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Candidate Biography
Joel and Alex have been brothers - and in bands together - for as long as they can remember.
Ian had a studio set up in the front room of the flat where Joel ended up sleeping when he moved to London. He also played the bass and owned everything Swell had ever recorded.
Chris answered an ad for a drummer into “The Pixies and Frank Sinatra”. He wore a suit to the audition and talked about French cinema, so it was cut and dried.
At the very fag end of 1998, influenced by the quiet intensity of American slowcore bands, Candidate turned their back on the noisier end of their record collections and recorded a series of basement demos (at a volume that wouldn’t disturb the neighbours) that pricked record company interest.
After a few bruising experiences at the hands of a confused and bewildered music industry, the band took matters into their own hands, and began releasing records themselves. The Snowstorm label was willed into existence and three increasingly confident EPs were put out, ending with the Leader EP, whose catchy, thumping title track, with its upbeat, Nilssonesque chorus, gained the band an enthusiastic following.
A first album, “Taking On The Enemy’s Sound” came out in April 2000. An independently released, self-financed, self-produced record, Candidate’s first album stood out like a sore thumb, and got enthusiastic reviews, everywhere from the NME to The Sunday Times.
Encouraged by the reaction, Candidate played a single, incandescent gig to celebrate their new record, and vanished back into the shadows to work on their next project.
Obsessively writing and recording for six months before finding the right blend of influences and ideas for their new record, dozens of songs were completed and summarily rejected, some for merely retreading the ground covered on the first LP, others for echoing the work of the thousands of acoustic-based bands who’d scuttled out of the woodwork since the first album. If there was to be a follow up record, it had to be something new, something no-one else was doing.
Finally, it clicked. In two parallel home studios on different sides of London, a set of tracks were worked up that took the band where they wanted to go. More considered, layered and textured than the spare music on the first album, this was somehow a much more intimate and personal record than the band had attempted before.
Taking the experimental psychedelia of US independent bands like Grandaddy, but welding it to a core of British folk rather than second-hand Americana, this album, “Tiger Flies” existed in a world of its own. By the time the record was complete, the band were convinced they’d managed to, on their own terms, pull off something pretty special.
The band have just released a new album, “Nuada”, inspired by Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack to the early 1970s cult film “The Wicker Man”. The follow-up to “Tiger Flies” is planned for release mid-late 2003.
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