The last album made on my beloved portable eight track, this time from 2002. I had an idea for a band called ‘King Buffalo King’, all heavy of horns and thick with percussion; storming music for my-then 26 year-old mind.

We recorded the drum set in Tom Shotton’s parent’s living room with him drumming on five of the eight tunes. Everything else was self-recorded in my old living room in Teddington, in a flat high amongst the trees. We also had a lovely sounding reverberant stairwell outside the flat, and I’d often record out there as well. Then one day I was playing a ghostly wailing kazoo line and a neighbour shouted up ‘stop making that bloody noise’. Point taken.

I never found the horn players, but I picked up my old clarinet from my mum’s place and began working out notes. I never wanted to play the clarinet, but my parents had said a violin was expensive and ‘you’ve never stuck to anything in your life’ (I was around eight at the time, tough childhood), so if I learned my brother’s clarinet for an unspecific amount of time I could have a violin. I did, I learned ‘we three kings’ and some other classics, but I never got the violin. Anyway. So years later I found I could noodle in a couple of keys on the clarinet and took to playing through a distortion pedal for more bite. I borrowed a melodica and used that too.

Buying percussion kind of became an obsession, grabbing something or other most days on the way back from University, inspired by early Zappa/Mothers and avant-classical, 70s jazz and world music records. It soon got out of control, least of all financially, and I was broke for my final year; I could either eat lunch and walk a few miles there and back, or get the bus and not eat all day. Still, I found an affinity for glockenspiel and triangle especially, and a couple of years later found myself doing some session glockenspiel work, including doing a freebie at Abbey Road, because, well, it’s bloody Abbey Road.

People who mock triangles don’t listen to enough funk records.

When I got a band together at the end of the year it took on a more pastoral sound and we became 'A Buffalo Crossing'. So this album never saw the light of day, and here it is, 16 years later. I hope you like it.

Tom Shotton - Drum set on tracks 02 - 06
Matt Rigsby Smith - Percussion, bass, melodica, guitars, clarinet, organ, synth, cello samples, wood flutes, kazoo in stairwell, drums on 'Thank Goodness for Bena' and 'Little Bear'

Buffalo design by Richard Davis, cover by Matt

Many thanks to Alex Lewis, Antony Finch for his listening ears and support, and to Louise for everything.


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