Messy Christmas, kids

Rachel Unthank's version of Farewell Regality is currently undoing me like I'm an old threadbare Christmas jumper. Sometimes the right song comes along and snaps me right into that melancholy festive groove. I feel like a snowman sadly melting in his own sentimentality, but at least I know what to buy my mother this Christmas. She's bang into all that Northumbrian stuff.

Here is a brief round up of Hot Club's 2008. It was a strange and busy year but we're pretty stoked on how it went. The start of the year is kind of hazy, but that'll teach me to blog more often and appropriately:

HOT CLUB FUCKED UP.

Unfortunately, due to an administrtive error, our first single of this year was our Christmas single from 2007. Some dick somewhere didn't make them in time, and they were thus rendered useless. Still, at only 300 vinyl copies and hand-stamped sleeves, it is our rarest 7", so why not give yours a spin and celebrate Christmas with smug rosy cheeks?

OUR FRIENDS DRESSED AS GHOSTS. BOATS AND WEED.

We spent the start of the year shooting a bunch of acoustic sessions with some friends on cold beaches, in ghostly pinewoods, nautical cafes and on the back of a rickety Southport shrimping boat. Disco Den who set it all up for us had a decent weed-leaf cap on the whole time he spent sorting shit out for us. The videos ended up on the second disc of Live at Dead Lake and on THE INTERNET:




WE LIKE B-SIDE TO BE BESIDE THE C-SIDE.

We made up some b-sides and recorded them in a church in our hometown of LIVERPOOL. We finished off bits of Live at Dead Lake that we hadn't nailed in Chicago. We recorded an acoustic EP called THE DEAD LOUNGE.

FALLING OVER AND FEIGNING PAIN.

We released the first single from Live at Dead Lake. It was called HEY! HOUSEBRICK and it was about when people throw bricks into the motorway because they hate their lives. The video on the other hand was a light hearted affair where we fell over loads and pretended it was real:



DUDE, IT'S NOT A LIVE ALBUM, IT'S A STUDIO ALBUM WITH A LIVE ALBUM'S NAME.

We managed to finally put out our second studio album 'Live at Dead Lake'. Everyone really liked it who knew about it, but it turned out someone somewhere did a bad job of telling all the people who bought our first album that the second one was out. Maybe it was our fault. I'm pretty sure it wasn't, but these things happen I guess. Maybe everyone thought it was a live album and they only thought about it as long as they usually think about live albums. I suppose we're meant to think that studio albums are more worthwhile than live albums, and I suppose that's true if you discount Live at Leeds, The Way the West Was Won, Live in Muenster and Live at Wembley '86.

RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL.

We released our second single from Live at Dead Lake called MY LITTLE HAUNTING. Joe Tucker and I made a video for it. We had to steal fake tan from a shop called BOOTS and make our hands look like a LADY'S HANDS:



GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR TOWN.

We went on tour for a fucking really long time. We did two month-long tours in the UK and visited places we'd never been before, most notably THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND. We toured with Tellison, who are NICE GUYS. We toured with Sky Larkin, who are NICE GUYS. We toured with Sunset Cinema Club who are NICE GUYS. We toured with COPY HAHO who are kind of odd: Their bass player Richard was telling me today that their guitarist Mini, after soundcheck last night, asked if he could put his hamster in Richards flat as he didn't want it to sleep overnight in the car. It's still a mystery as to why Mini thought he'd bring his hamster to a gig in Aberdeen, but I'm trying to figure out the details as I type. Mini hasn't called Richard since but the hamster is in good health, spazzing around on one of those wheels that hamsters have. Anyway, we finished the second tour in the far north at ULLAPOOL, having played STORNOWAY, STIRLING, FORT WILLIAM and INVERNESS. Then we went and toured IRELAND and BELFAST before going back to GERMANY where we had some of the raddest times. Our driver got twatted by a prozzie in Hamburg and merch boy Jimmy got his kecks ragged apart by a traffic cop.

