Blood Red Shoes on their 7th LP, Support Bands, Crisps and Two Decades As a Band

August 26
56 mins

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Episode Description

In this week's episode Sean sits down with Steven Ansell, the singing drummer of Blood Red Shoes.

They have known each other for around twenty five years now, since Sean first saw Steven's old band Cat On Form playing to a room of skinny, topless Fugazi obsessives in Brighton.

Blood Red Shoes formed in Brighton in 2004, Steven on drums and vocals, Laura-Mary Carter on guitar and vocals, and released one of their first singles on the Drowned in Sound label. Twenty years on, they're still one of the more interesting duos working in guitar music, a band whose sound has been chased by plenty of others since (Royal Blood, for one, used to come and watch them). Their songs keep finding new listeners in places that have nothing to do with the traditional music industry, the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack years ago, more recently Directive 8020, the horror game that features their track 'Dead Air'.

However, delves into their seventh record. Stay Lonely, which is out 18th September on V2 Records. The record features the single 'Screams', and it's the first Blood Red Shoes album the two of them have made entirely on their own, no outside producer, no outside mixer, nobody else touching it.

The conversation gets into how a band that's been almost wordlessly instinctual for two decades actually functions day to day, who sings what and why.

Steven also produces for other artists, including Brighton duo Arxx and Circe, and co-runs the Jazz Life label with Laura-Mary, who records solo too (her debut album, Bye Bye Jackie, came out last year).

As with every episode, Sean asks Steven the question he now puts to every guest: how would you spend five hundred million pounds to improve music?

The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz at https://qobuz.com/dis.

Produced and edited by the team at Tell Studio.

Recorded, engineered and hosted by Sean Adams (seaninsound.com) at Polygon Portal, Soho. Polygon Portal's immersive listening room is back for Season Two from October, with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Pixies' Bossanova and De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising among the album playback sessions on their listings, well worth a look if you're in London.

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