Billy Ruffian Live!!! Tonight!!!

Hello, if you happen to be reading this, good for you! If you happen
to be reading this in Manchester and you're not up to anything
tonight, even better! You should come up to Tiger Lounge to see Billy
Ruffian performing their Greatest Hits! Live! Tonight!

Billy Ruffian @ Fiction Non Fiction
Tiger Lounge, Cooper Street
9pm, Tue 16 September 2008
£3, 4 bands (probably) lots of fun.

New Ruffian Album Title Delivered by Email

Subject: fever standish‏
From: Wallace Wade (WillardprovenanceWade@drupal.org)
Sent: 27 July 2008 04:34:49
jukes flagpole pentane europa bankrupt mete? waterfall, jelly affricate.fever doug fever pentane indonesia marcy, combustible
consolation collar fever venereal swahili.
boniface consolation.

Well, it has got a ring to it.

This evening I started on the video for 'Windsor Uplift'. It currently consists of lots of footage of my great, great, great Grandmother's nephew giving a speech. I imagine this will change at some point.

Have been experimenting with new encoding software to attempt to get the huge Ruffian video library into editable form. We've got well over an hour of footage from various gigs, but the pieces of software that I use to put the music videos together won't recognise the huge majority of it. Hence the same pieces get regurgitated again and again.

Hopefully I'll find a way around this...

Billy Ruffian is Down Wid Da Kidz

As I'm always on the forefront of technology I thought I'd add the
Ruffian as a user on Bebo assuming that it'd be a bit like Facebook.
A quick shuffle around would suggest that it's nothing like Facebook
whatsoever.

However, we should at least pretend to play along and so Bebo
themselves advised me to advise you all that I'm now using a service
to stay connected with friends. Please click below to link with me:

http://www.bebo.com/a/invite/7556352396a791811653b65

* Draw or write on my White Board
* Upload, share and comment on unlimited photos
* Read my bebo blog
* And, er, other stuff

Here's hoping the "other stuff" is as exciting as it sounds. Peace
out, homie... cough.

So, Farewell Then, The Castle...

With an exciting August FLC date (The Housewives, The Favours and The New Royal Family) all confirmed and September (Go Lebanon, Starfighter Pilot) in readiness, the demise of our venue, The Castle, has come as quite a blow. It's very unlikely that Filthy Little Clubnight will continue, unless we can find a venue who will allow us to put it on for £cheap. We'll send a few Press thingummies out to possible venues in the next week or two, but the FLC future ain't bright.

The Castle was the only venue in Manchester willing to put on bands for free. This was free for the organisers and free for the punters (unless, like us, you wanted to pay the bands). We would take £3 on the door, split it evenly between the bands who played and owe nothing to the landlord or the bar manager. They took their money out of the extra bar takings that our clientele and bands would provide them with. Everyone went home happy and bands took home money between £5 and £50 depending on the success of the night.

We were first associated with The Castle on 2nd August '07 when we played a gig to seven friends in the backroom. We clambered around, we fell, we played an encore and we hurt some equipment. Despite the lack of clientele, the atmosphere was wonderful and we kept it in mind for future events.

The event would by the Filthy Little Festival, on 23rd and 24th September 2007. We were meant to organise the 23rd, but instead ended up organising both days due to horrible personal crises on behalf of the organiser of the 24th. We put on And What Will Be Left of Them, Balor Knights, The Fountain and The Leatherettes on Day One (Das Wunderlust died in transit). It was an excellent day with a good crowd. Day Two saw ourselves, Vichy Government, Dirtblonde, The Colt .45s and Natalie Findlay and was another treat with another great turnout.

At the start of 2008 we set up the monthly Filthy Little Clubnight, to run on the 3rd Friday of each month. January saw the excellent clatterpop of And What Will Be Left Of Them?, headlining over the first gig from Manchester's currently hugely tipped First Black Precedent, who brought along an unimagineable army of friends and fans. The surreal and scary world of the Plague Doctors supported, as well as a two-man line up of the Ruffian performing their own brand of Ruffeoke.

February saw us squeeze The Generalissimos, ourselves and Julius Martov and the Sexy Mistakes onto someone else's bill due to a double booking. The Martovs scowled through an excellent opening set and the Issimos bounced merrily and brought sunshine into the dark and dank back room.

In March we tried for A! Big! Band! and got Das Wunderlust. Unfortunately, due to it being Good Friday, the students had fled the city so it wasn't quite the success that it could have been. Nevertheless, the Wunderlust were excellent as were the Plague Doctors (again), who played after FLA favourites Dirtblonde and The Colt .45s.

