long live / circle of us

i am clearly in the mood for reminiscing at the moment. here's a little a bit about a band who were local and very dear to me, long live. around 2003, my local scene was highly exciting. i was still massively into screamo and we were being treated to great local shows with good bands such as open letters, blue is the new black and when ghosts used knives. we weren't far off from the mock heroic, and we all really missed we closed our eyes who maybe i'll post about on here some time. then out of nowhere, klim, jop (both from we close our eyes) and tom (terms of endearment) decided that they would do a completely different band. the best band that would come out of norwich this decade. long live left us with a 5 track demo (uploaded here) and a 3 song 7" on santos that i probably sold 50 copies of from my distro, the label likely has the rest. you can see reviews of both of those here. at the time they reminded me of bands such as slint, ethel meserve and giants chair. listening these days it's a lot softer than that would suggest, but live they always turned things up a notch. the music was slightly jazzy, meandering and intricate but rarely (on the demo at least) got overly twiddly and fiddly. jop and klim's vocals are all high pitched and youthful, recalling lumber and ordination of aaron. tom's bass is delightfully full and warm, giving real depth to the songs. listening back these days i can't really think of a good comparison for them, which should tell you an awful lot. i really like this quote from joe c on zillective cone: you know boys life is pictures of sad midwestern trains.. long live is like sad norwich fields, but jazzier.

it's a crushing shame that they split up so soon as the songs they were playing live at the end were unbelievably good, but were never recorded. at one point they were going to do a record with uber flake charlie wilhoit (golden shiny wire of hope - die emperor die / toru okada split fame) but fortunately the band never committed.

anyway, here is the long live demo. pay particular attention to an overseas robbery, my personal favourite.

the guys all went their seperate ways. tom and jop did mock heroic, and they both moved to london. tom told me he was working in a sweet shop but i am never quite sure if he was making this up. he still has a bass guitar that i gave him to fix that a friend of mine who moved to japan let me borrow. i never learned to play an instrument due to this. DAMN YOU TOM.

klim produced a beautiful cdr under the name of circle of us, which hardly anyone has heard. i last saw him in sainsburys about 3 and a bit years ago, he seemed surprised to see me. you can find his cd here. it's somewhere between ida, and a stripped down long live. you should check this out for sure. it might give you some idea as to what the unreleased long live stuff would have sounded like...