So that's what happened to us. BY THE WAY:

TOP RECORDS OF 2008:

1. Deerhunter - Microcastles
2. SSS - The Diving Line
3. Maps and Atlases - You and Me and the Mountain EP
4. No Age - Nouns
5. Parts and Labor - Recievers
6. Arthur Russel - Love is Overtaking Me
7. Horse Feathers - House With No Home
8. School of Language - Sea From Shore
9. Waited Up Til It Was Light - Johnny Foreigner
10. Avenging Force - The Avenging Force

THROW YOUR FISTS INTO THE FUTURE.

That's kind of what happened in 2008. We tour again starting in March 2009. In the meantime we're writing a new record. The working title is 'BREAK DOWN AT DEVIL'S POINT'. BRB.

Paul.x

King Tut, his wah wah hut and a tired bunch of silly sausages.

Wow. We've done NOTHING apart from play shows for a very long time, and we're finally drawing to a close. We're currently in GLASGOW after playing EDINBURGH last night. Matthew and Alasdair are streaming football and Joe and Richard from COPY HAHO are sat in silence on their laptops, Googling themselves (probably). I haven't rocked the blogosphere for a while so I'll fill you in and tell you about where we've been:

BRIGHTON: Pissed it down. The sea was scary and the sky looked as though it was going to spill the apocalypse all over our lousy lives. We stayed at a friends place. The cat fucking loved me. I wrote a song about it, and forgot it straight away.

CAMBRIDGE: Amazing venue. Great support bands and friendly faces. Good Chinese restaraunt. Interview. Broken amplifier. Long drive home at night on lawless, dark motorways.

TWO DAYS OFF IN LIVERPOOL: My housemate's birthday party. Breadsticks, bombay mix, olives and houmous. Spanish friend came to stay. He's an epic church hall of a man. Watched a GOBLIN tribute band at STATIC GALLERY. Watched GOMARRAH at FACT, or whatever it's called. Bleak as fuck and not all that good. Some complete dick-eater talked the whole way through it in a baritone warble. I love owning a bed.

NOTTINGHAM. Back on the road. A room full of people. TELLISON'S best show. They well nailed it. DOG IS DEAD deliver the goods and have improved ten-fold since we played with them. Load out. Aggressive huge man tries to set us on fire with his beady eyes. Fuck you. Get a smile on that dick sucker.

SHEFFIELD rules. Lots of good people. 3 drunkards fling their beers about, but they mean no harm. I develop an obsession with the Sheffield branch of TELLISON'S STREET TEAM (who appear to only have one member). She's brings a cake. It's got their faces on it. She had it printed at ASDA. Heckles about my Uncle Kevin. The cold weather begins. Snake pass at night, the lights of Manchester burning in the night.

WREXHAM is quiet as per usual, but a lot of fun. There's a hilarious review somewhere online. Rape jokes on stage. Sorry. Good food. We say so long to TELLISON. We welcome SKY LARKIN to our tour.

YORK. Fibbers! This venue has improved greatly since fucking Barfly doesn't run it. The people here are far too lovely for pricks like us. Unfortunately SKY LARKIN don't get to play because some shit-lover sprayed Katie's eyes with detergent from a water pistol from a moving car. She goes to hospital whilst we continue the rock show.

MANCHESTER. I mean, I like the Night and Day but its nice to play somewhere different. The Ruby Lounge is a totally awesome venue. We finally get to watch SKY LARKIN and they rule. I can't remember the name of the openers but they were grand. The Great Gatsby. The Old Man and The Sea. Our first gaffer tape wallet is sold for 5 quids. It looks like rain, but thats what Manchester is famous for.

CARLISLE. A MASSIVE room filled with nice people. Vile weather. Stay over in Sunderland. Sweet cheeba, beer and a nice view of the sea.

NEWCASTLE. Great to see old friendly faces and to play with B>E>A>K again. They are totally one of our favourite bands RIGHT NOW. We go and DJ at the End Bar and get completely fucked up. I still feel ill now. Late night walk and fastfood. Sleepover and breakfast with a soundtrack of the Beach Boys. Grassy claims that ACDC sing about card games on their new record. "DAH DAH NAH NAH NAH PONTOON!"

Sorry. This blog is a fucking saga. Empires will have fallen in the time it takes you to read this dogshit.

PRESTON. I eat the worst Chilli I've ever eaten. I drink Roots Manuva's apple juice and we play a show to a room full of freshers who have no interest in Hot Club de Paris. There are a few loyal fans at the front so we deliver rock specifically towards them. Attractive fans? Hot Club? Loneliness and madness.