In April we had the excellent Starfighter Pilot headlining over ourselves and the great Liverpool girl punk of Town Bike and Awesome Wells. Excellent atmosphere, excellent crowd.

In May we had The Lovely Eggs (starring Holly from Angelica), ourselves, Dirtblonde and the unforgettable Hyperbubble, featuring American indiepop's answer to David Hasselhoff.

Later that month we hosted a whole day of entertainment at The Castle for Maps Festival. We showcased Whitstable's unique and wonderful Psychotic Reaction, Manchester's rawkish The Dead School, the tweepop of The Lovely Eggs, Liverpool's rather good and rather well attended The Affection, FLA favourites Starfighter Pilot, Colt .45s (best set I've ever seen by them) and Dirtblonde before The Plague Doctors took to the stage and gave us their reworking of 'Earth Song'. Pink Riot and Town Bike followed before ourselves. Finally, after the excellent Housewives (who I would heartily recommend), First Black Precedent headlined, bringing another huge crowd. The day was a huge success. We finished only twenty minutes over time, and all of the band went away happy at playing on such an excellent bill.

In June we had The Affection, ourselves, The Fountain and The Dead School. A sort of 'greatest hits', if you will.

July saw us with Buxton's snarling, noisy and brilliant The Ascension, a wonderful acoustic set from Politburo, a fascinating and wonderful set from The Man Amp (ex-Car Crash TV) and the Ladyfest sounds of Hug Party.

So, there we have it. Excellent bands, excellent times. Many thanks to The Castle for its unstinting support over the last year, and many thanks to you all for coming to our nights!

The Other Billy Ruffian

We just got a facebook message from the other Billy Ruffian - no, not the ship - that would be crazy, boats can't email. The other Billy Ruffian is www.billyruffian.com and it's a sort of record-label-cum-collective of people who make experimental music and sounds:  

"Billy Ruffian is a completely non-profit-making open-source hippiefied non-entity. But it's a bit like a record label. All music is released gratis through the Internet Archive."  

Ironically, the registered address for this domain used to be just down the road from Ste Ruffian's house but now they have moved their operations into Central Manchester.

Go check them out: www.archive.org/details/billy-ruffian

---

Back in the world of Manchester indie band Billy Ruffian, we've got a rehearsal tonight.  On the agenda is tweaking and resending the Masterminding My Downfall single, practising Debtor's Lament for the live experience and working on new song Long Walk Home. I'm certain it will be most edifying.

Billy Ruffian on Just A Minute

Ok, so it's not that Just A Minute.  The Ruffian reign of terror on Radio 4 still only clocks in at 15 seconds and a confused sounding Humphreys namecheck.

The blog title actually refers to the www.filthylittleangels.com compilation of 1 mintue long songs. And would you believe it, it actually looks like it's going to see the light of day! Billy Ruffian open up side 2 with a song about a man who wakes up and decides he's the queen.  Lots of other FLAians are on there with the glorious Town Bike and lovely Star Fighter Pilot putting in appearances. I'm also a fan of the song about Jimmy Tractor.  It has 19 songs by 19 bands on one 7" slab of vinyl. That's economy right there.  Just remember to run it at 33 and a third or it'll seem even more concise.

Thanks to all who came to see us at Tiger Lounge, although we were 40 min late going on I think it sounded as good as we'd ever done at the Lounge and a great time was had by all.  Thanks go out to The Rise and Fall of the Rockets for being very polite and nice and cheering me up with a banjo solo.  Thanks also go to whoever it was that left the amps on stage. They were handy.

I've just listened to the new song by the Wild Beasts on youtube.  I really recommend you don't do similar.

Much love, Ben Paul

Technorati Profile

First Haltemprice and Howden Candidate takes notice of 'Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender Of All...'

David Craig, author of the catchily titled 'Rip-Off!: the scandalous inside story of the management consulting money machine', 'Plundering the Public Sector: how New Labour are letting consultants run off with £70 billion of our money' and 'Squandered: how Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money' writes a blog. He is also standing as a candidate in Haltemprice and Howden. Not quite sure what his stance is (but he is negative on Davis), but on 28th June he wrote the following blog entry:

"Saturday 28 June

Somebody posts a comment directing me to a very funny video about David Davis http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KsqYihgo0AI It's called The Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender of All - brilliantly done, worth having a look."

