We’re playing Woopie! at The Drop tonight in Stoke Newington, London.

It’s a tiny room! Doors at 21:00, free entry until 21:30, we play around 23:00.

Good luck everyone!

(oh and it’s my birthday at midnight! whoopie!)

Yay! The CD of the new album just arrived at Chap HQ.

We Are Nobody, to follow last years compilation We Are The Best, is released exclusively on entirely non-evil iTunes on 13 Feb, and available everywhere else 20 Feb. Physically, it’ll be released on CD and Vinyl. It’s full of NON-IRONIC super straight pop songs we made up last year.

It looks like this:

We’ll be touring Switzerland and Italy in February, and some shows in UK, France and Germany in March.

Here is our new video. We made it on our last tour in November. In it we drive around and express ourselves. It also features an audience in Metz, France.

This is how we’re feeling about the next few months…

Sorry about that. Our amazing new album We Are Nobody is out soon.
We’re playing a bunch of shows in Feb and March, check out the Live page.
Here’s a hilarious interview we did to help inform you about life

Hello everybody!

So far this year, we have been very busy looking both backwards and forwards, taking stock as well as preparing for what lies ahead. I wish I could think of even cheesier ways of expressing this, but my brain is all numb due to regular Codeine intake intended to ease the pain in my right heel that some twit caused by slowly driving his car over it while I was attempting to join the queue to a Tom Vek show at some monstrously hip magazine launch thing the other night. I’m not complaining, though, that was definitely the most interesting way in which I have ever sprained an ankle.

“The most interesting failure in pop history”, on the other hand, is how we recently responded to the task of defining the nature of our band in less than 140 characters, and I am here to tell you, amongst other things, how we intend to celebrate that fact.

We figured that if we were to turn being the most interesting failure in pop history into some form of success, all we would have to do is to just keep going. When sadly misguided fools like us stay around for about twenty years, they will eventually be perceived as “underground legends”.

We are fast approaching the half – way mark on our ever curious voyage to that “bit of an underground ledge” status, so our record label thought it would be a good idea to release a Chap Best Of compilation. The Greatest Hits! How we laughed! But we agreed to do it anyway because it gave us the opportunity to include a new song called ” Campaign Trail” and a new version of our garage rock classic “Le Theme”. Needless to say, we have arranged a number of shows (see “live”) to mark the release. Can’t wait to get back on the road!

So, for those of you unfamiliar with all or some of our previous material, here is an opportunity to catch up and save time! Confusingly, the compilation won’t be called “We are the most interesting failure in pop history” or even “We are halfway to becoming an underground legend”, but instead simply “We Are The Best”! Lo Recordings will release it in a month’s time or so, there will be a single featuring said ” Campaign Trail”.

That single will be a split between our song and “Architects” by  all – round 21st century renaissance man Larry Seftel (aka Seftel) who together with professional partner David Day created the marvellous video to “We’ll See To Your Breakdown” (see below) AND will be directing the video to our song of the split single! Surely you won’t be able to resist such an intricate web of creativity…

BUT, as if all that wasn’t confusing enough, we have also just finished A NEW ALBUM, due for release early next year! Having spent the last ten years dealing in all kinds of semi – humorous referentialism we decided to experiment and make a pop album DEVOID OF IRONY. It’s catchy and simple sounding and we’re loving it! Making it taught us a lot: Mostly, that we will never be REAL  SINGERS. But I guess the fact that it has our voices on it rather than a REAL SINGER’S means our music hasn’t lost its Chappyness.

Anyway, that new album, showing The New Us, will be called “We Are Nobody”. We will attempt to perform a song or two from it during our upcoming tour.

Just to recap:  single, some shows, ”We Are The Best”, “We Are Nobody”. Exact release  dates/ 2012 tour dates to follow.

Geez, that was exhausting.

Nice. We have a new amazing video, directed by Larry Seftel and David Day, for the track “We’ll see to your Breakdown”. It was meant to be released along with our latest digital only release “Your latest Breakdown” whose existence you probably hadn’t noticed and you’re not to blame. Should you enquire within the realms for various digital distributors you might discover that “Your latest Breakdown” contains other appealing pleasures, such as a Dire Straits cover and a super nice remix by the legendary Family Fodder. Anyway, the video has produced many interesting and interested reactions and is our best so far. Have fun!

since this “hauntology” concept seems to continue being all the rage, we thought we’d jump the bandwagon. as far as i can tell, if someone who is not very old takes elements of an old song (i.e. one which was popular when said someone was a toddler), slows them down and puts a load of reverb on them, this constitues an act of “hauntological” music making, the idea being that somehow the hauntologist’s subconcsious is haunted by the old radio smash hit from their very early life and this haunting finds its way into the character of the new piece of music. i always figured there isn’t a great deal of haunting going on anywhere in pop music, not even in the  current revival of what was once called, i believe, “shoegaze” . what IS going on is  just some very basic digital effects treatment of songs which have been omnipresent since the eighties and through the internet are almost more easily available than during the days of their release, which eliminates their potential to haunt anything or anyone as if from a distant past.   but what do i know. anyhow, to prove this point, keith took one of our own, very recent songs (which is by no means omnipresent) and slowed it right down and – bingo! it sounds very “hauntological”, although no-one’s subconscious was ever penetrated by it twenty-odd years ago. it also sounds rather nice, methinks. here it is:

http://thechap.bandcamp.com/track/even-your-friend-slow-mix

Hello, as some of you may have noticed, we recently released an album called “Well Done Europe” . On it, there is a little song called “We Work In Bars”. It’s about people who work in bars. Bingo! Our friend Harry Rambaut recently shot a video for it, featuring us – in a pub!
Being pretty rad n unconventional types, we’re unleashing the video to that song NOW, although it came out months ago and has since been followed by ANOTHER single with another video. But then, this here video is all stop frame live action, i.e. Harry made us spend many mornings in that particular pub, only to throw buckets of water and pints of ale at us, make us change seats and facial expressions every five seconds for hours on end or get us to fall off a bar stool in twenty stages. In short: it took a long time to make. Here it is. Enjoy!

P.S. : another video for another song is underway. Apparently, a whole team of professionals is working on it around the clock since it’s rather complicated to make. More soon.

When I need cheering up, I find it helpful to watch this little video.

They used to play with Prince, so you know they have good taste.

If you’re in Berlin tonight, you should get down to Festsaal Kreuzberg for the Puschen 10th birthday party!