ve a photo of myself somewhere wearing a fetching pink striped t-shirt and at that time I was sporting a frazzled mop of blond hair. Quite the look I’m sure you’ll agree. Ahem. Anyway, this was a major thrill for me as I was supporting the Canadian post rockers Fly Pan Am. The gig was put on by the lovely Darren Smyth of Strange Victory and I had saw Fly Pan Am on a legendary triple bill in the Empire a few years earlier. They were supporting a then unknown Sigur Ros and Godspeed Yo...

I'm writing this blog a bit of a sweaty mess. Not from doing exercise, but from wrecking the house trying to find a wee tiny hardback book that I recently re-acquainted myself with. The contents were purest gold dust. Especially given my intent to write some historical blogs about my musical past. The front page of this little book still contains the words "Geoff Topley-Cell3-'C' Shift-Kiefel Instructions. There follows 7 points about how to start up the big plastic forming machine I used to run on the night shift in a local factory. Thereafter, there are details of every CD I released under the name Foamboy, or Foamboy Deluxe, or The Foamboy Deluxe Arkestra. Not only that, but a list of every one of the lucky bollockses who received a promo copy of their very own. This information is extremely handy given I have misplaced a lot of these CDs and can't recall the exact order of releases. You see, I didn't just pop up and fire out a lock of CDs and disappear. Oh ...

It was a strange mixture of fear and excitement breaking free from the constraints I found in the latter days of Foam/Roque Junior. I could now set about my art in my own (considerable) sweet time. I was also free from the shackles of working 12 hour night shifts, having moved jobs to daytime employment. I had nothing to stop me now and my newly acquired guitar meant I could make the sounds I wanted to without filtering them through a slightly wayward guitarist. The sampler I had was bought out of my own pocket, so it stayed with me along with the Kaoss pad and other gadgets I would use to turn a shite musician into something approximating a not so bad musician. My skill set was arrangements and knowing how to strip away the best bits of other people’s music to add my own to. I had been doing all of the admin stuff for Foam so that wasn’t going to be a problem, the main issue was always going to be the live situation. At least before I had a wingman to lean on. I wasn’t really the mo...