Thus we have been noticed! A shame that none of the Sunday papers picked up on any of this, but to be noted by one of the candidates is quite exciting! We're fairly confident of reaching 2,500 hits on the video between now and by-election day. Currently at 2,337 and counting...

The whole John Humphreys thing

"...but he is attracting some er, perhaps unlikely supporters...

~cue tune~

...yeah, if you can catch the lyrics, 'Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender Of All' there, by the band 'Billy Ruffian'. Well our correspondant Danny Savage is on the line. Does that sort of set the tone for this by-election, Danny...?"

Hearing Jon Humphreys read out the title of our latest record was an odd experience indeed. Mind you, hearing anyone talk about us always throws me a bit. Indeed, the last thing I tend to think about when writing a song or lyric is the critical reception/attention that it will receive, so when stuff does get heard and commented on, I always tend to find it an odd proposition. The idea of Mr. Humphreys talking (however briefly) about our song certainly never occurred to me as I sent the 50% joking, 50% serious text to Thom Ruffian whilst walking down Wilmslow Road one morning.

I’m paraphrasing here, but I think it was something like: “When are we going to write ‘The Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender Of All’ then? “I think that maybe I’ve been taking pills / ‘cos David Davis is acting like he’s John Stuart Mills””

As simple as that. Thom sent back part of what would become the 2nd verse and we went on from there.

Trying to get the key line to scan as I was walking along was slightly troublesome, and I tried several permutations to try and get the two main facts across – a) that Davis seems to be pro-civil liberties and b) that he really is the least likely chap that one would expect to do so. The words swapped position several times until I settled on what I was happiest with. Thom suggested the chorus be put to the music of the old, old Billy Ruffian song ‘Mixtape’. The words duly fitted. In time, due to lack of having any other suitable music available, we stuck the verse to the Mixtape verse, too.

When I wrote ‘Mixtape’ back in the Summer of ’05 as one band died and another began to be born, I never could ever have dreamt of it being heard by as many people as it has now been!

I’m glad I pushed ahead with the song. It seemed a bit silly to spent so much time on something that would be so ephemeral – there’s only another nine or ten days left before it entirely stops being relevant – but I thought that, with good luck on our side and a lack of any other big political stories, we might just get a fair bit of attention for it. At the worst I hoped for at least a couple of blog mentions. At best? Well, a phone-call from PM’s Eddie Mair to discuss the song and our own views on politics wouldn’t have gone amiss. But, y’know, John Humphreys is definitely the next best thing!

Where next from here, then? We certainly don’t have any intention of becoming a political group, for starters. The song was never meant to be political, merely being a song written from Davis’ own point of view. We’ve been tarred as Conservatives, Libertarians and, most confusingly, the progeny of Labour MPs. Not sure I understand that one. But the experience has been useful – writing a song with such a quick turnaround was a fascinating challenge, and Producer Paul really does deserve kudos for getting it ready so quickly. I’m not sure I’d like to try and compile a video in just one night again, though. But the whole experiment was definitely worth the effort. We’ve raised our profile exponentially and, keeping our fingers crossed, perhaps as we approach by-election day, we’ll get a bit more play out of it.

Oh, and just for the record – we're very much in line with Nick Clegg’s stance on this one, in that we agree with Davis’ stance on opposing 42 day detention without charge, but I can’t imagine that we’d agree with Davis on many other topics.

I also don't agree with the previous blog post that suggests the song is about the 'ridiculousness' of David Davis. As I said, this song is largely written from his point of view and, whilst there are some of our own thoughts and opinions in there (notably on the verse about the length of detention without charge in various other countries), I don't think we're really hitting any targets other than the Prime Minister, Kelvin McKenzie and The Establishment (i.e. those who would support '42 days') in general.

Just a shame I hadn't forseen the fact that David Icke would stand. That's a song in itself right there...

At Last! Billy Ruffian Played on National Radio!

Ste's audacious decision to make a song which was only relevant for 5 days has paid off. This morning we were played on National Radio. That's right, the Big British Castle endorses Billy Ruffian.  This morning at the prime time slot of 8:30, for a whole 15 seconds, the country was treated to the end of verse and a bit of the chorus of "The Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender of All". Hear it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7477000/7477266.stm

Politics, Masterminds and ADD

Ste has decided to begin the week on a political bent and has made a video to his song about how ridiculous he thinks Conservative Politician David Davis is. It has the succinct title of 'The Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender of All'.  Already it has been deemed "awful" by someone called Bill and Jingouk has declared "it couldn't have be sung better".  Everyone is a critic. See his handiwork and make your own mind up by clicking here:

http://www.order-order.com/2008/06/most-unlikely-civil-liberties-defender.html

On the positive side, at least it knocks the Thomas the Tank Engine tribute video off the top of YouTube search results page for the search query "Billy Ruffian".

