*on The HENRY ROAD

Nottingham-based The Henry Road and their debut EP, ‘Loggy Log’ sound like they’re about a country dump being taken on an obscure, mediaeval road by a stuffy, rahrah wearing a tight, pink cravat and knee high yellow socks. ... Read on >

But hold your horses and hang on to your top hats as this couldn’t be further from the wicked truth. The Henry Road are tacitly working towards saving the world and after hearing the first few seconds of ‘Loggy’s Theme’ you will be reaching for ammunition to support The Henry Road saviours. They are phenomenal visionaries with the rare and acute sense of mixing all styles and instruments to create magically dark fairy tales for adults. I wish they would read me my bedtime stories at night...

As the listener is taken on an enchanting journey mapped out with immense precision and pleasure, The Henry Road boys watch the world and laugh from the top of their Loggy Land Castle. Armed with musical catapults and songs as heavy as drawbridges, welcome to the Henry Road fortress. Make sure you get there first before the hoards of other Loggy pilgrims.

Ben and Phil from the band answer some random questions...

Let the questioning commence...

So you are creators of Wagon Pop, have got 2 EPs under your belt and a strong live following…don’t you think it’s time to retire now?

I think you can only retire when you are too old and have finished what you set out to do. We are not and we haven't. Is there an end to creativity? I have always suspected not, although there is probably an end to a song or a painting if you really want one.

So Benjamin, as well as being a drummer, you’re also a secret writer/artist. If you had to choose between loads of money for a record deal or loads of money for a publishing deal, which would you choose?

It's no secret that I paint and write every now and then, however being a 'secret' painter sounds quite good, adds a pinch of mystique, perhaps I'll try it....

I'll just hide everything first. When I have done something that merits being in the position of choosing some kind of business offer, I'll go for whatever comes along first, I'm not fussy. If the offers come along together I would go for both....

I'm not busy. Who is your favourite author?

It varies from book to book, which is not a cop out! I have cultivated a philosophy for my opinions, and that is that they are not fixed. It has taken a while to get to this point and I follow it religiously. People who believe in fixed and concrete opinions in life bore and scare me, I allow myself the freedom to change my mind about things whenever I want to. Something I believed to be correct in the morning can change dramatically by the evening (usually much sooner)...

I have complete freedom and it means I rarely have to argue.

I read a lot more when I was younger. All pretty existential. Hesse, Kafka, Kundera, Sartre, and Camus. But depression soon followed. I am a lot more light hearted about everything I do now days. I have been going steadily through 'The Times' 100 best novels list. I am doing it in order so that I flit across different styles, it starts; Don Quixote, Pilgrims Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones etc etc. I rarely read contempory stuff.... I dabbled with the beat stuff a while ago, that's about as modern as it gets. My favourite book was Crime and Punishment a minute ago.

Who’s the biggest diva in the band?

Who's the most flamboyant? Or who looks and sings like a 19th century female opera singer? I sometimes wear eyeliner and was once really into frilly shirts. Philip still very much digs the shirt.

For those of us who haven’t seen you live, sum up what we should expect in a sentence.

BEN: Pretty standard, sometimes have props, sometimes draw on themselves, Metempsychosis shine lights and film all over their faces.

PHIL: With a combined height of eight furlongs, The Henry Road are easily audible and look really nice.

Will you stay on in Loggy Land for future material or have you thought about venturing musically elsewhere…somewhere exciting, like Hull?

BEN: Tim could tell you all about Hull, he went to art college there, although I think he went for other reasons...there was definitely something fishy going on. Loggy 2 will probably centre around Loggy Land, we will record it in a week at the end of September, with the help of anybody that passes by and wants to get involved. There will be sing-a-longs, hats, wine and Duncan (the crap cat).

If you could take part in a tribute show, who would you like to pay tribute to and what song would you cover?

BEN: I would like to do something for Coldplay. One of their songs with piano in it at the beginning.

PHILIP: Coldplay's piano stuff is lovely. I'd like to arrange a massive festival of music for "piano" (Coldplay, Keane, Elton John, etc) and then use guns to destroy the piano. Meanwhile, we will be playing a tribute show to ELO, using stolen synths and prosthetic beards.

What makes you anxious?

Ben: Plums. PHILIP: I suppose any soft fruit makes us anxious. And things that are too big for the room in which they are (grandfather clock in small downstairs toilet, very big horse in tiny stable etc). What is your favourite sound? Ben: Turning off the light when you are knackered either that or 'plops'. I also like things that are 'poggy'.... candles clacking together, tuppaware containers, fingers on keyboard....all extremely 'poggy'. PHILIP: Any noise that is unexpected and unlikely. I heard a leaf fall on the ground and the noise it made can be roughly transliterated as "pwaat!". That doesn't happen very often, usually they just go "put?" or "glat:". Name 3 people that you’d like to big-up (i.e. greet in the style of a homeboy/ghetto male). Barry Pincers. Michael Knight. Stig. Seriously - Jaymiblu, our beautiful friend and webwizard. Dee Seeker

* TIMEZONE RADIO (Loggy log e.p)...