EDINBURGH. I love Edinburgh. Drinking hard. Welcome COPY HAHO. Travel Lodge, Livingstone. Over sleep. Drive to Glasgow. Casserole at the 13th Note. King Tut's Wah Wah hut. Right now. Tired. A plate of sandwiches that are never going to get eaten.

Next stop Aberdeen and the Highlands and home.

Thank you so much for coming out to the shows. You make our lives the funnest things to live.
x

Swindon Travelodge. School Show. Tired...

I just remembered the other day that when Graham of rock band Voo and I were doing our club night (GLORY NIGHT) at Korova, some proper little fuck-end foppish student came up halfway through our set (WHICH WAS AWESOME) and he'd typed out this little twatty message into his phone which said 'You are inherently rubbish' (which I guess is an inherently rubbish thing to do for no reason). He showed it to me and then legged it out of the bar like a LITTLE GIRL in a TINY pink dress. I hope he comes to the next one so I can dismantle his frail mess of a body with my muscular frame.

ANYWAY. We just played Petersfield School, which was fairly mad. There were loads of parents there with their kids and it felt a bit like we were compering a PTA meeting.

I'm writing this from a Travel Lodge room in Swindon, which isn't as depressing as you'd think. Matthew and Al are watching Devil's Advocate LIVE on the televison set. We're eating Chinese food and drinking cider. I'm considering bedtime. We just played a venue called 12 Bar, which has been one of the nice suprises of the tour. It was strangely busy and everyone flung appreciation at us. There was a fake Johnny Rotten there who had Hitler's Speech as a ringtone on his phone. That's pretty prickish. I liked the support band, The Alfonz, because they reminded me of I Should Coco by Supergrass.

Tomorrow night is Brighton. Fucking love Brighton.

Paul.x

The road ain't a cruel mistress...

I'm flinging forth a quick update to let YOU know what WE have been up to. We've just played show number 8 out of 37 or something shows and WE FEEL AWESOME. Well, that's a lie. We're completely fucked and tired but dude! The Hot Club machine is in motion and we couldn't be happier. I'm writing this from our friend's house in BRISTOL. We played the THEKLA last night and it was really quite lovely. Before that we played the legendary 100 CLUB on OXFORD STREET in LONDON, which was awesome. We were trying to figure out what date the METALLICA photograph was taken and we reckon it must have been like '87 or something, seeing as poor old CLIFF ain't there working the thumpstaff. Me and Alasdair got drunk in Madame JoJos. Matthew got drunk watching Battlestar Galactica on his own. WE SAID GOODBYE TO TAKA (our favourite Japanese SUPER FAN). Other hightlights since I last told you what the fuck was up include: LEAVING COVENTRY (despite meeting some awesome folk there), SWEEEEET BIRMINGHAM SELL OUT SHOW, a super-nice Cardiff show full of super-nice kids, and the fact our TOUR GAMES have gotten out of hand:

My favourite so far is singing people's license plates to the tune of 'If You Don't Know Me By Now' by SIMPLY RED. There's also the classic BAND NAME GAME. I'll post up a proper rule sheet at some point, but you'll get the jist from this jam:

THE THE FALL OUT BOY KILL BOY GEORGE MICHEAL JACKSON FIVE KNUCKLE DUST BROTHERS WITH DIFFERENT MOTHERS OF INVENTION.

Ok. We're headed to PETERSFIELD tonight, and we're STOKED about it. Then we go to SWINDON, BRIGHTON and CAMBRIDGE and then we go home for a night off before getting into the NORTHERN LEG of this tour.

Come out and play! ALSO! MY LITTLE HAUNTING IS OUT RIGHT NOW! BUY IT AND SEND US TO THE TOP OF THE CHARTS etc. You can buy a fit as fuck 7" from our site www. hotclubdeparis. com, or from www. banquetrecords. com. There's all that usual download shit too.