Hopefully, in the coming weeks we should have some other new material seeping out. http://www.filthylittleangels.com will be presenting 'Masterminding My Downfall' as a free to download single.  This, as I'm sure you'll be aware is taken from the album "My Secret Life" but it is to be backed with 2 new songs, 'Debtor's Lament' which is Billy Ruffian's most Fallesque, noisy-disco, synth and guitar workout and 'Twenty-Eighth Day' which is a more reflective song about a man going a bit wrong.  It narrowly avoided being called 'On the Nature of Being Shipwrecked' if that gives you some idea of the deeper subject matter.

We're still waiting with for a release date of the Just a Minute 7" compilation from Filthy Little Angels which features our new song 'The Windsor Uplift'.  Hopefully this will happen soon as we're quire proud of it.  The compilation should be fairly exciting all around really as I hate long songs so a whole slew of 1 minute tracks will be great for my ADD brain.  I've already heard the New Royal Family's and Starfighterpilot's and obviously ours so I reckon it's shaping up to a rather impressive selection.  We'll let you know more about it when we know more ourselves.

Filthy Successes / iTunes

Thank you all for attending the Filthy Little Clubnight on Friday.  It was a fun gig and many thanks to Town Bike, Awesome Wells and Star Fighter Pilot for putting on such good shows.  Special notice goes to the drummers who laboured on valiantly despite there being significant parts of the kit missing.  Our drum machine also coped wonderfully under the circumstances!  There are photos on our Facebook (add the user "Billy Ruffian" - yes, they think we are a person) so you should go and tag yourself if you are there. I'll link it at a later date.

In other news, I don't think we mentioned it here, but we've been up on iTunes for about 3 weeks now. You can buy the entirety of My Secret Life in one go or in discrete, track length, 79p packages.  I think there's a way to link to an iTunes band page but again, I'll have to link it at a later date.  The rest of our hits can be obtained gratis from http://www.last.fm and http://www.filthylittleangels.com, so go there and do that if you have not already.

Thanks to all the people who came to see us at Fiction Non Fiction, Tiger Lounge. We had a great gig and special thanks go to the lovely people who were dancing at the back. Thanks also to BlackLands who were kind enough to lend us a guitar amp.  Billy Ruffian historians will be happy to know that this gig was the first with the current lineup that Ruffian Founder Sam Evaskitas has attended.

Tonight we have the Filthy Little Club night which promises to be even Filthier than usual thanks to Liverpool's finest Town Bike. Their songs even have swears in them.  We might even play our new very short song.


BILLY RUFFIAN
"Mark E Smith fronting the Sweet singing the songs of Half Man, Half Biscuit wrestling Lord Lucan in a bath on acid!"

THE STAR FIGHTER PILOT
"Trent Reznor singing the songs of Grandmaster Flash shimmying with Shergar on on speed!"

TOWN BIKE
"Suzi Quatro fronting the Sex Pistols playing lawn tennis with the Loch Ness Monster on prescription drugs!"

AWESOME WELLS
"The Queen fronting Queen singing the songs of Cream jousting the exhumed corpse of Elvis on nutmeg!"

So yeah, come to the Castle. It'll be grand.

The latest news on what we're up to...

On Sunday we convened. Work on the second album has been rather slow, but this is largely because we don't have the backlog of songs to record that we did for the debut. Current songs in the pipeline are 'Single Boy', a pop song that was formerly the seven-verse epic called 'Spencer Must Die', relating to the trials and tribulations of John Bellingham, the assassin of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. When it was realised that the riff was becoming really rather poppy, the idea of a seven verse epic was ditched in favour of 'pop' lyrics about boys and girls and relationships and suchlike. 'Single Boy' currently lacks a bridge. For the fact fans amongst you, before 'Spencer Must Die' received its lyrics and title, it was formerly called 'In Another World', I think.

Also being worked on is 'Imelda Marcos', which still has its working title. Its lyrics are culled from a song called 'Prison' that I completed for the 'Tom Rakewell and the Sound Investment' 24-hour album project with The Generalissimos, Band(ism) and Air Cav last year. Expect further re-emergences of my better lyrical contributions to this at some point. 'Imelda Marcos' lacks a chorus.