Recalling the spirit of Frank Zappa's "Thing-Fish" operetta, The Henry Road invite us to the land of LoggyLog. ... Read on >

* PLUG MAGAZINE ...

The suburbs of Nottingham can be confusing places. The mottled, brown and grey brickwork of one street blends seamlessly with the lines of pre and post-war constructions that stretch out for five miles in any direction. ... Read on >

No direction home? Or every direction home? Disorientation. However, if you want to lose the familiarity of home and get gloriously lost, seek The Henry Road. The band may have studied West Coast building techniques, fried their foundations in a quart of Beefheart and employed the progressive structures of early Genesis and Soft Machine. But the resulting landscape bears little resemblance to anything on the current musical horizon. It’s sound that you can see. But what does it sound like?

On their 2002 debut ep, Horse Clock Leg, the band gave us a clue. The Henry Road play wagon pop. But what does it mean? “Wagon pop has backfired a little bit because it comes across as a little too irreverent,” explains Ben Lord, the band’s skin merchant. “During the first few years people wanted to know what we sounded like so we invented wagon pop, anything to get away from fusion. Fusion is a good description for molecules. But for music? Fuck off!”

Until 2003 the irreverence was not really a problem. The waspish punk for modern lovers that characterised the band’s debut ep still buzzed in the background of follow-up, And Arm. But the scope of the new ep was much broader, taking in music-hall vistas, BBC educational broadcasts and electro-pop sensibilities that hovered somewhere between ’79 and ’81. The Henry Road were clearly having a lot of fun. On the night of And Arm’s release, Philip Collin, player of keys and vocal chords, peeled off shirts in-between numbers to reveal a massive, painted pigeon on his chest. What did it mean? It didn’t really matter, this was Wagon Pop and the audience was cosy enough to understand.

And then, in late summer 2003, The Henry Road released the Loggy Log ep. Suddenly a lot of people wanted to know where the band were coming from. The ep charts the tale of Loggy Log, from Loggy land, as he and his friends try to save his one love from the random allure of Crap Arrow. Rolling Stone USA got very excited and commented: “The Loggy Log ep…will fire up the synapses of anyone who found side two of Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake a mite too lucid. Mad, original and really rather brilliant.” Closer to home, LOGO Magazine likened the release to, “Richman doing Cousteau doing Ringo Starr.” And the ep reminded Losing Today of, “Neil Innes having a spell of the Spike Milligans.”

Amid the maze of adjectives and reference points used by reviewers, the phrase, “this is a band that doesn’t take itself too seriously,” kept cropping up. Words that seemed very pertinent as I chatted with Tim, Phil, Chris and Ben; to try and pin down clear directions to The Henry Road. In-between stories of why steel is lighter than air and periodic-table pies, the band were finding out more about me, than I was of them. Worryingly short of material I opted for the simple, “how are you finding music in Nottingham?” The Road almost opened up.

The conversation quickly turned to a general feeling that independence is on the wane in Nottingham. Summing up a tale about the decline of Bunkers Hill, Chris Henson – bass hoon – stated, “The individual things are getting pushed out of the city centre to make way for the homogeneous things.” Commenting more directly on the music being made in Nottingham, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, Tim Hawkins said: “The things that are good in Nottingham are generally left of field, they’re on their own, not part of a scene. So you can’t just stick them in with someone else.”

Perhaps the reason why Nottingham bands are not regularly signed? “We’ve already established that not many A&R come to Nottingham…,” begins Phil. “You’re talking out of your hat when you say they don’t come here,” interrupts Tim, “because you don’t know. They don’t announce themselves and go ‘hi, we’re A&R just come to watch a gig’.” Ben suggests a solution, " I think that A&R people should wear massive, really good helmets because we don’t know if they’re here. Helmets would probably sort that out.”

Are the directions any clearer? Perhaps not. But that’s not surprising for a band that appears refreshingly free of reasons and intent. “We never sat down to discuss the sound we wanted,” finished Ben. “But on Loggy Log there were times when we thought, that sounds like the intro to Tull and then we’d try and pastiche the sound. Or someone will say, it needs more wagon. And sometimes Tim will say, I don’t want to wagon that and we know what each other means without having to describe it.”

