Leo Brazil and his Twitch

Magazine in the Toilet

2011-04-29T04:56:00.000-07:00

Just a quick one today as I realised it has been sometime since I blogged.

Great gig last night at Sleepers in Huddersfield, great crowd and sold a whole bunch of albums.

Good things on the horizon:

A one off catchy comedy pop tune with an accompanying video that just needs editing.

Some more gigs - Holmfirth Folk Festival on 6th May, Pickering with 3 Wise Men on 30th April and a whole clutch of gigs around my birthday on 15th May.

Lots of new songs coming together: Woman, Magazine in the Toilet, Super Amazing...

Here is a little video of me playing Woman on the banjo:

Frank

2011-01-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

Shalom!

Well, we just had the first Twitch rehearsal of 2011 after a little new year sabbatical. It felt great to have a play, seemed longer than the 18 days since our gig on new years eve. A couple more tunes from the album should be appearing in the set soon and potentially a duelling vocoder break!

The next gig is an acoustic show with just me and Dave. It is at Hepworth village hall which has been putting on quite a lot of folk gigs recently. It is a charity show as well helping out banana farmers from the Caribbean island of St Vincent. It's not even a charity, the money goes directly to them which is fantastic! There is a facebook event here -

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=179493865417451

As well as myself there is some great acts on that are well worth catching: Stefan Melbourne, Owen Phillips and The Sail Pattern.

I have been busying myself since new year working on the studio and building some baffles for the shiny new Gretsch drum kit I bought before christmas. I have also been trying to learn how to set up guitars which i've been meaning to do for years. This guitar pictured below (Frank or Frankenstein to give him his full name) started life as a Squier Tele back in 1999. Over the years I painted it a variety of different colours and patterns and upgraded the bridge pickup to a piercing Di Marzio Twang King. One day I got bored of the shitty paint job so decided to sand it down and go for a natural finish. However, my arm swiftly got tired of the sanding action so I decided to go for the 'driftwood' look and finished the job with a chisel and a blowtorch. Not exactly a professional finish but certainly unique!

Anyway, for years the guitar had been fitted with flat wound strings and used exclusively for slide work (the bad intonation made any chords sound bad) but Eddie's gift of a very nice 80s left handed ESP strat neck he saw sticking out of a skip gave me the motivation to get the beast in shape and back in action. 12 hours of trial and error sorted out the action/intonation and now with the flatwound strings and a Seymour Duncan Seth Lover in the neck it sounds beautiful.

Having just used it for a two hour rehearsal I am pretty happy with how it's turned out, it is bloody heavy though so I may try and do some more chiseling around the back and try go for a contoured strat feel!

Well, that's enough of that guitar geekery. I went to see Richard Thompson at the weekend with my dad so i'll leave you with a link to a video of him. It's amazing he's not better known, he has to be one of the greatest guitarist the world has ever seen and an amazing songwriter as well!

Dead By Dawn Records

2010-12-13T06:11:00.000-08:00

Hello again, welcome to blog #2. I have been getting the band's web stuff together and this blog is going to be the new hub for our online presence. I like the simplicity of it and the links across the top to all the other shizzle. Unfortunately myspace is still our top listing when you google us but I may redesign that to redirect here. Anyway, enough of that...

It may be slightly old news now but we are now on Huddersfield's newest label: Dead By Dawn Records.

The label has been set up by Mikey from the band Mr Shiraz - http://www.myspace.com/mrshiraz and is

going to be a showcase for the finest underground music from Huddersfield including Mr Shiraz, Pinpim and ourselves.

Anyway, the album is out now and available to download online (google us to find sources or better still go to our bandcamp), to listen to on Spotify or to order through our new bandcamp. (http://leobrazil.bandcamp.com/)

We had a fantastic album launch show at The Parish in Huddersfield with support from label mates The Coroners, afterwards I got very drunk and danced the night away to the amazing Dr Huxtable Axis Sound System, my legs hurt for days afterwards.

This was also the debut for the fifth member of The Twitch - Steven Beever. I have known Beeves for some time as the fantastic keyboards man in Huddersfield's finest funk/soul revue The Nu Popes - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nu-Popes/137713776248267 and it is a total buzz to be playing with him.

I leave you with some pictures of the album launch and a few of a gig we did for a friend's birthday fancy dress party, thanks to Beezly (http://www.flickr.com/photos/beezly/) and Leah for the pictures!

Blogasaurus

2010-12-11T06:37:00.000-08:00

Hello,

If you don't already know me, my name is Leo Brazil. Welcome to the new blog for my band: Leo Brazil and his Twitch. I have kept a blog on myspace for several years but been forced out by the constant "improvements".

This blog will contain news for the band (i've not done a round-up for quite some time on myspace so soon will post a proper blog with all the exciting developments in Twitchville) as well as music related goodness from the fantastic West Yorkshire scene and beyond.

I am currently setting up a Bandcamp site for us as well as a few other bits and bobs so stay posted for news on that!

Thanks for reading, take it east,

Leox

Each blog I will post a link to a video or something of interest, this time it's one of my favourite bands, Wilco. I've been a fan since their second album way back in the day. This is from a film of a recent tour

Wilco - The Late Greats