The story so far...

Ok, I’ll take you right back to the start of Mechanical Owl in Leeds (LEEDS! LEEDS!) in the late 2000s. I was living in a flat over the road from the Brudenell Social Club. The building had subsided a bit so the whole flat tilted downhill toward the Bru, you could say this was a physical manifestation of my inclination towards music and performing, but it wasn’t, we just had a terrible landlord (the shower was under the stairs, not a room under the stairs, just the exposed under stair area with a shower and a shower curtain).

Anyway, in that flat I bought a white MacBook, an OG sp404, Kaoss Pad II, a Tascam 16 input interface and a microphone. I already had some other gear and was sticking around in Leeds for a year with my now wife having just finished a BSc in Music Tech at the Met. So I got to recording music. It was mostly what at the time got called Folktronica or IDM (Four Tet, Adem, Frog Pocket etc) but with vocals and more traditional song structures. One track called RSPCA which had a thumb piano loop and a load of glitchy, organic sounds was probably the one I was most proud of. It was the start of this whole DIY bedroom producer movement driven by cheap recording gear and MySpace. It’s pretty much the norm these days, but not so much back then, though there were big acts like Postal Service, CTFTPA and probably loads of others I’d not heard of. I was listening to a lot of Why? and Anticon stuff, plus Canadian bands like Wolf Parade, Broken Social Scene and then Animal Collective, Battles plus all the stuff I’d grown up with like Radiohead, Boards of Canada, Manic Street Preachers, Plaid and a load of 90s music.

So I recorded these songs and put them up on MySpace. I can’t remember the stats but they were pretty good I think and I felt part of a community of musicians. That community was partly online but mostly humans I could touch with my hands, my friends like Nicolas Burrows doing his Glaciers project, Matt doing his self recorded Dinosaur Pile-Up stuff, Katie, Doug and Nestor in Sky Larkin, James doing Napoleon IIIrd, the guys in Pulled Apart By Horses, Harry Dean with Bear Driver, Maff Stenning’s jungle, Dan Shepherd’s funky house and loads more. It was a really inspiring environment and we played in each other’s bands (Crayon, All My Friends Are Dead), we put on shows, printed posters, played in basements and clubs. I even did a stint as Sky Larkin’s tour van driver and guitar tech for a couple of their tours with Los Campesinos and a European tour with Conor Oberst. Both of which were inspiring and generated quite a few good stories.

The next year we moved back to Wales and my partner went away to teach in Ghana for a couple of months. In that time I was living in my parents house, working as a Barista, binge watching 24 and American Chopper with my brother and making music. my Dad had/has a little office in the box room filled with his penguin book collection, which provided some decent sound proofing so that’s where I moved my drum kit and set up to record the first Mechanical Owl EP, Snowdonia. I’d always preferred recording guitars and drums to just sequencing stuff, but I wanted to keep the electronic elements, so it became a lo-fi mix of everything. I ended up with 7 tracks that would become the EP and a shed load more that got discarded, some of which I’m still wanting to record properly and release 2 decades later.

I burned a load of CDs and sent them out to DJs, promoters and record labels, and put it up on MySpace. I got played and interviewed by Adam Walton, Bethan Elfyn and Steve Lamacq. I started playing live with the laptop and guitar. It worked to a point, but after a gig in Leeds James from Napoleon IIIrd said I needed a band with a drummer and he was right, it didn’t really work. So when I got back to Wales I called up Maff Stenning and Ian Davies and we went to MAD DOG studios in Garden City. We made noise, it was fun. We later roped in Dave Parr on bass and Greg Mitchell on drums. With this line up we played lots of shows locally. One of the first was in my home town of Mold, organised by now bassist Andy and his then partner Sophie for one of their amazing Absurd nights at Y Pentan. We’d go on to play more and more local shows, shows in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as well as various festivals and sessions for BBC Introducing. There’s this YouTube video of us recording with John Lawrence in Snowdonia which probably gives a decent idea of what that period was like.

We’d started recording as a band previously to this, nothing really got finished or released. That was partly down to me not knowing what I wanted and then at some point after Greg went to university and I’d gone back to study for a Computer Science Masters, music and the band just got put on hold. Over the next decade or so the band carried on with shifting lineups with our brilliant friends and amazing local musicians joining the band and putting in shifts. Theston Jones took over on drums, Dave Morait played guitar, Steve Nicholls joined us once for a show, Ian came back to play bass, then Andy Garside joined to play bass, Meirion on guitar, Tim on bass then guitar, Steffan started drumming for us. I’ve kind of lost track and I’m sure my flip-flopping with the band over the years has been annoying. You can see the current, stable lineup below.

Often the band has been at the whim of personal situations changing, losing faith in the whole thing, finding it again, having kids, getting all consuming jobs, health and mental health problems, logistics, geography, being tired. Trying to maintain a band that has no economic upside is tricky when you pass 30 basically, though ironically the economics of it matter less, as we all have jobs. Perhaps the stick is as important as the carrot.

I’ve skipped ahead a bit there, but in amongst the maelstrom of life and the band I self recorded Winter Songs which was the debut album. The bulk of it was recorded at home, with the drums recorded at Tim’s studio Full of Joy. The reviews were good. I was happy with it. We organised an album launch party at Un Deg Un, an amazing DIY art space in Wrexham where JJB sports once was. We sold tickets, we built a little set out of cardboard, we played the show, people enjoyed it. We went on to play shows, big and small. FOCUS Wales became a particular focal point of each year, if I could apply for that and get a show then it meant we had to at least get our sh*t together to do one good thing that year. That festival is also an amazing time to see, play and catch up with all the bands and people who are part of our local music community, one which has grown strong over this whole time back in Wales, from our contemporary bands like Baby Brave, Kidsmoke, Campfire Social (I could go on for ages, see the homepage for more), to the tireless promoters and festival organisers like Brendan, and Andy and Neal at FOCUS. You’re all incredible.

During this time me and Maff also did Half Avian shows and recordings, it was a two piece electronic band and we played around Wales, the North and London. I did a solo project called Sightseers which eventually became a short lived band and we played some shows. I do a solo electronic set with some recordings on SoundCloud, just under my own name.

Which I think brings us more or less up to now with a new lineup and what feels like a bit of mommentum building. There have been a few self recorded singles released just to keep things ticking over, but we’re nearing the point of starting to record a new album. Hope to see you out there somewhere soon.

Mike x