![]() It suited the beamed-from-another-dimension quality of their music, which gleefully mashed together every sound under the sun – a typical song might mix 80s synth pop, pompous glam rock, thrash metal, and Aphex-style IDM, all within about 30 seconds – but the band’s true origins were far more earthly in nature. They wore gold robes and silver hoods on-stage (or “neon grey”, as they’d call it), had nonsensical song names like “ Space and the Woods” and “Bathroom Gurgle”, and sang in surreal, stream-of-consciousness lyrics ( “Falling over / Aeroplanes and / Wanting to be a derelict,” goes one typical line). ![]() The nicknames were all part of the parallel universe they’d created for themselves, a place that was as fantastical as it was absurd. Late of the Pier were four school friends, Samuel Eastgate (vocals, guitar), Sam Potter (synths, sampler), Andrew Faley (bass), and Ross Dawson (drums) – or, as they called themselves, Samuel Dust, Jack Paradise, Francis Dudley Dance, and Red Dog Consuela. Those bonus tracks really drum home how immature and silly and adventurous and laissez-faire we were.” “It’s a nice document of what it is to be a teenager. “The record itself sounds excitable, because we were excited about life, and what life could be, and what life is,” says the band’s Sam Potter, speaking over a conference call with his old bandmates, who today are geographically spread across the UK and Europe. A reissue of the record, released today on Phantasy Sound (the label founded by DJ Erol Alkan, who also produced the album), acts as an introduction to the group for a new generation, packaging together both the original album and a bonus collection of the band’s older demos, a surprisingly versatile set of songs recorded when they were still just teenagers. In the decade since its release, Fantasy Black Channel has gained a cult following, with everyone from Mike Skinner to Jarvis Cocker singing the band’s praises. “They were 18-year-old kids who made this record that’s so good, and nothing ever happened to them. “They blew my fucking mind,” Dave Grohl said of the band in 2013. For my money, they were the last truly radical British group to emerge out of the mid-00s indie scene, and although they released just one album, 2008’s Fantasy Black Channel, that record remains a blueprint for a new kind of pop – one that steamrolls genre binaries, fizzes with colour and energy, and wholeheartedly believes that, when it comes to music, anything is possible. Late of the Pier were hardly a typical band, though. With a population of just 6,416, the Leicestershire village of Castle Donington isn’t the sort of place you’d expect one of the most innovative, exhilarating bands of the 2000s to have come from.
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