Unlucky Fried Kitten:
A palm-full of others passed through the ranks at assorted times (mostly for live shows and occasional-to-seldom recording)Notable contributors include:Tony Wilkinson-Sword, Leigh Highwood, Citizen Chris, Ben & Sam Kesteven, Paul Cox, Marky Boy, And Rupert.
So, there you have it. The full and final roll call of a band that always strived for more...but could not quite get there. A band dogged with infighting and conflict. A band successfully and non successfully sued by a multitude of corporate companies
Export made a point of insisting he was "no musician...not by any elongation of the imagination." He always preferred to think of himself as an "Optimistic busker in the garb of a griffin" He was misunderstood.
Childhood misery drove him into the arms of songwriting where he created his own little characters and worlds..to take him from his own cheerless existence. Terri Saunders in her potted Andy Export biography for New York's Good Morning Sunday magazine described Andy's childhood writings as " a paranoid rock and roll baby version of the Bronte sisters infantic work" Andy's own recollections were harsher...as exampled in his autobiography, Drunk Rock. ...with the reflection:"I could never sleep. I was haunted by remorse...yay...from such a young age.I tried counting sheep, but they were black sheep...I couldn't see them in the dark. In the later chapters he alludes to the pointlessness of his childhood with the remark..."I wish I could have been born at 21...then I would have missed the pitiful years of my youth." Even in a recent interview with L.A. glamour hack, Taylor Reed, he joked "My childhood was gross, a time when I played with soldiers and my sister played with dolls...it's the other way around now!" Andy was roaring drunk at the time of the interview...and on-lookers saw it as a glib attempt at flirting with Miss Reed.
Given Andy's bleakness of expectation it was seen as odd that he should team up with the supremely confident (many say arrogant) Kingsley Oregon. Kingsley was poached from urban art-rockers The Cinzano Slagz. Seriously happy with his own persona, Oregon was often mis-judged by the "salt of the Earth" die-hard punk crowd of of Leuven...the Belgian university city famed for it's Stella Artois and bicycles...from where he hailed. Oregon won the Opwijk Drummer's "drummer of the year" award for three consecutive years.(sponsored by Drumbeat Magazine with the grand prize of drumming for the Pedal Pedal Gang in the Brussels amphitheatre). Andy, in Brussels on a soul-searching mission to the Belgian capital....with a view to "easing consternation" noticed the flip-crash style of Oregon's drumming...and signed him on the spot.in the Hilde de Wachter Bar.Their vastly conflicting personalities worked incredibly well together. Andy would often joke:"my inferiority complex is not as good as your inferiority complex." to which Oregon would retort.."yes..and my superiority complex is better than your superiority complex...and better than anyone else's for that matter!" They shook hands back in that Hilde de Wachter Bar...and so began the hunt for a bass player. Andy and Kingsley relocated to London and placed an ad in the Melody Maker. They got three responses. One from a 55 year old golfer who played bass in a covers band doing Jim Reeves/Marty Robbins songs. Another from a leather rocker girl into Suzi Quatro and Mud. A third from Michael Shufflebotham who lived on a farm on the south coast. They chose Michael due to his unswerving natural ability on the fret board...(and cos they had a barn they could practice in for free:) Michael was the black sheep of the family...his two brothers followed their father into farming...not like Michael who chose the "wicked path of rock and roll" So, the basic line-up of UFK were out of the traps. In Andy''s autobiography he explains how they changed Mickey's name to the one we all know him by now..."Ah! He was funny in those days...we'd roll up at the barn with our amps and our crates of booze...and he'd pitch in with a box of apples! We just had to christen him "Mickey Apples"
Mickey continued the tradition on the UFK, Kitten On your Doorstep tour, insisting on a pallet of apples be loaded into the dressing room.
Mickey was a good bass player, but he constantly badgered Andy..trying to get UFK to play his songs, which were mostly atrocious! They argued a lot. In a fit of pique Mickey stormed out of a YMCA gig...on the "Perishing Robots" tour and he never played with UFK again.
He made a single, "Black Sheep". It sank without a trace. His last roll of the dice was his mini-LP Dead Pop Stars...finalizing his place in low-rent pop punk history by astonishingly killing himself on the release date. In honour to Mr. Apples..we have created a shrine to him in
The Doll's House where you can hear his "Black Sheep" song and his subsequent DPS songs.
Thank you. And now you know the origins of Unlucky Fried Kitten. Please enjoy checking them out!
| Andy Export | guitar/keyboard/vox |
| Kingsley Oregon | drums |
| Mickey Apples | bass guitar |
No comments:
Post a Comment