Lampost Gullivers - album launch

We were tipped off about The Lampost Gullivers and their “gnarled, brutish, blues metal” and vocalist that “scares the living shit out of anyone he manages to make eye contact with”, and pitched up at the launch of their debut album All Your Worldly Schmutter on Marble Ears Records, held at The Stags Head in Hoxton, London, home to many an arresting new underground band.

The Lampost Gullivers are really building up a live reputation and we found them riveting, as if Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds went to the bowels of hell and gargled with fire. With lean menacing guitar, and a really tight rhythm section augmented by violins on some tracks and for live, our album favourite is Peregrinations, a slice of devilish alien jungle dirty bass-ness with a fiendish hook.

The band members’ pedigrees include stints in Silverfish, Mephisto Grande, Giant Paw, A Suitable Case For Treatment, and Headbutt. Together they are muscular and hypnotic.

Lampost Gullivers are playing The Victoria in Dalston on Friday 13th appropriately enough, and they wrote us a few lines about their gear.

Liam Ings-Reeves

Liam Ings-Reeves performs vocals and plays guitar. He uses a Big Muff distortion pedal and a Danelectro Guitar. He has both a Peavey Bandit 112 Transtube Series and Marshall Valvestate VS100 Orange Series amps. The Peavey he got when 16 and has “served me well over the years.”

Jon Aye Mitchell

Jon Aye Mitchell plays a Pearl Masters five piece drum kit, with Maple Shells. He has Zildjian Avedis cymbals, a single Iron Cobra bass pedal and prefers to use either Promark or Zildjian 2A sticks.

He also points out that on track 1 of the album he plays two gongs, obtained from car boot sales and bells made from roto toms. On track 4 he uses a football rattle at the beginning and Liam uses a vocal sample. Track 9 features bowed gong samples. Jon says that he would be very happy to endorse Zildjian products.

Chris P. Mowforth

Chris P. Mowforth prefers using his Ampeg SVT 240 volt / 500 watt amplifier. It has a transformer to change it from an American power supply. He can run the amp with a 2 x 15” Black Widow speaker cabinet. However it is often simply easier and more reliable to bring a 100 watt HH Bassamp Combo amp on wheels to gigs.

He has an Ibanez Roadstar II series bass but was told it would last him a life time, when sold it. Therefore it now largely stays at home, like a picture of Dorian Grey. Live he uses a highly stickered Yamaha RBX200 bass. He initially tunes up with a Korg DT-10 BR digital tuner. He enjoys stomping on a ProCo Rat 2 pedal and uses a Boss Turbo Distortion DS-2 pedal for a further boost. He favours Whirlwind leads but enjoys using a cultish curly one too. The last strings he bought were a set of Ernie Ball roundwound regular Slinkys.

Here’s a video from an early gig in Oxford.