A Band Of Bees
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In fact, in most cases we can negotiate for
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A Band Of Bees Biography
The Bees (known as A Band of Bees in America, owing to a
rights conflict over their name) started out as the duo of Paul Butler
and Aaron Fletcher, both of whom hailed from the Isle of Wight. They
recorded their debut album, Sunshine Hit Me, in a home studio in a shed
in Butler's parents' garden. Butler and Fletcher, both
multi-instrumentalists and singers, were avid record collectors and,
even more so, avid record listeners with interests that extend back to
the roots of British rock and into American soul, as well as a
multitude of other directions. Sunshine Hit Me, released by We Love You
as a U.K.-only issue and credited to the Bees, reflected their
interests and listening, melding '60s freakbeat and psychedelic
sensibilities with '70s power pop, and got nominated for the coveted
Mercury Music Prize in 2002. Their prospects were further enhanced when
the duo's rendition of Os Mutantes' A Minha Menina, from Sunshine Hit
Me, was licensed for use in a car commercial in England. The Mercury
nomination and the album's critical success led to the assembly of an
actual band, and a couple of years of steady touring.
When the smoke cleared, the Bees were officially a sextet with everyone
writing songs and switching off on instruments (and Fletcher doing
their lyrics). And instead of recording their second album in the
Butler family garden shed, as they'd intended, Butler's stint producing
another act at EMI ended up with the group booking three weeks there.
It took that long for the six members -- Kris Birkin, Michael Clevitt,
Tim Parkin, Warren Hampshire, Butler, and Fletcher (all of them except
lead guitarist Birkin multi-instrumentalists) -- created Free the Bees.
Released in the summer of 2004 on the Virgin imprint, the album got
rave reviews in England and earned notice in the United States as well,
working its way into better stores and eliciting positive reviews from
critics who normally would never have known about it. The group's work
has been variously compared to that of the Small Faces (and the Faces),
the Beatles, the Byrds, Donovan, the Kinks, the Temptations, and early
Pink Floyd, with some other interesting permutations. Butler, for
example, counts his own influences as Lee Perry, King Tubby, and Fela
Kuti. They saw further commercial success when the tracks Chicken
Payback and Wash in the Rain, off of Free the Bees, were both picked
up for use in television commercials.
In 2005, in the wake of their success with Free the Bees, the band was
also prominently featured on the soundtrack of the Brian Jones
biographical film Stoned. Their contribution, doing some finely
executed and nicely inventive covers of songs from the Rolling Stones'
repertory -- including a version of The Last Time that managed to
rock as hard as the original and get the guitar nuances right, even as
it was decked out with sitar -- provided some of the very few bright
spots to be found in a film that was otherwise greeted as wrong-headed
and tedious by most critics; and their tracks made the soundtrack CD
well worth picking up. In 2007, reduced to a quintet with Clevitt's
departure, they released Octopus, a brilliant, wide-ranging pop/rock
opus that had inventiveness and unexpected influences quietly oozing
out from between every note and chorus. Its feet were planted in 2007,
but its musical influences looked back to the Kinks of Village Green
Preservation Society and the Small Faces of The Universal. As with
much of their earlier work, the album seemed to demand attention as
much as it elicited delight, like a book the reader can't put down. For
all of their seeming '60s influences, the group comes off as
startlingly contemporary, just willing to reach back to artists and
styles they admire when it suits them and the music at hand. ~ Bruce
Eder, All Music Guide
Written by Bruce Eder