We grew up…in a house with a garden and a shed. Me and Mickey turned the shed into a fortress and by the time we were ten we would write songs inside it and post them to local radio stations. This all happened in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear. Who knows how Mark and Matt began.

It all started when…we meet in a greengrocers shop over the butternut squash. I had a Saturday job and Michael would deliver walnuts and other such things. Mark and Matt are cousins so came in looking for fruited wonderment. We had David Bowie on the ghettoblaster and just started talking about music, grapes and courgettes. Aeons later we started a band together!

If we’re not recording or playing music you’ll find us…playing a game we’ve invented like: Chastity Hammer (find an abandoned building and throw a claw hammer at the wall, if it sticks you get a point, points are lost for peripheral damage), Coinbombing (a variation of dodge ball combined with stone-skimming with two teams of players sitting opposite on leather sofas, at least two tables and four chairs must separate each couple), Pro-barricade Building (secure a given location). Other than that we’ve been spending a lot of time recently doing an advent calendar on the facebook page, with things like this.

We can’t perform unless we have…practised lots and have taken some water. It helps if we’ve been allowed to put our percussion line up above the stage too. Some venues think it is a spontaneous fire-hazard….

One country we’re dying to play live in is…Germany. We’ve been to Berlin before and it is a  lovely place. Ideally we’d start small before one day recreating the Hasselhoff gig when the wall came down.

Our three dream festival headliners would be…David Bowie (because he is the king of the modern world and would have a tour bus to match Xerxes I), Paul Simon (from quite a few years ago because he is little knacked now) and a Bob Marley / John Lennon duo – can you imagine that!

You’ll recognise us by our… self-decorated van, gaudy jumpers (Rob), bad attitudes (Matt), general cleanliness (Mark), and Neumann Mic Collection (Mickey).

We wish we hadn’t…signed to Columbia Records. It was like working for a bank, but without the perks or access to people’s accounts.

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt it’s…that you should try to learn how to do as many things as possible for yourself. Learning to record, do artwork, make videos and write in roughly coherent sentences has given us a much greater level of intimacy with our music (if that makes sense)… it makes it really personal, and we really care – hopefully this comes across a little bit in what we produce.

Give us 30 minutes and we’ll cook a great…meal. Mickey would choose some lovely olives and make some bread for a starter, I’d make a little red onion and goats cheese tart, Matt would curate the wine list and whack up a roast loin for main course, whilst Mark would no doubt make a clafoutis for pudding!

Buy us a drink and…we’ll say thank you for buying us a drink. Then probably offer to buy you one later, then realise that really we should have just bought our own drinks. Then go on the quizzer and curse the machine for giving us shit questions.

We’re not really into metal, but Matt does like Metallica.

Our latest release… is Joanna on the 17th of January and our album In Search of Elusive Little Comets on the 31st of January. You can pre-order it here .

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Little Comets – Joanna

Little Comets – Adultery