April Newsletter
Hello all - hope you're well - getting out the jorts perhaps as warmness increases. April is always when I take a step back and evaluate happenstance at Four Blokes PLC...
April 25th of course is the day of the Portugese Revolution, so we decided to put Popworld out on that day back in 2022. Yes, I remember... young and foolish and free. Popworld on April 25th 2022, the Slices of Urinal Cake EP on April 25th 2023, on April 25th 2024 I recieved a hefty fine from the French Railway Authorities... i tried to dodge it but I got a letter from the International Debt Collectors! April 24th 2025 (a day early) we headlined Heartbreakers, debuting 4 new songs to the public, April 25th 2025 we all had a nice lay in and nursed our sore heads with Lucozade. April 25th 2026 of course, we released Geisterbahnhof - a special single to celebrate Four years of Four Blokes. That's enough numerology for now - let's get into it.
I spent the first week of April back home in Southampton, mainly to get some sleep as a screaming woman lives outside my window in London and the building work starts at 6am, all the lorries say "THIS VEHICLE IS TURNING LEFT", all the cars are beeping.... but in Southampton nout but the distant braying of horses.
After a week of rest and relaxation, some nice joints with Tiago and some nice vegan sausages with Indian mustard, I caught the bus to Shirley Warren to begin work on a new track. Oliver, the fella from The Haldane Effect, has a WW2 era accordian and I thought I'd make use of it for The Ballerina's Disfigured Foot - she's dying out on the street in mainland Europe, of course there'd be an Accordian! A few goes through of the oom-paa-paa verse and then my cheeky chorus chord progression - Cmaj -> Cmaj9 -> Dmaj -> Dmaj9 -> Emin -> Emin9 -> Dmaj -> (bass D).... then Cmaj -> Cmaj9 -> Dmaj -> Dmaj9 -> Emin -> Emin9 -> Emaj -> Emaj11. It's soooooo satisfying to play, if you have a piano to hand give it a bash. Surrounded by bicycles and Duran Duran VHSs we got a take and went down the icehouse for a few extremely cheap beers. The next day I wrote the lyrics in the shower.
9 days of wandering around in the woods and drinking triple-shot iced cherry oat lattes (i really am insufferable), Then I returned to London to peruse the Photographer's gallery to get a glimpse inside some woman's prisons, before spending several days wandering around videoing flowers, trees, and through the windows of abandoned inner city buildings. For some reason a crucial part of my creative process is wandering around looking at things and having ideas - London is great for this because you can wander around so many galleries, parks, neighbourhoods, and see so much...
But there comes a point when you’ve done too much foppish wandering and need to LOCK THE FUCK IN! On the 14th of April, Synthesiser underarm, I went into uni to record the next single. LI didn't know it was my turn to bring a song in for my live performance class but I had all the chords to The Ballerina's Disfigured Foot fresh in my mind so I thought we'd do that. Turned out pretty well and an mp3 of it is included with this newsletter - makes me think we could do it live!
I had most of the lyrics to Geisterbahnhof - entirely in German - ready to go, but i could've done with one more verse so popped down the local Cemetery to finish it - i had a few hours spare before my studio booking, what's a girl to do but hang out amongst the dead? I'll cheekily include a little bit here along with the translation -
Deutsch:
Manchmal erscheint es so schön,
Dieser halb brutale Zustand
Die westliche Gier ist obszön,
Gold ist ihnen mehr als Anstand
Sie begehren Kapital,
Sie würden jeden dafür verraten.
Dort ist die Marktmacht total
Beten Sie am Bankomaten
English:
Sometimes it seems so beautiful,
This half-brutal state
Western greed is obscene,
Gold is worth more to them than decency
They covet capital,
They'd betray anyone for it,
There, Market power is total
They pray at the ATM
OBVIOUSLY it sounds daft in English bc it's written to rhyme in German but certainly a new topic for Four Blokes, I've not written from the perspective of an East German before - big credit to Bridgette Reimann's Siblings for inspiring this.
