Haight Ashbury

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"The two female singers, backed by a talented male guitarist, are like a new and improved version of a psychedelic Abba. The lyrics are great, the vocals are haunting, the timing is impressive and they fill the stage like a bigger much fuller band"  - The Sunday Herald

HAIGHT-ASHBURY are a trio, like Peter Paul and Mary, Crosby Stills and Nash and Motorhead (when they were good). HAIGHT-ASHBURY don't necessarily sound like any of them, though. They play beautiful West Coast sunshine pop, full of the sort of close harmonies and sweeping melodies that, when it all comes together, make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.

Listening to their borderline-kosmische neo-hippy pop, you may imagine that they formed when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars, with the intention to herald the Age of Aquarius. That isn't unnecessarily untrue. What definitely did happen was that best friends Kirsty and Jen were in bands together from their late teens. One night they had a gig at Glasgow University and the rest of the musicians couldn't make it, so Kirsty’s brother, Scott sat in on guitar while the girls sang. It was a great show. They formed a band.

“We did a Bangles cover. My favourite guitarist was Stephen Stills and that's what I wanted to sound like, nice open tunings, close harmonies,” says Scott.

Scott had travelled that summer with a friend in America. “We spent a while specifically in San Francisco. I knew that a few of the bands I liked had roots there. I bought the first Jefferson Airplane album, Grateful Dead. When we came back wearing Haight Ashbury t-shirts, it was just one of the names in our heads. We didn't choose it because that was our sound, though our sound eventually came to be that. As we developed, we fell into that mold easier than we thought we would.”

HAIGHT-ASHBURY’s debut 'Here In The Golden Rays' was released in November 2010 and was well received by press and fans alike.

In particular 'Freeman Town' and 'Favourite Song'  became radio hits across Europe,  where they played and continue to play some pretty heroic tours, reaching parts other bands rarely do. Over the best part of a year and a half they have built a sizeable European following, ending 2011 with a sell-out show at world famous Les Transmusicales Fesival in Rennes.

Great as that album was, ‘Haight Ashbury 2: The Ashburys’, released on the 7th May on Lime Records, is even better. It's a superb, heavy pop album by a wonderful new pop band. Real pop, with its roots in the 60s, but songs that could be covered by actual, y'know, pop artists. The types who get in the charts and go on The X Faxtor.

“We take that as a compliment. We never started out to be this ‘alternative’ band. The girls in particular, when they were teenagers were listening to pop like everyone else. When I was getting into music I was listening to stuff that was in the charts. Nirvana was one of the first bands I got into and they're just full of pop melodies. The psychedelia thing came in for the sound structures. But it's easy to do a ten minute psychedelia song and miss a melody. It's important that it's catchy,” says Scott.

HAIGHT-ASHBURY’s reputation for being a 'folky' band will be put to rest with ‘Haight Ashbury 2:The Ashburys’.

One of the first bands Scott got into was the Jesus and Mary Chain, and you can definitely hear that circuit-frying acid punk influence creeping into their sound here. Their particular genius is to flip between sweetness & light and something darker & heavier - a degraded psychedelia - sometimes in the space of one song. Opener, ‘Maastricht ( A Treaty)’, with its dark, distorted sitar sounds and those perfect girly voices, sounds almost ritualistic, somewhere between the Partridge Family and the Manson Family.  Single, ‘Sophomore’,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRHPG1WiLiM , another beautiful song that harks back to some of the crazier side of Jefferson Airplane, and the gorgeous ‘Freelove’, evoke hazy visions of dancing in circles in Golden Gate Park, putting flowers in the barrel of a National Guardsman's rifle and chemically assisted California dreaming.

It isn't all 'freak out' music though. The closing ‘Love, Haight & Ashbury’ is stark, sad and very moving, a love song  the Carpenters would have been proud of.

Anything else you should know? Few, if any, other bands around at the moment make such great use of the tambourine. Kirsty used to have Joni Mitchell's Blue played on the cassette player when she went to sleep as a child.

Comprising, in a nutshell, angelic choral, folk female vocals set against often mournful, dark music, the plethora of great songs on this album have led one French journalist to already describe it as the “shoegaze Rumours”.


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