Hello everybody!

So far this year, we have been very busy looking both backwards and forwards, taking stock as well as preparing for what lies ahead. I wish I could think of even cheesier ways of expressing this, but my brain is all numb due to regular Codeine intake intended to ease the pain in my right heel that some twit caused by slowly driving his car over it while I was attempting to join the queue to a Tom Vek show at some monstrously hip magazine launch thing the other night. I’m not complaining, though, that was definitely the most interesting way in which I have ever sprained an ankle.

“The most interesting failure in pop history”, on the other hand, is how we recently responded to the task of defining the nature of our band in less than 140 characters, and I am here to tell you, amongst other things, how we intend to celebrate that fact.

We figured that if we were to turn being the most interesting failure in pop history into some form of success, all we would have to do is to just keep going. When sadly misguided fools like us stay around for about twenty years, they will eventually be perceived as “underground legends”.

We are fast approaching the half – way mark on our ever curious voyage to that “bit of an underground ledge” status, so our record label thought it would be a good idea to release a Chap Best Of compilation. The Greatest Hits! How we laughed! But we agreed to do it anyway because it gave us the opportunity to include a new song called ” Campaign Trail” and a new version of our garage rock classic “Le Theme”. Needless to say, we have arranged a number of shows (see “live”) to mark the release. Can’t wait to get back on the road!

So, for those of you unfamiliar with all or some of our previous material, here is an opportunity to catch up and save time! Confusingly, the compilation won’t be called “We are the most interesting failure in pop history” or even “We are halfway to becoming an underground legend”, but instead simply “We Are The Best”! Lo Recordings will release it in a month’s time or so, there will be a single featuring said ” Campaign Trail”.

That single will be a split between our song and “Architects” by  all – round 21st century renaissance man Larry Seftel (aka Seftel) who together with professional partner David Day created the marvellous video to “We’ll See To Your Breakdown” (see below) AND will be directing the video to our song of the split single! Surely you won’t be able to resist such an intricate web of creativity…

BUT, as if all that wasn’t confusing enough, we have also just finished A NEW ALBUM, due for release early next year! Having spent the last ten years dealing in all kinds of semi – humorous referentialism we decided to experiment and make a pop album DEVOID OF IRONY. It’s catchy and simple sounding and we’re loving it! Making it taught us a lot: Mostly, that we will never be REAL  SINGERS. But I guess the fact that it has our voices on it rather than a REAL SINGER’S means our music hasn’t lost its Chappyness.

Anyway, that new album, showing The New Us, will be called “We Are Nobody”. We will attempt to perform a song or two from it during our upcoming tour.

Just to recap:  single, some shows, “We Are The Best”, “We Are Nobody”. Exact release  dates/ 2012 tour dates to follow.

Geez, that was exhausting.

Nice. We have a new amazing video, directed by Larry Seftel and David Day, for the track “We’ll see to your Breakdown”. It was meant to be released along with our latest digital only release “Your latest Breakdown” whose existence you probably hadn’t noticed and you’re not to blame. Should you enquire within the realms for various digital distributors you might discover that “Your latest Breakdown” contains other appealing pleasures, such as a Dire Straits cover and a super nice remix by the legendary Family Fodder. Anyway, the video has produced many interesting and interested reactions and is our best so far. Have fun!

since this “hauntology” concept seems to continue being all the rage, we thought we’d jump the bandwagon. as far as i can tell, if someone who is not very old takes elements of an old song (i.e. one which was popular when said someone was a toddler), slows them down and puts a load of reverb on them, this constitues an act of “hauntological” music making, the idea being that somehow the hauntologist’s subconcsious is haunted by the old radio smash hit from their very early life and this haunting finds its way into the character of the new piece of music. i always figured there isn’t a great deal of haunting going on anywhere in pop music, not even in the  current revival of what was once called, i believe, “shoegaze” . what IS going on is  just some very basic digital effects treatment of songs which have been omnipresent since the eighties and through the internet are almost more easily available than during the days of their release, which eliminates their potential to haunt anything or anyone as if from a distant past.   but what do i know. anyhow, to prove this point, keith took one of our own, very recent songs (which is by no means omnipresent) and slowed it right down and – bingo! it sounds very “hauntological”, although no-one’s subconscious was ever penetrated by it twenty-odd years ago. it also sounds rather nice, methinks. here it is:

