Witches get Christmassy

Come and join us at the Jericho Tavern on Saturday 8th December for our final gig of the year. Hosted by The Coo Coo Club, we'll be supported by the excellent 50FT Panda and, from London, Eddie Halliday.

Main support 50FT Panda should need no introduction here in Oxford - as Nightshift recently stated, it's all about the riffs. These guys are fantastic. We met opener Eddie Halliday at our recent Windmill gig where we were greatly impressed by his Elliot Smith-inspired songwriting. Expect great things.

Tickets are £5 in advance, or £6 on the door. Advanced tickets are available from We Got Tickets. Come and celebrate the end of a fantastic year for Witches. Hope to see you there!

Cool night

Audioscope was great last night :-) Practically every act was a highlight, and playing our set on a decent sized stage was particularly nice.

And of course, hopefully it raised a good amount for Shelter as well. Well done to the Audioscope team for putting all togther!

Here's a few pics

Audioscope

We're proud to be joining a fantastic lineup of band playing at this year's Audioscope festival, to be held at the Oxford Carling Academy on Saturday 10th November.

Kraut-rock legends Michael Rother and Dieter Mobius will be headlining this year's festival, which raises money for homeless charity Shelter. Also appearing will be Clark, The Sea and Cake, Shit and Shine, Rothko, Einstellung and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element.

Tickets are available from We Got Tickets, visit the Audioscope website for more info.

Free video download when donating to Shelter

http://witchesband.com/shelter/

Witches are raising money to support the work of Shelter. Focusing primarily on the causes of homelessness, Shelter helps more than 170,000 people a year fight for their rights, get back on their feet, and find and keep a home.

Make a donation via our Just Giving account and we'll send you a URL, username and password allowing you to download a four-track Witches video: Witches - Live and Undead.

Recorded at the Heart of Stone album launch in Oxford in September 2007, the video contains exclusive performances of four tracks from the album:

• Josef's Lament
• Taking Myself Home Again
• Heart of Stone
• At Night I Dream of Black Dogs

You'll be given an opportunity to sign up to the Shelter mailing list as part of the donation process.

http://witchesband.com/shelter/

All the best,
Witches

Brixton Windmill and Lisa Lindley-Jones

The Brixton Windmill have booked us as support for the excellent Lisa Lindley-Jones (4AD) on Saturday 17th November. We're really excited to be playing at arguably the best indie venue in London, and look forward to playing to some new faces. Also playing will be Maxwell's Daemon + Eddie Harrison, tickets cost £4 on the door.

uniTruck at Oxford Brookes

We're going to be playing one of our biggest gigs yet on Tuesday 27th November at Oxford Brookes Student Union, as part of the uniTruck lineup, to be headlined by Blood Red Shoes. The Truckers are organising a mini-indoor festival complete with astroturf and an excellent lineup spread over three stages, also featuring The Warlocks, Goldrush, The People's Revolutionary Choir, Stornaway and DJ Teddy Dubspin. Tickets cost £8: buy online or on the door.

OxJam gig tonght!

The Port Mahon has their second OxJam Oxford night tonight, starting at 8 - hope to see you there!

Album launch pics

After much prevarication by yours truly, we now have some album lauch pics on the website, courtesy of Rex Diablo - Thanks!

We've also got something special planned for the video we took at that gig as well - details coming soon...

Truck 10

Truck 10 was lots of fun (even though certain members of Witches were too wimpy to camp). Here are a few pics of my first Truck:


If you were there for our set, thanks for the response - it's great to play, but even better to see that others are enjoying it as well :-)
See if you can find yourself (and add a note) in this one:

Debut LP Heart of Stone out now!

Witches are proud to release their debut album Heart of Stone, which is now available on Amazon and iTunes. We'll also be selling the album at Truck and Audioscope, so pick up a copy whilst you're there.

Album launch gig a success

The gig went really well, I reckon. Although our set wasn't flawless, we had a really good energy on stage pushing our performance. I think it's the best gig we've done so far (and luckily others have said the same).

Having all three bands playing headline length sets (~45mins) is a good format - so long as you've got good bands, and The Workhouse and Flies Are Spies From Hell were keeping the standard high :-)

I would have jumped about to FASFH a bit more, but my headbanging days are in the past. I think they found some new dancers anyway. Quick pic:


Here's the end of the gig, from my PoV:


We've got audio and video recordings of the whole gig, so we might be able to get a nice live video put together. More on that as it develops...

Oh! bar Camden

Our first London gig was fun. Inevitably a bit disappointing compared to the great gigs we've been having in Oxford, but not a bad start :-)

Not a sauna

Apparently The Wheatsheaf's air conditioning has been fixed, which should make it a lot more pleasant playing on Saturday - Hurrah!

Heart of Stone launch gig

Tickets are now available for the Heart of Stone launch at The Wheatsheaf on Saturday 15th September, featuring performances from Witches, The Workhouse and Flies Are Spies From Hell. This will be a very special night, with all three bands playing headline sets.

