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SPECIAL NOTICE FOR OUR REGULAR CUSTOMERS : IF YOU BUY ANY SEVEN TRACKS FROM 'FREAK SCENE' HERE ON BANDCAMP (from either the Frizz Records or Silver Panda stores), WE'LL SEND YOU THE REMAINING THREE SONGS FROM THE ALBUM, PLUS THE ALBUM ARTWORK FREE OF CHARGE IN THE FORMAT OF YOUR CHOICE. JUST DROP US A NOTE WHEN YOU BUY THE SEVENTH TO LET US KNOW!

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We are THE SILVER PANDA

'She Rides The Waves' is the fourth of ten instalments of our debut album, entitled ‘Freak Scene’, which we're releasing song by song, one every two weeks over the next few months...

The album is a set of ‘weird covers’… The original versions were all recorded between ’88 & ’92, by bands that used guitar noise at the centre of their sound (call it grunge, art punk, indie rock, shoegaze, whatever) - Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine… - and our versions strip away the dirt & the electricity, and reinvent what’s left with acoustic instruments, harmony voices, Latin percussion, jazz-inflected woodwinds…

The first three singles, our versions of Dinosaur Jr.'s 'Freak Scene', Pavement's 'Summer Babe' & 'You Made Me Realise' by My Bloody Valentine are available from a sidebar near you >>>

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[Raphael Mann:]

"It’s a song from a record I loved back in 1989, the Pale Saints debut EP, 'Barging Into The Presence Of God' (the one that has 'Sight Of You' on the a-side), that got a lot of play on the record deck in my teenage bedroom..

My favourite song though was on the b-side, a melodic adrenalin rush called ‘She Rides The Waves’… Since unlike ’Sight Of You’ it didn’t go on to feature on their debut album, the brilliant ’The Comforts Of Madness’, it’s still a relatively little-known track… Possibly the least known song on our ‘Freak Scene’ album (…apart from, I reckon, the next one… but you’ll need to wait a few weeks for that one…)

‘She Rides The Waves’ in our Silver Panda version has been entirely stripped of adrenalin and of it’s beautiful washes of guitar noise… What’s left is a very pretty song, with an infectious melody, that perfectly suits the Silver Panda sound… We went sort of bossa nova Burt Bacharach on the bridge, turning the melody of the Pale Saints’ bassline into a Maree Choie clarinet solo…

Funnily enough, the Pale Saints were actually my neighbours for a brief time in the early '90s...

Not too long after that record came out I headed up from London to Leeds (in the north of England) for university (although I was less interested in the Philosophy I was studying and more keen on finding my way in the local music scene…

I ended up playing in a band with two local characters called Dan & Tom… I met Dan because he dj-ed at the club we used to go to (the legendary ‘Beat Surrender’), and Dan introduced me to Tom…

Now, Tom’s older brother Aiden happened to be the singer in one of the best Leeds indie bands, the Edsel Auctioneer, and Chris Cooper was the drummer in both Edsel Auctioneer and the Pale Saints… Which I suppose is how Dan ended up living in a house with Chris and Graeme (who everybody called Jock) from the Pale Saints…

Ian Masters the original singer/bassist had quit by this point, and they’d recruited Meriel (who’d been in an early incarnation of Lush) on guitar & vocals and Colleen from the Heart Throbs on bass… The tiny little house they lived in was one of what we called ‘back-to-back’s, because the back wall was shared with the house on the next street behind, & so had no doors or window or back garden, and there was also no front garden or yard or even a hallway…

The front door opened from the pavement straight into the living room… So the first time I went back to Dan’s house he opened the door & there’s the Pale Saints on the sofa drinking tea & plotting their next move…

I remember them as lovely people, although I was too shy to ever say very much to them… And they were a great band, so it’s satisfying to be able to include one of their songs in our album!”

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