http://thechap.bandcamp.com/track/even-your-friend-slow-mix

Hello, as some of you may have noticed, we recently released an album called “Well Done Europe” . On it, there is a little song called “We Work In Bars”. It’s about people who work in bars. Bingo! Our friend Harry Rambaut recently shot a video for it, featuring us – in a pub!
Being pretty rad n unconventional types, we’re unleashing the video to that song NOW, although it came out months ago and has since been followed by ANOTHER single with another video. But then, this here video is all stop frame live action, i.e. Harry made us spend many mornings in that particular pub, only to throw buckets of water and pints of ale at us, make us change seats and facial expressions every five seconds for hours on end or get us to fall off a bar stool in twenty stages. In short: it took a long time to make. Here it is. Enjoy!

P.S. : another video for another song is underway. Apparently, a whole team of professionals is working on it around the clock since it’s rather complicated to make. More soon.

When I need cheering up, I find it helpful to watch this little video.

They used to play with Prince, so you know they have good taste.

If you’re in Berlin tonight, you should get down to Festsaal Kreuzberg for the Puschen 10th birthday party!

Obviously, all of you have recently done very little other than listen to our new single “Even Your Friend” over and over again. Some of you may even have briefly bothered with the B – SIDE, a song sung in Spanish called “Friendo For Life”. (listen to them both here) Those of you who did are now obviously bearing one burning question in their hearts: why a song in Spanish? Well, here’s why…

We were asked to write it by a very talented young German film director named Benjamin Heisenberg. He needed something which sounded similar to a traditional Cuban love song, as covered by Robert Wyatt, to be included in his new film, “Der Räuber”. Benjamin had tried to get the rights to that song but had been turned down. So, since none of us speak a word of Spanish, we got to work using various online translation engines.

We had to do a lot of cross-referencing with  texts on Spanish websites to get the syntax right but were later told that a Spanish speaking person had confirmed the lyrics to be grammatically and syntactically correct. Well done us!

The words make very little sense. In fact they are probably the worst love song lyrics of all time. Luckily, it’s quite difficult to actually make them out under all that delay and reverb. We’re too vain to reproduce them here in their entirety but to give you an idea, at one point in the song, we sing something like “the guitar in my head is permanently singing ‘au revoir'”. Impressive, eh?

Anyway, this whole thing then allowed us to attend our first ever film festival premiere, as “Der Räuber” was chosen for the competition at this year’s Berlin film festival. We got to walk across the red carpet, with Keith in particular cutting a rather fine figure in his suit and, of course, sporting his formidable beard. This led all the camera guys to believe he was some kind of celebrity they had better focus on, so there he was, zoomed in on on the huge live video screen at the entrance of the film palace for his entire walk across the carpet.

Later, inside the film palace, Johannes nearly killed a woman by accidentally dropping his mobile phone from the ten-meters-high balcony and only very narrowly missing her head. Understandably, she vocalised her feelings about this in no uncertain terms across the rather large crowd of people.

So there, now you know all about our latest b-side. The digital single was released yesterday, and you can find the 7″ single in your local record shop on Monday.

In other, equally fascinating news, we have just realized that the video to Foals’ single “Miami” pays, shall we say, close homage to the video of our very own song “Fun and interesting”.

Not sure what to make of that.

Anyway, have a nice day!

There’s a video. All the blogs say it’s unofficial, which is news to me.

The Chap / Even Your Friend from Lo+LOAF TV on Vimeo.

It’s particularly pleasing that it’s Video Of The Week on BBC Radio 6. Yes, video of the week on a radio station. Brilliant.

The vinyl version of the album is finished! And it looks great! And sounds great too!

You can buy it here for only £10 which seems kinda reasonable.

And we have a German tour coming up, followed by a mini-Swiss tour. Germany is being very nice to us. In Berlin we are playlisted on the top two radio stations. That’s daytime plays on mainstream radio. Gee, if I didn’t live here, I would definitely move here.

You know how whenever a very public figure messes up with the whole world watching/listening, someone immediately remixes the really poignant bits into a really annoying techno tune and puts it on youtube and then expects millions of hits and LOL comments? Well, we’re in the process of doing just that. Poor old Gordon’s voice recording in yesterday’s Rochdale Incident was just too smooth sounding for us not get our teeth into it. So here it is! In a really annoying techno version! Just to clarify: in no way does this represent our support of David Cameron or indeed any political party. We just did it to attract attention to The Chap.

http://thechap.bandcamp.com/track/never-a-frown-with-gordon-brown