Alision Cousens, Keris Howard and Alex Sharkley were Brighter. They broke our hearts from 1989 to 1993 while quietly attaining the "best band on Sarah Records" award. Who knew theywould shine among the Matinée roster ten years later?
( from matinée recordings homepage )
This is part two of an interview with Keris Howard (Brighter, Hal, Harper Lee) Part one can be read HERE (thanks magnusk! for the correct link)
1. For a short period of time, years back, you also had a project called Hal. Could you please tell us a bit about that?
It's funny because i can't really remember how, and why Hal came about myself! One moment Brighter had ended and we'd had enough of music and never wanted to write songs ever again and then within a year, we were back in the studio, doing a 4 track EP under a new name. At the start, Hal was basically me and Alex (Brighter's bassist). The first (and as it turned out to be, last) EP was basically a re-interpretation of 4 old Brighter songs. Alex worked some magic on them by translating them into shiny electro-pop and it's still a release i'm incredibly proud of. We kind of lost direction after that. We did some new demos and played a couple of gigs, being joined by my future Harper Lee collaborator, Laura Bridge, on drums. Sadly we never really got off the ground.
2. Matinée Recordings have recently released a second compilation with Brighter and I guess that you have a very special relationship with many of those songs. How do you look back on those days with Sarah Records?
Sarah was great. It's odd because i think for some of the bands it genuinely was just a label, nothing more than a simple route to release records. In contrast i think we were genuinely besotted. At the time I couldn't have imagined anything more exciting than getting to record on a label that i held in such high regard, not just because of the music, but because of its whole ideology. The letter from Clare at Sarah offering me the opportunity of doing a 4 track EP remains one of my most cherished possessions. Saying that, in honesty we were minor players on the label and i'm sure we would have been amazed to think that 15 years later they'd be a market for a compilation of our stuff.
3. What do you think about the response the two Brighter compilations have been given?
As i've just said, the simple fact there's anyone out there interested in band is amazing. You're never sure how something will translate to new ears. 15 years is a long time and admittedly a lot of our stuff now sounds quite 'naive'. The fact that so many people see worth in the compilations beyond them being simple historical artifacts is great.
My favorite:
song with Brighter: Half-Hearted
song with Harper Lee: I can bear this no longer
song on Sarah Records: Rio - ASD
song on Matinée recordings: Rock and/or roll - Pipas
animal: Squirrel
city: Stockholm
weather: Cold and bright
book: The end of the affair - Graham Greene
film: Star Wars
place in Brighton: Preston Park
Links:
Unofficial Myspace
Listen at Matinée Recordings
tribute to Sarah Records
Tom also re-posted some various demos from Sarah Records that you can find here
Hope you liked the posts!
Isn't part 1 here?