GRAND POCKET ORCHESTRA
GRAND POCKET ORCHESTRA
+ WE ARE LOSERS & GINNELSLo fi poppers Grand Pocket Orchestra return to whelans to celebrate the launch of their sophomore album ronald and sylma (released via popical island). Support on the night will come from special guests We are losers and Ginnels.
Popical Island will release Ronald and Sylma, the second album from Grand Pocket Orchestra on February 24th. The band will be playing upstairs in Whelan’s to celebrate the release. What follows is the testimony of Paddy Hanna, of the band: The story of Ronald and Sylma I don’t know if you heard our first album (The Ice Cream) but it was quite messy, heck we wanted it to be messy, we like messy debuts. But we knew for sure that the follow up should be slightly more focused, better produced and all that. So I sat down, pen in hand for a few weeks and attempted to put together a coherent set of songs. This gave Mark Chester (guitarist) time to release his own self-produced album under the name Ginnels, a deadly album of which we were all very proud. This also meant that he had a chance to grow as a producer and, if you wanna be deep, develop as an ideas man. With that in mind, we started recording the album in what used to be an old antique store in Dublin. We also used a lot of dusty old recording equipment acquired from various car boot sales across Europe. Now that was an interesting sentence wasn’t it? Anyhow, recording took a few months due to overlapping commitments. Bronwyn had duties playing bass in We Are Losers, Chester, Bobby and I in No Monster Club, and Chester, Bobby and I in Ginnels, but we got it done. Bronwyn and Bobby were also key players in the albums production, the fairy dust sprinklers if you want. They decorated the tracks with their lovely singing voices and mucked around on some new keyboards acquired in the operation documented in the interesting sentence. I should also give special mention to Tony Higgins and Ruan Van Vliet for helping us out on drums: they were very much the parsley on our stew of album. Ronald and Sylma are the names of Mark Chester’s grandparents.