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Leeds-based indie-rock quartet Pretend Best Friends release their debut single 'Save Myself,' on 31st January 2025. 'Save Myself' has already been championed by BBC Introducing (York & North Yorkshire) and is the first in a line of releases for early 2025. The bands sound is uplifting, vibrant and every chorus is massive. PBF are heavily influenced by the anthems of 90's Brit-pop but never stray too far from the chaos of the mid-00's New Yorkshire revolution, where most of the band became regulars of the Leeds Music Scene. The band were formed in early 2024, boasting a wealth of experience with members having played in the legendary International Trust and Kleine Schweine.
Insta – www.instagram.com/pretendbestfriends
The Sexy Wild East are a 2 piece British/Canadian electropunk band based in Budapest, Hungary. They have been described as "the angry Pet Shop Boys" and "like Sleaford Mods but shorter". You may recognise frontman Neil Hanson from Leeds punk band Kleine Schweine with whom he toured Europe and played with Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, Goldblade and many more. Neil is ably assisted by production genius Chris Welch formerly from Yukon, Canada. Now having ditched guitars and drums for laptops and beats, The Sexy Wild East blast hard hitting political electro with an underlying party vibe. Their 3rd album Unfuckinbelievable is pulling in fans worldwide, and onstage they are energetic, fun and totally unmissable.
Instagram - www.instagram.com/thesexywildeast
Check out the album at: thesexywildeast.bandcamp.com
Paul Morricone is sat, legs crossed, waiting in an airport lounge. Blue brogue shoes, red shirt, a long black coat with the collars up and a small carry-on bag with a colourful Roy Liechtenstein image on the side of it boldly showing the word ‘BOOOOM!!!’. There is something pop art about his ethos. Combining the familiar every day with a vivid presentation and reimagining it. “Not exactly the most convincing luggage to get through security” remarks Paul, “all that’s in there is my orchestra in a box.” He is referring to the backing track player he brings as he makes his way to a couple of solo gigs in Hungary.
“I wanted to turn up to a gig with just a bag” smirks Paul, who has spent the last quarter of a century piling into vans with amps and kit to play diy venues with his cinematic punk outfit The Scaramanga Six. But Paul’s change of approach is not just practical but aesthetic. Freeing himself from the confines of live instruments, he has embraced a different musical palette with lavish instrumentation and arrangements that could never fit on one of those stages.
This parallel solo output has become an opportunity for Paul to flex his mind as a writer, arranger, producer, and performer, working on a widescreen filmic sound to house his singular singing style and baritone voice. “I’m not a producer, I’m a director. Every song is a short film and I’m imagining the score” says Paul when asked how he works. This is a hint at his profession as commercial video director, and it seems he has decided to give himself a new creative brief. “In the noughties, there was a point when you could go into any indie disco and I’d have directed videos for half the records played” he says, referring to his time as a flavour-of-the-month music video director for the likes of Graham Coxon and The Young Knives, “but that feels like a long time ago”.
Growing up in the Somerset seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, Paul only had to look across the water to where his mum and much of his family hailed from in South Wales. “We would go to visit, go to family dos and everyone would be singing passionately, even those who couldn’t sing!” He says. To this day, Paul seems to attribute his love of singing and the art of the crooner to the working men’s clubs of The Valleys. “You learn how to hold a room with your voice, even without any music” he says. “I guess you could say I’m a modern-day crooner, and I don’t feel dressed without a collar” laughs Paul “it takes as much effort to wear a shirt as it does a t-shirt, you just need to know your way around an ironing board.” Indeed, Paul seems well presented, a considered appearance at all times.
With his twin brother Steve, life as primary school kids were a little different to many others. They were the youngest of five brothers with quite a gap to the other three. The home would be strewn with punk, new wave, dub and early electro records of their older brothers. They didn’t understand why the other 8-year-olds at school didn’t know ‘Shot By Both Sides’ by Magazine. This left an indelible mark, and the punk ethos of having a go remains. Through an early love of Madness, both Paul and Steve took up saxophone at school, trained classically, then ditched the sheet music for an array of self-taught instruments in a band together to this very day. The Scaramanga Six are on their eleventh album, but in more recent years Paul has found time to experiment with beats, electronics, and varied approaches to composing with his solo work.
So how does this recent output sound? If you take 2019’s ‘The Dissolving Man’, you can hear songs like ‘Estranged’ in which Tom Robinson of BBC6Music described that “If there’d ever been a dream collaboration between Scott Walker and Massive Attack this is what it might have sounded like…so dense and ambitious: a huge widescreen soundscape where the harmonic surprises never stop coming”. Move onto the second solo album ‘Cruel Designs’ from 2010, and you can hear a more pronounced move towards dark dance, mixing low-fi electronics with moments of easy listening orchestration.
“How I work today is faster, more of a patchwork, plugging in a keyboard, finding a sound then running with it until I have something I can imagine the visuals to” Paul explains, as the new album ‘Go Sanction Yourself’ is nearing completion. “It’s not aimless layering though, there has to be the craft of a song” he insists. The new record takes on a bolder wonky dance feel, doubling up beats with a super-tight live rhythm section of Ant and Mitch, yet still luscious and expansive in its ambitions. “I named the album ‘Go Sanction Yourself’ because that’s exactly what people in our country have been happily doing for the last decade. Through public votes and actions, we find ourselves self-sabotaged, an island increasingly cutting its own nose off to spite its face. People unwittingly approving their own punishment. A nation sanctioning itself” explains Paul.
The tannoy announces the imminent departure of the Budapest flight and Paul stands up to leave. “I hope I don’t make them cry like infants like I did in that anarchist squat in Romania” he remarks, referring to his last gigs where he reduced a room of punks to tears with his rendition of chocolate-box ballad ‘December’, “I had to go over and hug one of them mid-song”. With that, he’s off - with his orchestra in his bag.
Instagram – www.instagram.com/paulmorricone
www.paulmorricone.com
