Tiscali Showcase - The Hoosiers

"Showing all fours sides of our triangle?" proffers Alfonso. Quite. Four sides to a triangle that began like most musical greats: good friends who formed a band.

Alfonso and Irwin grew up together on the outskirts of Reading and at the tender age of sixteen they found tutorage from a most unlikely source.

"How can you write about life when you haven't lived it? Go live, then write about it". Wise words from Irwin's Chemistry teacher whose alter ego happened to be the drummer from 70's pop group Sailor (for more information on hits such as Girls, Girls, Girls and Champagne, ask your parents). So take his advice they did, and off on a road-trip to America they went. Along the way they got a little lost. This involved a spell at the University of Indianapolis after they were both offered Football Scholarships. Ironic, as both Irwin and Al claim to be allergic to running.

"After a year of tasting life in the Mid-West of America, we'd had enough of that. Something clicked and I guess we both knew we had to go home and get all these songs out. That and we were asked to leave the university. To get started in London we needed to assemble a crack team of musical commandos," chimes Alfonso.

That crack team turned out to be Stockholm's Martin Skarendahl.

"We were up cack-alley," remarks Al, "booked in a studio under Brick Lane with a bassist that had ceased to exist - he'd done one on us alright and who should be the engineering assistant but our very own bright-eyed and bushy tailed Skarendahl. I could have sworn he was shimmering from an ethereal haze the day we met his ugly mug."

Needing a bassist like a stray dog needs a Big Issue vendor avec string, Al and Irwin had the Swedish maestro and ex-army fireman swagger into their lives via a couple of years working through Oslo and Paris on his very own European pilgrimage.

'But where does such a band name come from?' I wondered.

"A Hoosier is a native of Indiana, the mid-western corn growing capital of America, the place we found ourselves when we found ourselves." says Al, relishing his role as scholarly lecturer. "A lot of Hoosiers maintain that they were named after Samuel Hoosier around 1825 and so became 'Hoosiers Men' for being the bravest and hardest working of types. Though if you dig a little deeper, you find the name's a bastardisation of the French for 'lay-abouts and rabble-rousers' and relates to a group of men who were of questionable morals. The ambiguity of it's origins appealed to us although it's probably the latter we relate more closely to," Alfonso explains.

When I listen to The Hoosiers, I'm hearing songs that have been lived in, songs that are describing everyman's rite of coming to terms with a grown-up world and its demands. "If I had to sum up my early 20's in a word I'd say they were "restless". You try a lot of things and you realise they're not the answer. You're searching and so are a lot of our songs. It's what I like about Tom Waits, Thom Yorke, Tom Jones, all the great T(h)om's: there's heart-ache, there's something lacking and you get that from the writing to the arrangement to the performance.

Irwin continues, unabated: "There's definitely a theme of someone being incomplete and looking for something and hoping it's looking for them. Worried About Ray, Sadness Runs Through Him and Run Rabbit Run come from the point of view of a powerless character who loves someone but hasn't the power to save them and can only warn and suffer the anxiety of watching events unfold".

"Worried About Ray" profures Irwin, "explores the idea that at some point everyone has to let something they love into a 'world of peril' and reminisces being grabbed by the line 'the future's out to get to you'. From this notion sprang the band's constant companion, and although I dare say it, what seems to be an imaginary friend, Ray. A character with a life of his own living in a fairytale land he shares with the three Hoosiers.

"We've always been interested in other aspects of music and visuals. Our early gigs were a melee of a fracas that saw us experimenting with digital designs, projections and programmed musical interludes," says Martin.

This may be where their penchant for dress up sprang from. Now a standard weekly affair, the lads have a strict dress code for Wednesday's; "come as anyone but yourself" - superheroes, gnomes or um.... skeletons. If you can't take my word for it all one needs to do is ask the MD of their record label who was greeted by his new signing in nothing less than matching, luminous skeleton suits.

Humour aside, here is a band bursting with ideas and energy. Their unique brand of odd-pop is as refreshing as their eccentricities. Welcome to the wonderful world of The Hoosiers! To be continued...

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