Shooting Crayfish
8
songs
2.2K
plays
Y'Think? Y'Think?
Pencil Mess Pencil Mess
Fish Fingers Fish Fingers
An Aligator An Aligator
Marvin Medium Marvin Medium
A straight up Ska Punk song about how Flopsy watches you in bed. Keep one eye open when sleeping kids.
Show all (8)
Ska-Punk-Rock-Indie-Surf-Comedy from Exeter, Devon, UK.Band/artist history
Shooting Crayfish: A History
The story begins at King's School in Ottery St. Mary, a weird little place where pastimes involve running around with flaming barrels of tar and chucking water at children dressed as pixies. Tom and Flopsy were painting the backdrop for the school's production of 'Annie Get Your Gun'. John was probably meant to be helping too, but more likely he was chatting up some girl called Eleanor. Or was it Fran? Or Eleanor? Bugger it, even he can't tell.
Painting was going slowly as Tom and Flops just kept playing music and leaving everyone else to do the work. Then the momentous conversation of "Wanna start a band?" "OK" came from nowhere and Shooting Crayfish, at least in concept were born. Little did they know at that time what a small effect it would have on the world.
It was around this point that Charlie heard of Flops and Tom's plan of world domination and made a mental note never to be in the band.
Somewhat stupidly for a band with only two members, Tom and Flops started writing songs. The first fruit of their lunchtime in the art room's labour was 'It's Hard To Be Gay (When You're A Mouse)', basically a stupidly simple song with bloody awful lyrics about dead gay mice. It should be terrible. Somehow, it's just bad. Anyway, they were proud at the time and thought some new recruits would be handy.
In a break from chatting up Eleanor/ Fran / Eleanor, John was convinced to join the band on drums, basically for a bit of a laugh and the prospect, some point in the future, of some more women. John is an incredibly talented musician and a dashingly handsome chap who at that point couldn't play drums at all. But that was just a small technicality. He got an old kit down from the attic and eventually overcame his fears of actually playing in front of the rest of the band and is now more than adequate.
Being the nice kind folks they are, Charlie, Flops and Tom were roped in to playing a song for some old folk who had been invited into the school for the day. After a tear jerkingly brilliant performance of '3 Speed' by the Eels, Charlie went against all his principles and decided to join Shooting Crayfish on bass, but only temporarily. We'd been offered a gig at the school's prom and he just fancied some free beers.
In the meantime, the Crayfish managed to find time to record sketchy versions of what would become the 'How To Dress Sexy For Grown-Ups EP'. Recorded in Flopsy's bedroom, it went so well that Charlie grudgingly joined the band permanently and a few rough tapes went on sale. Then followed good little set at the Prom with a few Crayfish Classics thrown in for good measure and a terrible gig at Double Locks where the band had to apologise for their own performance.
Despite all this, for some reason we were able to recruit more members. We were missing a brass section, something pretty vital to a Ska Punk band, and eventually after a long time managed to convinced Kyle 'Ghengis' Smith to join on sax along with Mr. Tom 'Lurch' Wakefield. We were now searching for a trumpet player and a trombonist. Our good Friend Dan Ford had a trombone, and even got credited with playing it on the EP, until we realised all he could do with the thing at that time was run around it, so we gave that idea a miss for a while at least. Flops was desperately searching for a trumpet player and it was only when Tom reminded him that his brother played the damn thing that Will joined, and the line up, for now was complete.
Or so it seemed, until the arrival of Summer 2002. Wakefield and Ghengis, the clever beggars that they are, decided to sod off to University, making gigging with them increasingly difficult. We drafted in Ben, a friend Flopsy and John knew from Big Band shenanignas to stand in on alto sax when they weren't there and to play tenor when they were, giving us a brass section of at least 2 people and on a good day, 4. Ben first played with us at our show at the Cavern supporting Dem Brooklyn Bums.
From there, things went from strength to strength to slight weakness to a bit stronger to massive delcine to pretty strong again. This makes our history look a lot more turbulent than it actually is, in fact, we're just lazy. We've played some great shows with fantastic / famous (are they the same?) bands such as The Selecter, Adequate 7, Jesse James, Not Katies, 4ft Fingers, Mad Caddies and Reuben and found time to release a second EP (some of us call it 'Musical Womb', others don't) which has had a lot of highly respected people respond with comments such as 'Hmm' and 'Listenable' and some less respected people go nucking futs.
So then a few more of us went to University. Fate being the kind mistress that it is happened to land Tom & Charlie both in London and provide Tom with an 8 track, on which they were able to spend the year demo-ing new material and debuting it to unsuspecting London audiences in smoky student bar acoustic sessions where both minds and PA systems were blown. The rendition of 'The Swashbuckler' from one such show has been recorded and sounds monumental. Returning home with about 30 new songs, they picked the best ones, and played them to the Crayfish. Some of them loved it. One, Flopsy, loved it so much he decided to retire from his role as a front man and take up drums and production duties. As for John and Ben, they became increasingly involved in other aspects of their busy lives and for now, the relationship is on hold. Thomas Wakefield wasn't entirely sure about the new bizarre direction (to be honest, it was quite a change of tact from the ska days), nor our habit of shoddy rehearsals where we learn 3 new songs one afternoon and them play them to a crowd that night, and decided to call it quits. A few very successful gigs with the new line up followed, before the recording of Shooting Crayfish's first full length, the confusingly titled 'Minty Million' LP. 12 tracks, one billion ideas. It's available to buy on this site. Shooting Crayfish love it, and sincerely hope the rest of you do too.
Soon afterwards, the Crayfish perished in a yachting accident.Contact
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