Spector

London, Spring 2011. Like a ghost in the machine of modern pop music, the spectre of Spector is rising. Here is a new band who are unlike any other around right now. They’ve got big ideas and big songs with even bigger hooks. They’ve cooked-up a new kind of peculiarly English power pop; pitched somewhere between Roxy Music and The Strokes, The Killers and Kanye West, Pulp and R ‘n’ B and Frank Sinatra. Nobody saw it coming but is was this, it turns out, that we’ve been waiting for since the last of the Next Big Things.

”This whole Spector thing started out totally as a bedroom project. I was cutting samples from vinyl and writing songs around that; listening to a lot of J. Dilla, a lot of hip hop. I was using an MPC, a laptop and a crappy little Casio keyboard.” How did these modest forays into solo writing swell up into the big sound of the big band that is Spector in 2011? ”It just evolved, gradually, from this very insular, personal project into a proper band,” explains Fred; ”Somewhere along the line I think I remembered the way that I felt when I was watching all those great indie bands that got me into music in the first place: The Strokes, Interpol, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All that raw energy that you just can’t get with a laptop project that you’re doing in your bedroom.” With that in mind, Fred enlisted friends, Christopher Burman (guitar), Thomas Shickle (bass), Jed Cullen (synth and guitar) and Danny Blandy (drums). Spector was born.