Run to the hills and connect your computer to one of these to little rascals of digital outlets:

Platekompaniet

iTunes

Tidenes norske sommerlåt i ny versjon

The Vineyards har som første band covret The Pussycats sommerhit “Just a little teardrop”, som herjet hitlistene i 1966.

Med “Just a little teardrop” minnes vi sommerene i Hverven-bukta i Oslofjorden midt på 60-tallet. Med pussycats på scenen og frisluppet ungdom, sprit og generell rock n roll i kullissene. The Pussycats karriere var preget av både skandaler og kynisk forretningsdrift, men musikken deres står som en bauta i tidlig norsk rockehistorie.

Det er på tide å hente det glade 60-tallet frem igjen.

Fakta om utgivelsen
- The Vineyards slipper slingelen “Just a little teardrop” digitalt i internett…snart
- Singelen gis ut av bergenslabelen REC90
- “Just a little teardrop” kommer også snart på 7” vinyl sammen med en annen norsk låt fra 1966, “intet er nytt under solen”

Original versjon:

Kontakt
info@the-vineyards.net

And we can tell you as a teaser that the Harz mountains is cold as hell and it is raining. Blurgh!

Today were playing some kind of stadtfest in Wernigerode (our favourite town in Germany!) and tomorrow Leipzig will experience the wildest show they’ve seen in a long time.

Hope to see you all there!

You can get it at Platekompaniet and iTunes.

And what are we going to record? Haha! Just wait and see. It might come as a surprise. Or not. It depends.

In 2004 we joind forces with the highly esteemed, but now unfortunately deceased, rock orchestra Autotune, to make a split 10″ vinyl. The recordings were done in August/September the same year in Autotank studio, later to be known as Come Again Studios, on analouge tape and a feisty, yet raw sound was secured. The recordings and mixing were taken care of by Håvard and the mastering by Renate Bakke. But one thing remained. The cover art. And that was when the trouble started.

Thomas Røst had done the first demo and Good Rock for Good People, so we decided to go for him one more time.

We gave him rather unlimited say in bringing in ideas for the cover. All we did was to give him the title, and since it was a split release, there shouldn’t be side A and B. The sides should be labeled with different colours. Svein came up with the title “This is Rock. You are Disco”, and strangely enough everyone agreed rather quickly.

So, Thomas worked for a few days, and we all gathered for a meeting at the infamous pub Cafe 33 in Oslo.

Café 33

The meeting went fairly well. Some of us loved Thomas’ suggestions right away, some were a bit indifferent, while some didn´t like it that much. So why not go for it and perhaps make minor alterations? For some democratic reasons why more or less had decided, or at least had the silent idea, that all of us should agree on the final product – no matter what. So when the bands were alone the discussions started on what kind of design we wanted the cover to have. A discussion we might have been better off with taking some time earlier. The moose was in fact a major issue.

Because the end of it was that we left the pub, and had some sporadic talks about what we wanted. The time went by, and suddenly it had taken so long time that Autotune was ready to release their own album, and found that the two releases came to close to each other. So it was clear that the vinyl was dead. All the songs that were supposed to be on the vinyl were re-recorded and ended up on different albums. A fun fact is that the song “Cruise Control” that VNRDS were supposed to put on the vinyl were renamed and the lyrics were rewritten for Hoggin´all the Action. The song ended up as “Sire, it´s the Bell Boy from Hull”. And what did the cover art look like? There were suggested other colours as well, but these are the only copies known to have survived:

Titles for songs often just pops out of someone´s head, but the album titles have been a bit more difficult. The EP was about to be called Schwedenborg. It was close to the deadline for the pressing, so we summoned a meeting at Hans Martin´s flat to pick the best name that had been suggested so far. I had suggested “Schwedenborg”. We all had seen the movie Riget, and I had read something about Schwedenborg at the university that I found interesting. However, after a couple of days, it didn´t longer feel quite right, and we knew too little about this enigmatic character, so the aftermath would be a bit uncertain. Then Kjartan suddenly said: “Let´s call it Good Rock for Good People”. This had for some reason become some sort of saying within the band in that period, so it suited the EP perfectly.

Then after two years we were on our way to Sweden to record our first full length album. Yet again, we had no title ready, not even a working title. After a week in studio we drove back to Oslo for a break. We arrived in Oslo late at night and on one street we were intercepted by an ambulance with the lights twirling, and out of the blue one of us blurted out: “It´s the Ambulance of Doom!”. When you are very tired and giggly some things can be a bit more funny than they in fact really are. So, in the following days we actually thought of naming the album “Ambulance of Doom”. I think it was wise not to.

So, how did we end up with Hoggin´all the Action? We did not want to name the album after one of the songs on the album. The opening song on the album is Hoggin´All the Action, I See – a title in fact lent from the video game GTA Vice City – and we thought that just Hoggin´All the Action was a good statement for the first album, and yet not making the opening song a title track. The title was settled during a few phone calls done late at night from where I work.

For some reason we just wanted to call our latest album The Vineyards. We always thought that we should save the self titled album for a sort of defining album. And since we were doing all of the recording ourselves, it seemed like a good idea, and we still think so. However, Hans Martin said a little bit to late that we should give the album a proper name, and I think we all on some level agree – mainly because it is fun to think up names.

This is the VNRDS-catalouge so far, but what about the album that never saw the day of light? What was that name intended? And the cover art? Oh, you will be let in on the secret in due time.