Will and Pamela

Last Friday, Sophia's piano player Will Foster had to sit in the same room as Pamela Anderson for the duration of the recording of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC1). We send him our deepest condolences.
(Will had to play with The Tears on that same show.)

Primavera Sound Festival (updated)

The Primavera Sound Festival has revealed it's line-up. Sophia will play on Friday 27.05 at the 'Danzka CD Drome' which is "devoted to promote the newest pop, rock and electronic music acts both local and international".
This is the line up for that stage on Saturday:
18:00 Sr. Chinarro
19:00 Vetiver
20:00 Micah P. Hinson
21:00 David Thomas & Two Pale Boys
22:00 Kristin Hersh
23:00 Sondre Lerche
0:45 Sophia
1:45 Psychic Tv
3:00 Piano Magic
4:00 Nathan Fake
5:00 Optimo Dj's

Other great band at the festival include:
The Arcade Fire, New Order, Isis, Mercury Rev, Sons & Daughters, Sonic Youth, Gang of Four, M83, Echo & The Bunnymen, Iggy & The Stooges, Tortoise,...

Radio.Blog

There's a new feature on the blog: Radio.Blog. It's a nice piece of flash software that I can use as a sort of private radio station. All the tracks are streamed and load pretty quickly. Quality is only 64 kbps, but then again: you can always buy the cd! :-) The radioblog is more of a teaser.
At the moment I've listed some Flower Shop bands and 2 covers of Sophia's 'So slow'. The Tex La Homa one has been on the site for quite some time, but the version by The Shallows will be new to most of you.
If you're done reading the blog you can always lauch the player as a pop-up (right bottom of the player), close the blog and continue listening.
I've already had some reports by Mac users that the Radio does not show up on the main page of the blog. They had to click on one of the 'Previous posts' before they got the player. I hope to fix that soon...

Adam Franklin on Sophia

Here's a paragraph form a recent Adam Franklin (Swervedriver, Sophia collective, Toshack Highway) interview, where he talks about his work for Sophia.

And, Sophia is something that I've done off and on for quite a few years now. Me and Steve George first did some shows in Copenhagen and Cologne I think in 1997, and then carried on doing Sophia tours in between the Swervedriver stuff - and the contrast couldn't have been greater! It seemed like we'd go from these raucous rocking shows in the USA and Australia to these quiet considered shows in France and Belgium where we'd be sitting down on stage. Sophia's more of a rock thing again now though - we're even standing up again!
And the last little stint just round Europe before Christmas we had a string quartet with us so there were nine of us on stage, it was fun. Also Jeff and Will, who are really the core of Sophia on drums and piano also did the very first Toshack gigs over here in the US.
(interview by Larry Queen for Queensizemusic.com)

The Zincs

James Elkington aka The Zincs has just released a new album called 'Dimmer'.
James is a former member of Flower Shop band Elevate and was also a member of the Sophia collective. There's also a song on Sophia's recent Collections:One cd called Zinc, which was recorded in 1998 with James Elkington on drums and guitar.
I haven't actually found the new album yet so I can't tell you what it sounds like, but the reviews I've read were all quite positive. The album is out on Thrill Jockey.