Kobayashi Who?
We used to tell people we sounded like a cross between Erasure and Queens Of The Stone Age or The Beta Band and Emerson Lake & Palmer.
But people had other ideas.
We’ve been compared to a bizarre hybrid of Linkin Park, Basement Jaxx, Roxy Music, Queen, James Brown, Tom Waits, The Stooges, Gomez, Bowie and Muse. Make of that what you will but we’ve realised there simply is no convenient box in which to fit the Kobayashi sound.
We used to tell people we were a live band - notching up years’ of stage experience in our home town of Croydon, as well as numerous bespoke London venues such as The Comedy, The Metro, On The Rocks, The Pleasure Unit, The Grosvenor, The Living Bar, Project Orange, Bar Rumba, The Cuban and The Bull & Gate.
And then we made Minus
In many ways, making a “debut” album after four years together is the quintessential Kobayashi move – wilfully beguiling and contrary to established rock lore. Taking an entire year to finish it was not quite what we planned. Here’s what happened – we wanted to set up our own studio/practice space that would allow total, constant access and a place in which to create, record and rehearse. With the help of Gareth Cox from Ambushed, we located a massive basement beneath a shop in Croydon, cleaned it up, lugged our stuff in and got ready to start the album. It lasted one day. We were just too loud and the vast cavern could not be sound proofed without a great deal of money that we didn’t have. So, relocating to Ambushed itself, we spent the next year grabbing every spare second of studio time available in the gaps between work, sleep, the odd paramedic course and the occasional wedding.
Was it worth it?
Hells yeah. It’s eleven songs of sonic perfection, interspersed with soundscapes and out-takes, de-mixes and glitches. It’s the rock album as we imagine it – a journey that reflects our own and mirrors our obsession with doing things our own way.
So, yes, we’re still the same live band who came third in the 2006 UK Battle Of The Bands and prompted the head of events at Xfm to say "I'm a jaded old man, I've seen everything there is to see in music but I have never seen anything like that" but post-Minus we’re also the band that made the album that reviewers are already calling “frankly inspiring”.