LaaLaa's Attic

There's something inside and there's
somethinginside and there's something about
your way
There's something you give, and there's
something I gave,
Something called yesterday
Its you... There's something inside i want to
show you
There's something inside you ought to know

Kinife away
I will quietly

And the fire's out your eyes, the years on your
thighs
Like its making a difference
The way that you say about your yesterdays
Make your present achievements an inference

I'm trying to say your not done

From BBC

Pellumair
Indy Almroth-Wright
We chatted to Jaymie Caplen, from the Southampton duo who've been compared to Simon and Garfunkel and are tipped to be one of the finds of the year.


Pellumair

    * Jaymie Caplen
    * Tom Stanton

You've been together as Pellumair for around two years now, how did the band come together?

Well, Tom and I were in other bands back when we were at college quite a few years ago, and then I went off to university and he carried on with his own thing.  I came back from uni and had some ideas for songs.  We got together after a night out - I played him what I'd been doing and he played me what he'd been doing and we just put the two together and they worked quite well. We just fell into it really, we didn't set out to be in a band.

You're about to set off on a two week UK tour which begins with a hometown gig, how are you feeling?

Good!  It's been a little while. We'll be doing some songs from the album that we've never played live before or even practiced, they just came together in the studio.  So there's going to be some teething problems, I should imagine that we'll have to get over. But it's always exciting to play new stuff and see the reaction of how it goes down live because quite often it's a completely different song live to how it is on the record.  So it's a mixture of excitement and anxiousness as to whether or not we can pull off the new stuff.

You've already toured with fellow Southamptoners Delays, Kasabian and The Engineers, have you got any memorable on the road moments?

There are lots, but the whole thing of being on the road is that you do a gig, then generally drink afterwards and then forget everything when you get up the next day.  By about three or four days in, everything just blurs into one and you can't really remember anything until you get home and look back at what's happened and piece together a few details.  It generally becomes a bit of a haze after the first couple of days.

Touring with Delays was great, Aaron's a really, really funny guy and he got up to quite a few high jinx which are probably best not to repeat, but they're always entertaining guys!

Do you two still have day jobs?

Yes we do.  Sadly, we haven't sold enough records or made enough money to do it full time, but fingers crossed it might happen one day. I temp and do financial stuff sat in front of a computer all day wasting time on the internet, I don't actually do that much work but I am at a place of work.

Tom works on a mobile library, he's got the best job ever - he just sits on a bus and reads books all day and rents books out to old ladies, which is far more rock n' roll than my job.  He's a lucky man.

You're just about to release your debut album, how long did it take you to complete?

It didn't take long to write everything, I suppose we had half the album and then we had to sit down and write songs specifically for the album - an extra six tracks or so. The actual recording process took a lot longer because our producer, Graham Sutton was also working on Delays. As it was their second album and they're already established,  they were a bit more of a priority than us so we did a bit in January and then April and we finished it off in May/June.  So it was quite long in actually how long it took to do, whereas we were only in the studio for about three weeks in total.

How did you get signed?

We were really lucky, I think we'd only done two gigs as Pellumair and a demo of ours made it's way to Geoff Travis the head of Rough Trade.  He heard it, really liked it and came to see us at our third gig, then offered us a contract about a week later.  So we'd only done three live shows and we were signed.

What do you think about being compared to Simon and Garfunkel?

I can't really see it myself, but it's a massive compliment to be compared to anyone like that - possibly the greatest duo ever.  I think even for people to mention us in the same sentence as them is unjustified, but it's still a very nice compliment. I'd say we're a bit shoe-gaze, a bit acoustic, just a nice mix of all the best things about guitar music.

There's just the two of you with one electric and one acoustic guitar, how does that work?

It is difficult because it's just the two of us, but literally that's it. There's no backing tracks or anything, there's no trickery going on, so it's extremely exposed.  If you have a good gig then it works really well. If you're in a five-piece band and one of you makes a mistake it's not really noticed because the drums and the bass will drown it out, but if one of us hits a note off key or puts a finger in the wrong place on the guitar then it sticks out like a sore thumb, so it's got its plus and minuses!

What's the best thing about Southampton?

That I know it better than any other town!  I've grown up here so all my friends are here and my family's here, I grew up in the clubs and the bars here, it's just familiarity I suppose.