大象传媒

Pandot

It was Jack's idea to have a go at making music. He convinced his sister Charlotte, eight years Jack's junior, to help with the recordings which soon made their way to friends of theirs.

"We let other people hear them and, since they didn't hate them, we made more," Jack explains.

Early praise came from Norfolk band Bearsuit and Radio One's Huw Stephens.

"Charlotte set up our MySpace and added lots of friends. She also contacted Ian from Bearsuit and he said he liked our music, which was very cool and gave us the legitimacy to carry on.

"I sent a CD to Huw Stephens and months later somebody told us 'well done on getting played on the radio last night'. We had to track down when we were played - he said some nice things about us on the air."

Although heartened by the coverage, Jack was taken aback by the potential expectation for Pandot's new material to meet the benchmark set by their early demos set.

"When we got played on the radio I started freaking out a bit, thinking that I'd have to start writing songs right now to capitalise on it. But this meant I couldn't write songs for ages.

"I'm trying to stay relaxed and see it as a side project, which helps, but not worrying about how it should sound and losing any spark which was there before."

Pandot live

When I spoke to Jack at the start of July 2008 the band were gearing up for a performance at Swanfest in Ipswich, only their third or so gig and the first one in over eight months.

"It's partly because we're not very proactive in asking people for gigs but we also live in different towns now - Charly lives in Stowmarket but I moved to Hertfordshire recently.

"I also find the idea of playing live kind of scary, so Charly is always pestering me to get gigs but I'm like 'can't we just record?'."

There seems to be a lot of instruments on the go in Pandot's recordings, so how does their live sound fare?

"We have a drum machine which is pre programmed. We get that going and then I tend to play guitar and Charly plays keyboard - that's mainly it, sometimes we'll have a glockenspiel and a few other bits.

"When we used to use a four track we'd be like 'oh, we need to use up the rest of the tracks so we'll record a few more instruments'. Live, it's a bit less subtle, a bit louder and a bit flashier."

Pandot are amongst the new Suffolk bands trying to do something different - producing music which doesn't have a formulaic song structure and isn't designed specifically for daytime radio.

This leftfield and independent spirit seems to be reflected in Pandot's hometown of Stowmarket, where Jack says things are slowly changing.

"When I was younger there was a great blues cover band, Built For Comfort, but there wasn't much going on before I went to uni.

"Stowmarket seems a lot cooler now. Charly's friends put on gigs and have bands that are more experimental - when I was young there wasn't much like this going on."

As for Pandot, once their appearance at Swanfest is behind them they'll get down to working on some new material.

But with a wide list of new influences, who knows what it will sound like.

"Recently Charly really likes M.I.A and I've been listening to a lot of hip hop - we also like chart pop. Architecture in Helskinki, Help She Can't Swim and these kind of pop indie bands have all been an influence.

"These are the kind of bands that I was into and I thrust into Charly and made her listen to them. She really liked them too, which was cool.

"At the moment we're trying to write seven or eight cohesive songs to make an album but we don't have a great work ethic, which is a bit frustrating."