motel void

Bobsled Team play dreamy guitar pop noise and have been steadily gaining momentum due to support from BBC Introducing as well as a smattering of the best small blogs around.

MOTEL VOID: You’re from Belfast, Northern Ireland. How would you describe the current music scene there? Could you say that you are a part of it?

BOBSLED TEAM: Hi! First off, thanks so much for having us. Motel Void is such a great supporter of independent artists and bands – we are delighted to be here!

Yes, we are from Belfast. We live in the East of the City, and we are surrounded by so many bohemian people doing lots of cool and crazy arty things. It’s a very inspiring place to live and create. Lots of artists and musicians floating about. Everyone is very supportive of each other.

We’re so lucky to have great record shops, places like Starr Records, Dragon Records and Sound Advice, that really champion the local music scene. They are run by nice, funny characters who are so passionate about music. They are wonderful places to hang out, dig for oddities, drink coffee, talk about weird and random underground bands. Marion Hawkes at Sound Advice has recently gotten me into all this bizarre stuff. She feeds our Alaskan Malamute dog biscuits while we listen to the cosmic swirling of avant-garde jazz. Our first gig was actually above Starr Records in the centre of Belfast. They organised everything for us and we managed to sell out the venue. For us it doesn’t get much more awesome than that – playing at your local record shop where you pick up copies of albums by Sonic Youth, Pixies, The Raincoats to name a few. Jeff, the owner, is like a character from High Fidelity, you never know what you will end up talking about. I think one week we were discussing the relative merits of laser discs. It’s definitely a welcoming place, whether you are a touring or local band.

MOTEL VOID: Could you recommend your favorite local artists and venues in Belfast?

BOBSLED TEAM: The Banana Block, Black Box, Oh Yeah Centre, and The Limelight are nice places. Malojian is a great artist to check out. He recorded one of his albums to tape with Steve Albini. You can see a documentary about it on YouTube. We were delighted that he actually bought our vinyl one random day and posted about it on his Instagram – a little nudge of encouragement.

MOTEL VOID: I really loved your 2021 single ‘Hey Kid’ which was a part of your album ‘The Colours Blur’. How are you satisfied with the reception of the record?

BOBSLED TEAM: Thanks so much! We are over the moon with the reception of The Colours Blur. I thought the songs would have just disappeared into the void, to be honest, as there is so much music being released. Yet, to our surprise we heard This Pink Moon being played on the radio, and then people started saying lovely things about it. Suddenly, more songs started getting picked up in these great small blogs, next BBC Introducing gave us more amazing support, and then BBC Radio 6 played us. We subsequently found ourselves being long listed for the Northern Ireland Music Prise. It’s nice people comment that we seem to have our own kind of bobsled team sound, a mix of indie, shoegaze, slacker, jangle pop, guitar noise.

Don’t get me wrong, we are still very much a very small independent act. We love the DIY aspect of it. I’ve always been attracted to the underground scene, bands on the margin. Like when Sonic Youth was making and selling their own little zines.

MOTEL VOID: I’m a big fan of your new single Analita as well. Will it be a part of your new release?

BOBSLED TEAM: So glad you like it! Analita is from our sophomore album. We are just finishing the mixing and mastering. We kind of disappeared for a year when I fell in love with the sounds of old tube amps. Little 5-watt tweed amps from the 1950s which are so battered and worn. We normally record with an Orange amp and Fender Twin Reverb, that’s our sound live, but this time around we started playing with these vintage amps that made such a fuzzy, warm sound. We had no preconceptions about what the album should be or sound like. Songs just started happening inspired by all that warm fuzz. Some are indie rock, some with quite a slacker vibe, others a little shoegaze. The drums sound vintage too.

MOTEL VOID: Could you tell us more about the recording and writing process of your songs?

BOBSLED TEAM: We began writing all our songs on a beat-up 8 track recorder from the 90s. We wrote a whole album on it before The Colours Blur which we might release one day. We call it the lost album (actually I think we called it The Test Run). I got in contact with a tape only studio, with the initial plan to record all these songs. However, somewhere along the line we got tired of trying to recreate the excitement of the initial demos or having to wait months to get into the studio. Some of my favourite albums are really lofi in flavour like Pavement’s Slanted Enchanted. Now, we like to record when we are inspired, when the song is fresh and maybe at the point of falling apart because it hasn’t yet been fully formed. So, we do it ourselves.

MOTEL VOID: Your plans for the rest of 2023? Any live shows ahead?

BOBSLED TEAM: Yup. Now the album is nearly finished, we hope to play some shows. One is being planned on a barge on the river Lagan. We also got invited to New York for a gig in the summer. We hope to get the album out again on vinyl. The Colours Blur is still available. If you want a copy on vinyl, please check out our bandcamp page. We pack and send it ourselves!