RIP Tubelord

Last Tuesday began like any other day - until one of my favourite bands announced they were splitting up. I say they announced it, their record label declared that New Year's Eve would be the date of the band's farewell show and that was that. In the week that's followed, I've been slowly trying to piece together my thoughts on the band. I don't think I've ever been this upset about the impending split of a band before, and I figured that meant it was worth me trying to write something about them. As it happens, the wonderful chaps over at Musical Mathematics have declared today Tubelord Day and as such gave me an incentive to get something finished and out into the world. I'm not going to try to write some sort of history of the band, because that will be done elsewhere and far better than I possibly could. Instead, I'm going to do a sort of story of my own love affair with Tubelord. It might be interesting to you, it might not. Either way, it's going to be emotional. So let's begin, shall we?

I'll take you back to August 2010. A month previously, I'd been to 2000 Trees (still the greatest festival of all time) and bought their excellent Cider Smiles compilation for that year and the two previous years' editions too. It was on the first volume of that compilation that I heard Propeller. Tubelord was a name I'd heard thrown around from various people, but this was my first proper introduction to the band. Needless to say, I quite liked it. It's a spiky, poppy, brash song and I found myself quite enjoying it. The next step was to track down the album it was from. One quick Spotify search later and I'd found it - Our First American Friends.

This, as it transpired, was Tubelord's debut album. What I couldn't have known then was just how important it would become to me. A certainty for my top 10 albums of all time, it's a glorious romp filled with angular guitars, yelps and incredibly catchy melodies. Most of all, though, it's fun. It became my album to do the washing up to - an excuse to pirouette around the kitchen and generally splash water everywhere. The final two tracks on the album (Synthesize and Our First American Friends) are particularly good, as are I Am Azerrad and Propeller. However, there's one track which utterly makes the album. Night Of The Pencils is the kind of song you wish you'd written. The kind of song that compels you to sing along, that instantly improves your mood with its first few notes alone. Within a few listens of the album, I was utterly hooked. I dove into the band's back catalogue, finding a handful of singles (including the excellent Feed Me A Box Of Words, complete with an unbelievably good b-side in the shape of Half Man Half Amazing) and the band's surprisingly good first release Square EP. I also found the acoustic version of OFAF entitled One For The Grandparents, which offers a very different experience of the album but an enjoyable one nonetheless.

At that point, the band's most recent release was an EP entitled Tezcatlipōca. It showed a different side to the band. A more mature one perhaps. The songs were less in-your-face, but still catchy. And there were synths! What did this mean? Well, as it turned out it was pretty indicative of the band's next album - Romance.

The album was released in October of last year, and by this point I was fully addicted to Tubelord. Romance took me by surprise a bit though. I wasn't sold on the first few listens, the dominant synths making me yearn for guitars. Judging from the online response, I wasn't the only one. Given some time though, it grew on me. There's still something unmistakeably Tubelord about it, and songs as good as My First Castle and In Greenland deserve to be enjoyed. I'm now at a point where I really like the album, and I can see why they chose to make it sound the way it does. I prefer OFAF of course, but this is a more than sufficient follow-up. It would've been interesting to see what direction a third Tubelord album would have taken, but alas that seems as though it will never happen.

I first saw the band live the month before the release of Romance, after waiting for what felt like an eternity to have the opportunity to do so. It was everything I wanted it to be. The new songs were interesting, Night Of The Pencils was huge and I even discovered a new love for Stacey's Left Arm. I shook lead singer Joe's hand at the merch table (after chatting to Toby Hayes, formerly of Meet Me In St. Louis. Quite a surreal moment) and walked away from that gig feeling about the happiest I ever have post-gig. When the band came back to Birmingham in January, I was back again to shout and convulse in time with their gleeful sounds. It was another great gig, made especially memorable by speed-skipping back to the station with my friends in order to not miss our train. It was a pretty appropriately fun way to conclude the evening, I suppose.

The lack of news from the band over the past few months while Joe had been releasing some solo EPs had started to worry people I knew, but I felt differently. This is Tubelord, I thought. They have to carry on once he's done with this. Their music is a huge part of me, and I didn't want to entertain the possibility of them being no more, but that is where we find ourselves. I love Tubelord, I love the variety in their releases, I love the artwork, I love the nonsensical lyrics. They released a final song to mark their split, appropriately titled This Is It. It continues where Romance left off, and is an all-round good song but what most accurately sums up the band is the conversation that occurs at the end of the video. They don't understand why they're described as emo-pop, they say. Joe writes about wizards and space.

RIP Tubelord. You will be sorely missed.

Find most of Tubelord's releases (some for free) here.

Find details of their farewell show (where I will cry the world down) here.