Here's the video again:

Love Paul. x

YOU'RE A WETHERSPOONER

We just had a hot meal in the most civilised Wetherspoons on the planet, which was nice enough. It was good not to be eating another hoummous sandwich. I'm grateful to Matthew for making them though. Our van is broken. The exhaust wants to get on the floor, the prick. We took it to the garage and a man hoisted it up dead high and looked at it and shook his head a bit so we're going to have to buy a new exhaust tomorrow. It was dead funny seeing the van so high up though. Looked like it was well enjoying it. We're in Cardiff waiting to play show number 5 on the tour. Birmingham last night was completely fuck-off awesome. It sold out and everyone went off their heads which was decent of them. Fucking load-out was monsterous though. Through a bar fraught with staff and down 4 flights of stairs. We were racked with pain this morning, but that's fine. I slept in a conservatory and felt like I was being microwaved when I woke up.

I'm off to sell some merch to Wales.

COVENTRY TOMORROW!
x

The Brownest Hands on the Block and TOUR!

Joe Tucker (who married his partner in crime Ruth Smith at the weekend - MASS CONGRATULATION) and I spent some time in London a couple of weeks ago to make this video for our next single My Little Haunting. The premise was that our hands would dance with a planchette over a number of Hot Club de Paris Ouija Boards in different costumes around various props. When we got to the last board, which was a pink and red number, we applied fake tan and attached fake fingernails to our finger tips so that it looked like our hands belonged to women (I should have probably shaved mine). We put on this fake tan and it was well shit. Our hands didn't even go brown. We decided to score some instant fake tan from the Boots on Oxford Street. It was far too expensive so we squeezed out the contents of the tube into our hands and left the shop, rubbing it into our hands as we went. We shot the scene, washed off the tan and removed the finger nails (the latter activity being particularly grim) and packed up the gear. About an hour later our hands started to get darker and darker. It was well vile. I only just managed to get it off in time for the wedding and have since learnt a valuable lesson about fake tan: It's disgusting and will make you look disgusting until it washes off your disgusting body. And here is the video:

Crumbs kids, we go on tour again on Wednesday. I didn't think I was all that excited but I've just realised that I am. Our touring in support of our new record has been so sporadic in comparison to the last album but that's about to change. We'll be on tour for the next two months and it's sure to rule. We're revisiting some old haunts as well as spending some time in some new places so please come say hello. Unfortunately Elle Milano have had to pull out of the tour, so we apologise for that. It would have been awesome. However, we'll be stepping out with Sky Larkin, Copy Haho, and Tellison amongst others so please get involved. Party hard. Hooray for the road. Let's go.

Paul.x

You know we did, we really did.

Dear Blogosphere,

I'm writing this entry right now because our brand new site is about to go LIVE and I wanted there to be some words on our new blog for when people (like you, for example) clicked on the blog link in our navigation bar. So here it is - our new blog. I'm sorry the colours are so awful, but I couldn't figure out how to alter them. The Internet is far too complex for my brain to tame.

We've been playing shows, kids. Despite having a quiet festival season, we've been lucky enough to grace the stages of Offset and Leeds festival over the last couple of weekends. Thanks to all of you who braved the rain and showed up in large numbers to cheer, jeer and heckle - we had a totally decent time. We also played a show on a beach in Bourgas, Bulgaria and stayed out there for a whole week. We shot pool, played 3000 games of Blackjack and went for a drunken swim in the warm Black Sea in the dead of night.

However, my favourite two shows of the summer occurred here in the great Northwest. Firstly, we played a Tribute to Green Day's Dookie gig where each band (10 in all) had to cover a song from the record and play as many of their own songs in 10 minutes. We played Longview and Welcome to Paradise and managed to squeeze in two of our own. When you're 27, there's nothing like a few Green Day songs to make you feel 14 again. Secondly, we played a show in New Brighton's Vale Park with Voo, SSS and FRANK SIDEBOTTOM.

You know we did. We really did.

The bands played underneath a wonderfully ornate Victorian Bandstand to punters stationed in matching green and white deck chairs. Frank Sidebottom was too funny, as was SSS's Foxy when he hosted a game of Thrash Musical Chairs for the kids (and Frank). Hopefully some videos of the latter event will be posted up on Youtube soon so I can share them with you. Why does Frank Sidebottom never mention John Lennon when he talks about The Beatles? Can anyone answer that?

I think thats all for now I think. Listen to the new Slow Club EP. It's brilliant. Out on Moshi Moshi Records TODAY.

Paul.x