History of Apple Pie - Cockpit, Leeds, 8/2/2013

  by Helen Tipping

published: 23 / 2 / 2013

intro

Helen Tipping finds young London-based band the History of Apple Pie's mix of indie pop and shoegaze to be enormously promising, despite sound problems, at a show at the Cockpit in Leeds on their first headline UK tour

The History of Apple Pie are a London-based band. They comprise if Stephanie Minn on vocals and guitar, Kelly Owens on bass and vocals, Jerome Watson on guitar, Aslam Ghauri on guitar and James Thomas on drums. The band have recently released a debut album, ‘Out of View’, which involved Joshua Hayward of the Horrors in its production, and are on their first headline UK tour promoting the album. Tonight sees them play The Cockpit, in the tiny upstairs room above the bar, nestled under the archways of the railway lines above. This might sound intimate and interesting, but in fact it makes for poor light for photography and a difficult space for sound. Steph Minn’s vocals being somewhat low in the mix make it hard to hear her, the venue doesn’t really help, and I can’t hear Kelly Owen at all. The guitars, however, come over well leaving me wishing the vocals were a bit more audible, but then again that could be the sound they are aiming for. Their sound harks back to the 90s, and they mix indie pop with the more serious, and some might say self-indulgent, indie shoegazing and a nod towards Sonic Youth. The band themselves though come across as friendly and disarming, and not at all self-indulgent and their more poppy tones keep them from becoming yet another noisy band with a fuzz box. They are well worth looking out for and hopefully we’ll be seeing more of them in the coming year. These photographs were taken for Pennyblackmusic by Neil Bailey.