Nun hab´ ich den Namen der Vorgruppe doch noch ausfindig gemacht:
:super: \"Sizer Barker\" :super:
NOCH eine AUSNAHMEstimme.
Absolut empfehlenswert!!!
http://www.amazon.de
Schnellsuche: B00024YVKE
Have a :sonne: afternoon ...
:i_respekt: an alle Daddies 
Busserl,
:a_engel:
Sizer Barker
Liverpool, late spring, 1996. Carl Brown is walking through a cemetery with a friend, a dog and a headful of songs when his attention is caught by a headstone bearing an unusual name: \'William Sizer Barker.\' Flash forward a week and Brown is sitting in his car when a large truck passes by. On its side, the name of the haulage company: \'William Barker.\' He takes it as a sign. One day he will form a band. And Sizer Barker will be its name. Sizer Barker - intriguingly strange yet reassuringly familiar. Rather like the music on Hotel Juicy Parlour, a debut album that has been gestating within Brown since that overcast day in the graveyard. So how did we get here? After school Carl Brown starts learning the ropes in a Liverpool recording studio. He wants to be an engineer but his official job title is Tea Boy. He makes tea for a local producer, Ken Nelson, who will go on to work on the debuts of Badly Drawn Boy and Coldplay. Eventually Brown gets to twiddle some knobs himself. One of his first jobs is on a demo for an unknown local singer-songwriter called David Gray. He starts to wonder what life is like on the other side of the control room window and sings backing vocals for the Lightning Seeds and Terry Hall. Soon after, he picks up a guitar and starts writing songs, inspired by his love of Seventies singer-songwriters in general and Joni Mitchell in particular. He sends a tape to Nanci Griffith and she sends back a Christmas card from America, saying how much she enjoyed it. Encouragement is found in strange places. Then Brown gets a call from another local band he\'d once engineered. They\'re riding high in the charts with a song called Female Of The Species and they want him to step in for their sick guitarist on a US tour. Suddenly he\'s in LA, about to become a pop star. He parties like it\'s 1999. Because it is. But just as he\'s about to make his live debut with Space, the singer loses his voice and the tour is cancelled. Brown\'s dreams of stardom are shattered. For now. But he\'s been near enough to smell it. Back in Liverpool he forms a band called Fuzzy Logic and gets a publishing deal for his songs. Once again, stardom beckons. But the publisher only wants him to write line-dancing tunes. Despondent but on a creative high, Brown house-sits for a musician friend who\'s gone travelling in India and discovers his collection of unusual instruments. In a flurry of activity, he starts writing songs and lyrics, inspired by life, love and random words and phrases from magazines. He records a home-made demo under the name The Modernaires. Then Brown calls up Space\'s manager. He loves the songs, offers him a deal and sends him into the studio with whizz-kid producer Markus Dravs (Eno, Bjork). Brown decides on a new name - Sizer Barker. In December 2000 the spectral ballad Day By Day is released on his manager\'s own Hug label. It instantly becomes single of the week on Radio 1. The critics love it too: \"Strange and wonderful,\" says the NME. \"Floaty, gorgeous and Scouse,\" offers Melody Maker. \"A wonderful, idiosyncratic thing,\" declares the Guardian. Then... nothing. A follow-up single, Something In The Park, is due to be released on 14 September 2001. It\'s pulled. Suddenly no one wants to put out a song about being afraid in Manhattan. Sizer Barker shrink from a quintet to a quartet and dwindle to a trio. There\'s Brown plus Tim Bruzon, who started out playing church organ before the divergent influences of AC/DC and Autechre led him towards the twin epiphanies of guitars and distortion, and Maria Hughes, a bass guitarist in love with Blondie and The Beatles. They go back into the studio and come out with an album that defies categories. It\'s got the pop sensibility that seems inbred for Liverpudlians ever since the Four became Fab; heart-melting melodies and catchy choruses are all over it. But there\'s a darker undercurrent at work. Pretty songs implode into weird electronic fragments and sudden squalls of rock guitar, subterranean horns emerge from nowhere and then, just as swiftly, disappear. Found sounds drift in and out of the ether: distorted telephone messages from friends declaring that \'Something very strange is going on.\' Indeed it is. Unusual instruments abound: a zither here, a harmonium there; recorders and accordions floating in and out of the mix. But they don\'t have a deal until Dravs, now working with Peter Gabriel, plays him the unreleased songs by the unsigned band. Peter Gabriel tells Brown how much he likes the album and offers to release it on his label. So here we are. Eight years on from that day in Smithdown Cemetery. FIVE YEARS after Sizer Barker were formed. Three-and-a-half years after their debut single. It\'s been a while. But the best things come to those who wait. The new album \"Hotel Juicy Parlour\" will be released on Pre Records in July 2004. Distributed by Virgin/EMI. (website coming soon at http://www.prerecords.co.uk/sizerbarker)
/sizerbarker