ROBOTS & ELECTRONIC BRAINS

Number One Cup, 12th June 1997

Now that Blue Rose has been absorbed by Richard Branson's sprawling V2 monster, big things look possible for Number One Cup (and hopefully also for label-mates Olivia Tremor Control), doyens of the US College movement with a healthy lo-fi pop edge and some minging good tunes. Well-matched, then, with tour-mates Urusei Yatsura who approach the guitar thing from a different angle yet still come up with a hint of pop beneath the distortion. Seth (guitarist with Number One Cup) certainly thinks so, picking them as the Good to go with Shell Oil (the Bad) and his Ugly right eye when confronted with the Clint Eastwood Words and Objects Number 8 machine before their Boatrace gig.

Bike
Dismissing Pavement comparisons with a contemptuous sneer and rubbishing the frankly ludicrous nod towards Cable ("we played with them twice, they're nice guys but...we don't sound like them") in the Melody Maker review of the "Wrecked by Lions" LP, Seth reckons that the N1C sound owes a debt to "70s Bowie, New Wave stuff like Talking Heads, early Cure, the Fall and recently we've been listening to a band out of Boston called Karate.."

Boat
"...and in the van over here we were listening to the third Velvet Underground album, that's a great record..I sometimes wish I didn't know all that old stuff, it'd be good to go back and rediscover it all".

With a wistful look in his eye, he joined just about every American that's ever played on this interview machine by choosing

Lorry
"..but we don't have that word in the States! Hmm, our booking agent is Unforgiven - he's fired actually - not for this tour, but for the one we did in the US just recently. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong, the worst thing was he had us stuck in this club in some frontier town in Montana, y'know people with raccoon caps and rifles over their shoulders. We played with a local funk band which was bad enough but they had this moment in their set when they all took off their shirts to reveal their new nipple rings. That's when we knew we were in trouble."

Pot
"Gnocchi. All you have to do is take the pasta and flour and roll them up into dumplings, it's very easy."

Seth's the only member of the band who does interviews and he likes to keep them short and sweet, much like their set which was plagued by technical troubles but shone through in places. He's also into talking about the music: "for me, interviews are just like..if you ask me a question, I'll answer it, I'm not like "Oh I really wish someone would ask me about that, cos I really wanna talk about it"....We get the Spice Girls questions, and the "who would you kill if you had one bullet?" ones, none of that's of interest to me. I'd rather talk about the music, cos that's what we're here for"

Which doesn't make him the ideal candidate for the Lazy Journalist treatment but frankly, with the quality of stuff his band are putting out, he doesn't need to talk about the music...it more that speaks for itself.

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