hello, we are johnny foreigner, an indie-rock band from birmingham, england.
our names are alexei, junior and kelly.
we played our first shows at christmas 2005
our first two singles were released by the laundrette recording company of sheffield. we myspaced them and said, will you put our records out and they said, ok then. being in a band = easy..
our first release was a lovely handmade sleeve 7″ of sometimes, in the bullring/camp kelly calm that came out winter 06. we recorded it ourselves. it sounds like this - DundundundundundunFZZZTSPKOWSSSSSSSSH, but it still got played on radio one and sold out in a month. alexei lost his.
the second single was a split 7″ with Sunset Cinema Club, covering each others songs. we do yes! you talk too fast and scc’s ninki vs dingle, they do down on the farm and candles, a really old song of ours that they do loaaaaaaaads better. we got dom to record it all and it got played on more radio shows and people started being nice about us on teh interent. some of these people wrote blogs and stuff we read all the time, there were many rosy cheeked moments.
we carried on playing shows till we had LITERALLY NO MONEY AT ALL, and in autumn 2007 we signed a proper record deal with Best Before Records. in winter we released an EP called arcs across the city, recorded by Harvey Birell at super-legendary Southern Studios. we got our friend lewes herriot to do th artwork. the first run came with a special 3-d popup sleeve. which meant no-one made any money but it looked rad. the ep got super-lush reviews, including 10/10 on brian may’s least favourite music website.
we spent november in new york making an album proper, called waited up till it was light, with popgenius machine. we came back, did christmas, and pretty much spent the whole of 2008 touring ourselves round the island with anyone who’d have us. bffl: operator please, los campesinos!, the mae shi, the subways, the young knives, forward russia, sky larkin, blood red shoes, tubelord. i don’t think we met anyone in a band we met who we didnt hug at some point.
our album came out, the music press decided we were HOT STUFF and loads of people bought it or robbed it off the internet and said yay this is good and started singing songs back at us. some singles fell of the album, they got played on Teh Radio and Teh Television enough to make people think we’d Made It and now took helicopters everywhere. we got very flattered indeed and spent most of the summer playing in fields or to people marginally more drunk than ourselves. it was pretty spesh.
we went to japan for a bit too. every rumour or extreme anecdote about japan you’ve ever heard is true, it’s like playing a game about being in a band, only with all the cheats on. we were awed, humbled, excited, drunk, high, blissful and grateful in equal measure.
anyways, yeh, came back, did leeds, did reading, did reading again superdrained and wasted at 1am, went out on tour with our spiritual lovers dananananaykroyd, and then the futureheads took us around for a while and we had some big stage woooooooo moments, then went home to sleep a bit
it was like holding yr breath for a whole year, we got giddier and giddier and more jumbled and by the time we’d exhaled, it was christmas and we were home and it was cold and we were broke.
so we escaped and went to europe with bestfwends sky larkins. it was pretty idylic, if yr able to sleep in a sitting position and like being constantly in-gin. which we are and do.
after that, alex newport asked if he could make a record with us. because he’s a legend and we like recording as far away from home as budget allows, we said YES! can we sleep at the studio? and he said, um, you can but theres no showers.
so the adults hooked us up with an apartment above some rehearsal rooms in williamsburg amongst the uberrich hipsters and 24hr diners, and we lived of cheap sandwiches and dollar menu (actually 1.19 with NY tax) and poured ourselves into a bunch of songs which you get to hear at the end of september. we had an awesome carthartic funtimes making it. i tried to keep a diary but it turned into: guitars guitars guitars sing sing sleep guitars eat guitars guiatsr gyuatrrs singgsihng sinfi hguyartsrsrsuys singdis ylspep
after we’d finished, we got the plane home, had like, 8 hours in bed and went back out on tour with 100 reasons. a bunch of giant fun bouncy shows. i wish i could be more descriptive, the whole tour is like a giant drunken daze. i made colins wife a rude jade goody tshirt..
we had a few weeks to sleep and then we went out around england again, this time with the super-amazing copy halo, calories and tubelord. it was epic, and pretty righteous filling venues we couldn’t last year with all the hype. kelly made some videos about it.
and that sort of brings to about now. we have a more relaxed summer ahead, our second albums is called grace and the bigger picture and is out in autumn, and then we’ll doubtless do more fun band stuff.
come say hi sometime yeh?