Before tackling the tapes for the new single i spent another couple days back down on the South Coast, for Finn's 21st (we had a mess of pints and I got in the back of a Greggs lorry). While there a song I had been working on morphed once more... I don't know if I've ever mentioned this one. I thought up the concepts of the first 5 tracks on this new album wayyyy back in December, and have just written each song as the concept has appealed to me. I always knew Track 3 was gonna be a noise piece about a Data Processing Machine, and when I got the idea of how to actually realise that vision I was straight down the shed with copper pipes and pots and pans.
Track 5 was originally set to be a Grime song, juxtaposing the Opera and Classical either side of it (these have both morphed a bit... I'm being intentionally vauge). Now I did go through a big Dave phase in 2021 but I'm not exactly a Grime For-Lifer so this was always gonna be a tricky concept to realise and it would probably have been a bit disingenuous to do an full send up of a Grime track. I had kind of had an idea to make it be about Reagan's insidious War on Drugs but that never came to fruition - the first time I properly got an idea for the song was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, while watching a new Black and White French Language adaptation of Albert Camus' "The Stranger". "Life's essential images, coffee sex and cigarettes, fetishised on silver screen, fetishise the guillotine" - that's the opening line i came up with in the back row. The original title was "Death of The Moral Tale", like Au' Rebours, i was gonna do a completely meaningless aesthetic song and just make horrible violence all sexy. While walking through the woods - these woods -
I changed the title to "Bluebells in The Meadow" bc I thought that would be funnier. More on all this later - sorry for that completely pretentious ramble guys -
Back up in London, it's now April 21st, I overdubbed a MIDI string quartet onto The Ballerina's Disfigured Foot. I spend the next day cutting up and reassembling the tape, what plays when, what parts of the strange beeping and booping to use. Got some great Eisbär type shit on Geisterbahnhof, and i synced up some sinister and ominous sounding shit with the lyrics on BDF. That bit at the end...corrrrrr thats what I call beeping and booping.
It came out on April 25th, Four Blokes' Fourth Anniversary, and was our worst performing single ever released. However - I don't mind becuase I had so much fun making it and I was really happy with how it came out. If ur reading this plz do listen to it tho I promise it's good! I'm also aware that as soon as we're gigging again the streams will shoot up. To be honest it's very creatively freeing to be in a period of obscurity, I know the few people hanging around at this point are open to anything. Idk how to not make this sound bitter but I genuinely don't mind how bad it did in terms of streams and it took me a looooooong long time to get over my obsession with numbers. When we headlined Joiners I thought that 130 was a total failure because I'd wanted to sell it out so bad. Anyways thank you to everyone who did stream it :)
Also on April 25th Johnny officially joined as our new drummer - I've probably listed about 5 different "complete lineups" since I moved to London but this time it's locked in... because.. WE HAVE OFFICIALLY BOOKED A REHEARSAL! After 6 months locked up in the studio Four Blokes are getting back out there, and after 6 months of just me in these newsletters you'll finally get FULL COLOUR PHOTOS OF THE WHOLE BAND!!!! I'M SO EXCITED!!!!!!
I have wanted to gig in London soooo bad for soooo long but it's been hard getting a gang together, partly bc of my crippling anxiety and paranoid delusions that everyone secretly hates me and is plotting against me but I have overcome my demons to book 3 hours in a room in Earlsfield. Now, everything can still go horribly wrong I'm sure, and I am highkey panicking that it will, but I have got us into rehearsals which feels massively concrete and like a big step in the right direction to me. May newsletter will reveal all...
Sidestepping one last time back to Bluebells in The Meadow... having written a few verses in the shower and on buses, I thought I'd start trying to record it - GET THE AULD IPAD OUT!!! PROGRAMME A LITTLE BEAT! Yes it sounds alright to me boys. Think I'll add some bass, synthesiser, additional snare fills, and run some things through a crazy feedback loop to create atrocious white noise. Then i might add a Grime bit in the middle after all... HMMM!!!
Anyways that's all for April. Four years, ey... I'm getting on. CREAKY!!! Creaky old man, me. Chest pains... much to look forward to in May. I'm really upping the pace for work on the new project - there's gonna be more filming, more editing, and extensive recording sessions. Of course the most exciting thing is going into rehearsals with the new band, I've ended basically every newsletter for half a year with "hopefully next month we get into rehearsals" and now it's actually happening!!! Eeeeee!!!
Anyways I'll catch you guys later
Warmest regards
Harry(?)
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