Thoup Thoughts
7.2.26 First shows of the year
I was waiting for [BRICK] stuff to slow down before I posted another blog post but stuff seems to keep happening so I’m gonna just gonna post this now. The past month has been super busy and kinda bonkers for [BRICK]. We’ve played five shows this year already. The first one was for Fighting for Unity at Daltons in Brighton. A free all ages hardcore show booked by the guys at Hellride Records, a local record shop in Brighton. It was really nice to finally play a hardcore show that wasn’t focused around the Queercore scene. As much as I love playing those shows it’s nice to be taken seriously by the cis het hardcore boys locally. We are after all a hardcore band. Maybe I’ll write a bit in another post about Queercore and hardcore.
The next show was a birthday party for our friend Rose (Floralis) at the Actors. It was packed. Seeing all the goodwill she has accumulated over the years has been fantastic. We aren’t really birthday party vibes, but we seem to have went down well. Even sold a couple of shirts off the back of it which is always nice. I would absolutely recommend checking out her music too. She makes anti-colonial hiphop/artpop inspired by emo music. She’s been a good friend for years, it’s always nice to see her doing so well. I've linked her latest album down below. Personal highlights include I Might Tell Your Mates and Capitalism Gone Mad
The same week as the birthday show we played a headline fundraiser for Lyn and Cole at Daltons again, promoted by Do Yourself a Favour and Gaylord Zines. All the bands that night were amazing, I hadn’t seen How Long Have You Been Driving in a good little while. I had seen either Vote for Pedro, an awesome emoviolence band from Manchester, or Flesh Prison before. This was a fantastic show. I’m not sure how much money was made in the end but the crowd was really into what we were doing and saying. I won’t go into too much detail here has the whole set is on YouTube and you should watch that instead!
At the end of this show we also announced that our other guitarist Jane will be getting bottom surgery and we need a dep. We had one girl who came up to us after the show in addition to a handful of people who messaged us after we posted on instagram. We really want to make sure we find the right person to fill in for Jane during her recovery. We invited the girl from the show to a practice and taught her some of the songs. She fit right in and was able to learn Jane’s bizarre guitar parts with ease. We are all very excited to see how she gets on but also what she goes on to do after this.
We then got to play Bristol for the first time. It was my first time at Cafe Kino too. The upstairs is a small Coop cafe with a venue in the basement. Whilst we were waiting for the show to start the cafe were playing some awful folk punk and I was learning to juggle in the corner. I didn’t get very far… This show was also sick, there was some issues with monitoring and I somehow knocked myself out of tune for a couple of songs. But we made up for it in the performance side of things. I’m really excited to come back to Bristol and play more shows.
The last show we played in this run was at The Cowley Club. Which is our local anarchist social centre. It was a fundraiser for my friend Alice, which I booked. She needed some money for laser hair. I messaged a few friends who were in bands and put together a lineup with [BRICK] headlining, Clouded on before and Hemiptera opening the show. My previously mentioned friend, Rose, also put on a raffle. I was super nervous about turnout as you cannot sell tickets advance tickets at The Cowley, the weather also wasn’t great and a couple of other factors. This didn’t seem to be an issue. It was the busiest I’ve seen The Cowley in a long time. We made £841 on the door which is absolutely bonkers. I was not expecting to make anywhere near that much. The set went really well too, lots of compliments all round.
In this time I’ve also been working on some of my own music with VCV rack and samples I have recorded over the past year or so. Some of this will likely get reused for the next version of the [BRICK] set. Some of will hopefully make it into a solo a gentle pound work of some kind. I would also like to figure out how to perform this as some kind of live set in the future. But we shall see how that works. Some of this music is being reused for the [BRICK] set, but thats all a work in progress.
The past month has been kinda wild. We keep playing sick shows to a great crowd of people. I’m really proud of what we’ve all managed to achieve so far.
