about blooming cellar

It started the way these things always start — with a ragged poster flapping on a damp Manchester wall in 1993. Steve tears off one of those paper teeth at the bottom — phone number dangling like bait — and suddenly the machine is in motion. A couple of half-lit rehearsals later, they’re in London, riding the death-trap highways in an Austin Allegro that cost seventy-five quid, a rolling coffin with amps in the back.

The line-up coagulates through the Loot paper’s “musicians wanted” classifieds — Kev on vocals and guitar, Steve on guitar and vocals, Neil with the bass, JM on drums. Song writing was a street fight between Kev and Steve, but the arrangements — messy, wild, all-in — were the blood of the band. They stormed the London circuit, chewing up every sticky-floored venue that would take them: Laurel Tree, Falcon, Monarch, Dublin Castle, The Orange, Water Rats, Samuel Pepys.

Then came the white label single — homemade dynamite pressed into wax — mailed like contraband into the belly of the music industry. Against all odds, it hit. GGL Management signed them. Steve Lamacq spun them on the Evening Session. Jo Whiley even called up asking who the hell these lunatics were — Kev answered the phone less than 24 hours after his house had burned to the ground in a freak candle fire. Pure rock and roll lunacy.

They toured Luxembourg and France, leaving wreckage, ringing ears, and empty bottles in their wake. But by ’98, fate intervened. Kev got sick. The internet hadn’t yet become the monster it is now. Blooming Cellar were building a following the old way — gigs, sweat, chaos — and then they were gone. Vanished into smoke. JM and Steve wandered into other bands. Everyone has their own version of what happened, because that’s the way it is — history bends under the weight of noise and whiskey.

Kev came back from the edge, still writing, still chasing the spark. Under the Blooming Cellar name he kept recording, throwing songs into the fire. One of them — Wild Birds — clawed its way to the semi-finals of the International Songwriter’s Competition in Nashville, 2010. Meanwhile, he was building Bandit Music Projects, shaping young blood into musicians, keeping the road alive.

Now Blooming Cellar still breathes. Kev and Neil are working on new songs, old songs, future songs. The band never died. It just went underground, waiting for the right moment to explode again.

reviews

Steve Lamacq (Music Week)

Blooming Cellar, whose single Purity Teen is a pretty thing, looks like Walthamstow High Street with a bit of late Eighties Leytonstone pop chic thrown in. The singer could be a bit of a star with his slightly faraway stage presence – and their gig at the Laurel Tree featured a few nicely bittersweet sparklers which sound quite neat in the autumn.

The Fly Magazine

Retrospective, insomuch as they take on board early Lemonheads and late XTC, Blooming Cellar have an English ness that nestles easily in the ears and compliments the coming summer months.

Folkridge.

Kevin, Really good to meet you at Folkridge on Saturday and thanks for all your help. You played a great couple of sets and were a real unexpected highlight of the day for many people. Many thanks again. Keep in touch.

Peter Whitehead, GIG UK (National Band Register magazine)

What an intriguing way to right a song! ‘Mr Portilda’ is a blank verse poem about boring John Portilda who dreams all day, has ass holes for friends and can’t even smoke dope in case his girlfriend finds out and tells him off. Somehow they’ve managed to put it to music really effectively with a really catchy tune – a hit in our office. The music’s verging on country, solid and harmonic like the Bellamy Brothers, but the words are superb. ‘Ben’s Magic Red Scarf’ is about the singer’s friend who has life on a plate, including loads of horny girlfriends which he reckon is due to his ‘right on’ clothes and, in particular, his magic red scarf. Again they’ve got a really catchy chorus so that’s another three points for an away win. ‘Sea’ gets all serious and depressive and the joking’s definitely over. Highly autobiographical stuff, one suspects, but what a great band. Could it happen, I wonder?