FLA Records head honcho Woon required a minute long track for a crazy FLA-project he's currently working on. We started working on it a couple of weeks ago, using one of Thom's endless supply of riffs. Verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, fade. All very adequate for a minute, really. We speeded it up as much as feasibly possible and lyrics eventually happened. It was going to be about Ertu Fruel Osman, a man in his 90s who is, effectively, the last Roman Emperor. In the end it became about something much odder. Ertu can wait for another day. The song eventually became "Hey! Hey! I'm The Queen", retitled by Thom to 'Windsor Up-Lift'. It's pretty much completed now and will be on an FLA release sometime soon.

There's also another track that is currently without a title (unless you count the title of the song that we've ripped it clean off from). This is a good, exciting track that will sound great live when we've got it finished. Currently lacking some music and all of its lyrics.

For further purposes of completion, if you're still seeking out new Ruffian songs, then try to dig out the other stuff we've released since 'My Secret Life', there's 'My Secret Life' itself (B-Side of the Music vs. Money 7"), Hip to be Square (Huey Lewis and the News cover, available on FLA's 1987-2007 compilation - and also on Youtube), Hot Patootie (Rocky Horror Picture Show cover, also on an FLA record), It's A Long Lonely Christmas Without Jimmy Greenhoff (from Cherryade Records' Christmas Compilation, and also on youtube), and Feliz Navidad (recorded for FLA's Christmas compilation, and featuring vocals from Band(ism)'s Robin Nature Bold). There's also a cover of Public Image Ltd. out there somewhere that'll probably see the light of day someday...

Happy hunting!

Stephen R x

Billy Ruffian DJ Playlist

The other week, Ste and Thom Ruffian DJ'd at 'Bungalows and Bears' in Sheffield. Some people danced.

This is what they played. (Ste in bold, Thom in not so bold).

Blur - Bugman
Public Image Ltd - Hello
Black Grape - Kelly's Heroes
Suede - Beautiful Ones
Pulp - Mis-Shapes
Elastica - Stutter
The Fall - Touch Sensitive
Dresden Dells - Girl Anachronism
The Ramones - Pet Cemetery
Billy Ruffian - Hot Patootie
The Cramps - Human Fly
Boris Pickett and the Crypt Kickers - Monster Mash
Kinks - Dead End Street
Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman - Kinky Boots
Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat
McClusky - Lightsabre C*cksucking Blues
Grandaddy - Summer Here Kids
Googol Bordello - Start Wearing Purple
X-Ray Spex - I Live Off You
Adam Ant - Antmusic
Rolling Stones - Get Off My Cloud

--intermission--

The Noisettes - Sister Rosette
Help She Can't Swim - What Would Morrissey Say?
Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn't Have Fallen In Love With
Tiger - Race
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
Flaming Lips - Life on Mars
Sid Vicious - My Way
Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK

CD Baby

We're finally getting on the road to full digital distribution.  And so you can find the album here: http://cdbaby.com/cd/billyruffian

Yes, I know you can't buy it yet.  I tried.  Sadly we're not 100% all systems go, but check it out, it's listed and that's a start.  It's only a matter of time until we're on the hallowed ground that is iTunes.  We'll rig up a fanfare for when that happens.

On the positive side, you can still log into CD Baby (what do you mean you're not registered with them) and add a review of the album.  We'd like it if you did that.

---
The lovely Dirtblonde are playing tonight at Tiger Lounge on Cooper Street, Manchester for the Fiction Non Fiction people, it's free in, they should be on stage around about 9:30 so if you want to hear some rather good music and have some funtime drinking with at least two Ruffians, then get your arses down there.

A New Beginning

The world and his dog are on iTunes so I thought I should get us on it.  We have registered on CDbaby, they have our audio and I'll be posting some links when they come through.  Welcome to a whole new era of digital distribution.  Considering at least 2 of the tracks on the album are solid gold pop classics and downloads count as chart sales I'm looking forward to our first appearance on Top Of The Pops.

Come to the Castle Inn, Oldham Street, Manchester tomorrow as we've got:

Plague Doctors
Manchester's finest mask & cape wearing, slightly disturbing boy band.

Dirtblonde
Liverpool's finest punkrockest duo.

The Colt.45s
Durham's best kept secret.

Das Wanderlust
England's definitive answer to Kiss.

It's only £4, you get a free sampler from Filthy Little Angels and you might even get to meet Woon. But only if you're very nice.  Full details here:
http://www.filthylittleangels.com

In other news, I'm going to watch the Fall tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.