I’ve tried to describe it and I’m still not sure that I know what I mean. The Henry Road? Wagon Pop? It’s astounding technical ability. It’s free from the restraints of rock and pop’s more travelled channels. It’s sharp. It’s witty. It’s something that swallows my head and cocoons my imagination under the lengthening shadows of Tim Burton and Kevin Ayers as they splash in the wine-drenched tales of their own making. Argh! Hear and see for yourself. Loggy Log 2 is due shortly with an album to follow in the New Year. All of the band’s ep’s are available to download at: www.thehenryroad.com

* The Surreal World of Loggy Log and The Henry Road By, Josh Kail (GROOVE MACHINE)

It would be hard to classify The Henry Road’s new E.P., Loggy Log as fitting nice and neatly into any one genre of music. The best way to describe Loggy Log is as a melding of the narration style of the old BBC series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with early David Bowie when he was with Deram Records, think The Laughing Gnome.... Read on >

The entire E.P. is the ongoing story of Loggy Log. The story structure is similar to that of Fellini’’s Satyricon. Not that it is about ancient Rome, but that it heavily weighs on the assumption that the listener enters with knowledge of what is going on. Unlike Satyricon however there is no previous literature to base anything. Of coarse none of this really matters. The point of Loggy Log is not the story line, the cast of bizarre characters, (including but not limited to Loggy Log, Mrs. Scream, and The God Of Fire), or even the music itself. This is the type of E.P. that needs to be heard in its entirety, without breaks. To fully enjoy Loggy Log one must take a step back and let all the chaos surround them, let all the sounds blend into each other, and enjoy the resulting stream of consciousness that makes Loggy Log great.

Musically, Loggy Log spans the spectrum. From its 1950’s sock hop love anthem of Mrs. Scream, through the hard rock guitar riffs burning through Pecan Way (The God of Fire), to the broadway-esque chorus line piece Massive Navy. Logically thinking it is a bit hard to understand how such a mix could possibly work together, especially when all the tracks are to be listened to in one sitting. Henry Road defies such logic by using the constant of the narration and the bass line of the Loggy Introduction act as the astral ether holding the Loggy universe together.

While listening to the E.P. I had my speaker volume at a decent level. At least decent enough for my neighbors to get a fair hear of it. The response was pleasing. Mostly it went something like “What the hell is that insanity you are listening to?” I have to admit comments like that made the music even sweeter. There is a great flowing beat that is consistent through the entire E.P. and the styles change at a rate where boredom is a risk not taken. To hear the Loggy Log E.P. for yourself follow this link.

* THE HENRY ROAD GET BLOGGED 06

"We all believe that retro-futurism belongs in music, so here's a song about ELO at last"...... Read on >

Whilst twiddling with ITunes last night, it occurred to me that I don't believe I've mentioned Nottingham oddballs The Henry Road yet.

Releasing their own singles free on the Internet ,The Henry Road are a baffling collision of psychedelia and knowing new waveness with a twist of soft pop. If that sounds offputting, don't let it bother you too much. "Quirky" might be an accurate description of much of their work, but at the very least it could never be called boring, unlike the dabblings of some of their more successful contemporaries. They've already attracted the attention of Rolling Stone who praised their work in a recent issue.

Their last free single "Jeff Lynne Is Five" was a wonderous piece of ELO apeing psychedelia that combined squeaky keyboards, Buggles-esque vocals, a strangely funky bassline and a cod-classical arrangement. The lyrics seem to be largely a bunch of absolute gibberish that completely rewrites history (claiming that Kennedy drowned to death, for example) but they're no less intriguing than those of the Super Furry Animals circa "Fuzzy Logic" and "Radiator". I'm sure they mean something to the band themselves even if they make absolutely no sense whatsoever to me.

The track is still available to download from MySpace, and I'd recommend a visit to listen to it: http://www.myspace.com/thehenryroad

There's also an all-too-brief one minute video clip of the song below - please don't judge the track solely on that, as it's a song which builds and builds progressively throughout its playtime. All I need now is some generous London gig promoter to book them for a show down here so I can see them for myself. This lot surely shouldn't be left confined to the wilds of Nottingham.

* LOSING TODAY SAID:

'probably one of the strangest things you'll hear for many a year, rather more eccentric than weird and cleverly so. The Henry Road are a Nottingham based quartet who delight in making what they call 'wagon pop' (don't ask me) and according to our (so far failed) research the most rock 'n' roll thing they've done to date is to swear at planets, yes ladies and gentlemen this is a group of men who don't take things to seriously.'... Read on >

* SOME MIGHT SAY...

Their farfisa and orch-pop approach shakes down what may have ever transgressed on heath at Haight-Ashbury” :: Will Jenkins, City Lights,... Read on >