Tickets are limited, so book early!

Witches launch line-up goes to London

The Witches album launch line-up will be playing at The Oh! Bar in Camden, London on Wednesday 12th September 2007. Full lineup: Flies Are Spies From Hell, The Workhouse, Witches and Dirty Jaguar. We'll be on quite early, probably about 9pm, so if you're in London this week come and see some excellent Oxford bands. Oh, and the album will be on sale too.

Witches on the BBC

Saturday was fun - we were on The Download - BBC Radio Oxford's local music program - playing tracks off of the album live and acoustic.

And that's real live, none of this pre-recorded live business! Having said that, you can listen to a recording of the live show on BBC internet radio. It's only available for a week though, so if you haven't heard it - be quick!

It was good fun to do, and I particularly enjoyed the banter between the hosts Tim and David this week :-)

Flies are Spies from Hell

Wednesday was another sweaty night in The Wheatsheaf, for Russian Circles, with sunnyvale noise sub-element, This Town Needs Guns and Flies are Spies from Hell , but it was worth it :-)

It was a very good night of music, and I'm even happier then before that FASFH are on the bill for our launch gig. Check out the pics:


Oh, and Hi to Jason, Scott, and Tom - hope to see you on the 15th!

Flash! Bang!

Audioscope 2007

We're proud to be joining a fantastic lineup of band playing at this year's Audioscope festival, to be held at the Oxford Carling Academy on Saturday 10th November.

Kraut-rock legends Michael Rother and Dieter Mobius will be headlining this year's festival, which raises money for homeless charity Shelter. Also appearing will be Dalek, The Sea and Cake, Shit and Shine, Rothko, Einstellung and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element.

Tickets will be on sale soon - keep an eye on the Audioscope website for more info.

Yay album review!

Many thanks to Oxfordbands.com who are the first to review the new Witches album Heart of Stone. We received a glowing review from Colin MacKinnon, and encourage everyone to go check out the site, which contains lots of information about Oxford bands, including reviews, news features, MP3 downloads and more.

Yay Nightshift cover!

We are very excited about being on the cover of the August edition of Nightshift.
Ronan Munro interviews Dave G and finds out more about the forthcoming album. We would like thank Ronan for helping Witches get the word out - the suitcase of drugs and cash is on the way.

Truck

Truck Festival has had to be postponed due to the crazy mental flooding we've been experiencing this summer. Fear not, however - the festival will now take place over the weekend Saturday 22nd - Sunday 23rd September. We'll be playing on the Lounge Stage on the Sunday at 11am. Keep an eye on the festival website for more info.

Oxjam 2007

Our friend Stuart from Oxfordbands is organising an Oxjam fundraiser, to be held at the Port Mahon on Wednesday 17th October 2007. We'll be headlining the gig, with excellent support from Harry Angel, Richard Walters and Mewgatz. This will be a good chance to see all four acts in a very intimate setting as well as doing your bit for a very worthy cause.

More album recording pics

I found some more album recording pics, from June, including a nice (IMHO) shot from the control room as Benek does a take.

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Photo shoot

Here are a quick couple of pics from our photo shoot a little while back.

Witches at Charlbury 2007

Here's a nice video from the Beard Museum stage at Charlbury Riverside festival...



That's some interesting camera work ;-)

Drum kit

It's been a while since I posted anything - I need to organise my pics - so here's a stitched pic of my drum kit...



Hopefully that's useful for any bands we do kit-share with.

More updates as soon as I get time...

Witches headline for Gappy Tooth at The Wheatsheaf

A great gig on Saturday, with lots of energy and a crowd that were into it - thanks to everyone who came, I really enjoyed it!

The Wheatsheaf was like a sauna again, there must have been a few pounds sweated off by the end of the night :-)

More photos on Flickr, and at GTI.

Album recording 2007-03-30

Here's a lovely pic of most (but not all) of our gear from the main album recording sessions. Follow the link for more photos from the studio.

Notably absent is Benek and his trumpet, because we recorded his parts in another different sesion.

Album recording

Ok, here's the first lot of pics from our recording sessions at Oxford Brookes Uni music rooms - not the first chronologically, but a nice little selection Rich Witch helped me pick out.



This session was the same day as we recorded Putting you Back in the Ground with Umair from Xmas Lights. We were very happy to find that Brookes had a harpsichord we could use :-)

Gig pics

Well, I've not got any of the album recording session photos ready yet, but I do have some photos from our most recent Zodiac gig. Many thanks to Hamayun for taking them :-)

Album in the works

We've been working hard on our first album - now a good way through the mixing stage. We've got a few photos and things from making the album which I'll be posting here RSN :-)

Hello world!

Hi, here's a first post for the Witches blog - Go to http://www.witchesband.com/ for more about Witches...