Bloody Social

“Your words are flying round my head like fire-flies - kick-start my high.”

When I move to another city, it’s usually because of a song. It’s always because of a song. I just have to hear one song and next thing I’m booking a flight, packing my bags and moving on to the sound of something new, some old dream, some sound I cannot help but chase.

And I’ve been hanging round aimlessly somewhere in Scotland where the tunes are drying up and the bands all look the same. There just isn’t enough going on and it’s boring me too, too much. Yeah, so there’s The View and similar, and Babyshambles if Pete bothers to turn up, but I can’t recall anyone I’d actually chase round here. It takes something special to make me spark up and abandon all else just for an instinct. It was the instinct that made me randomly go to Basement Club one night the end of last summer (and become properly acquainted with Rockfeedback), the feeling I felt when I first heard the Libertines when I was fifteen. It’s the kind of feeling that I have learned not to ignore.

So when I heard The Bloody Social, I breathed one long sigh of relief and tobacco smoke, that after all this trawling through pretty mediocre music I had found something real.

“Don’t let me down - I’ve been running round cities just trying to hear the sound”

Couldn’t put it better myself. You know you’ve found something when all the lyrics on an EP articulate completely all the fragmented thoughts that have been fluttering round your head and making you sick. It’s like smoking a cigarette after giving up for too long. It’s like falling in love with your big bad addiction all over again. All those other bands – they’re like Nicorete Patches. They’re just not enough.

So now that I’ve found The Bloody Social I feel much better. I’ve found the lust of the libertine all over again. I’m starting to wonder how I lived without them so long. We’re going to look back on the past few years and call it The Void: that awful time in between the break-up of the Libertines and Now – when The Bloody Social set the air on fire. It’ll be one of those times similar to rationing during the war, and we’ll look back and think, How the hell did we get through it?

We got through it because we knew that sooner or later, there would be a band that would relieve our tired and dirty souls, there just had to be. And here it is. The Bloody Social. Maybe not everyone will agree with me. Well as they sing:

“I’ve been walking round this town, the dirty old place is bringing me down, and I don’t care much anymore…”

Because enough people do agree with me. Word in New York is that they’re beautiful, lyrically and physically. The lead singer, Jamie Burke, an Englishman in New York, (representing Great Britannia pretty well I’d say) is a notorious Casanova... The other band members are pretty hot, too. They’re not called “Bloody Social” for nothing. But that’s not the point. They have the sound and that’s all that matters. They’re playing rock and blues and they mean it. It’s not some stupid ego-trip or fame-trail or pathetic little song of insincerity. All four songs on their EP are the real thing: yearning, lust, heartache, world-weariness, libertine insolence defiant as Victorian decadence, tales of debauchery, the deep low sultry voice of Jamie Burke, abandoned, lyrical, filthy, and yet comforting in a way I can’t describe.

There are too many songs right now that are like a lick of an ice-cream, a kiss on the cheek, a wave in the street. They’re not enough. They’re not even close. At best they’re a little tease of something more. But I haven’t heard a decent tune in so long, and now, finally, I’ve found something that isn’t shit, and I turn it up high, collapse onto my bed and take a deep drag of tobacco and rock ‘n’ roll – played like it should always be played, satisfying the insipid void that modern music had failed to fill until now… And I start planning another little trip to another big city, trying to hear that sound…

“Don’t let me down, I’ve been running round cities just trying to hear the sound, she’s breaking down, the city you’re sleeping in can’t stop weeping now… Oh baby, you’re coming with me…”
- www.rockfeedback.com

A few months back I was invited to the opening of some new trendy joint in midtown. I figured it was going to be the usual pretentious gathering of NYC scenesters, downtown freeloaders, bankers and the usual models. I figured yeah, whatever, but decided to attend being that my friend KC is the joints events director.

To my surprise just as I got there, I ran into Laurel the lovely singer of the band Daddy and her partner in crime Matt, then I spied their other band mate Jimmy Caps about to start rocking out with 3 other dirty rocking looking dudes.

Yeah, it was an unexpected surprise when I realized these fucking dudes were cranking out some killer dirty rock&roll shit! Bloody Social is one of my new favorite bands and these cats are sure going to blow up soon. Their singer Jaime Burke is a notorious womanizer and they are receiving lots of press due to his exploits. If Jim Morrison, Diego Garcia and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion were to have pulled a train on Jonis Joplin the result would have been Bloody Social.
- www.fmfb.net

"Brit singer Jamie Burke and his band of shaggy haired New Yorkers play rock 'n' roll how it should be played, with a classic stomp reminiscent of bands like the Who and the Stooges." - Stuff Magazine, July 2007

"They have true rock-'n'-roll style," says Wheeler of Burke's band, Bloody Social, whom she has seen perform live several times. "They get everyone going when they play. A sort of sexy, stormy atmosphere fills the room and makes everyone want to dance." - Fashion Rocks 2007

"The four members of New York's Bloody Social stand disheveled around the pool table at East Village dive Joe's Bar, apparently worn out and hungover from their show the night before. The scene is fitting, with the bar's dingy decor reflecting the band's grungy aesthetic and the rough raucousness of their music, which has only come into fruition over the course of the past few months. Singer (and Calvin Klein model) Jamie Burke, drummer Drew Thomas (who intially met Jamie at the now-defunct NYC venue Scenic) and guitarist Jamie Biden began penning the group's raw, garage-tinged rock songs just a few months ago, and recruited bassist Jimmy Caputo in January. But the quartet's quick evolution and immediate buzz have been entirely organic.

"People have been really into what's been going on," Thomas says a 3 p.m. beer while the band's manager hovers to enure the infant group doesn't make any missteps. "I think the energy of the band is good." There's definitely a cool vibe in what we're playing. It was natural between us when we started playing, the way we like to play together. And Jamie's voice has a natural rawness that fits."

"We all have slightly different styles that we all branch off on by ourselves," agrees Burke, his British accent notably standing out from the rest of the band's but generally the style was the same. We all wanted to play raw rock & roll that's kind of nasty. It all kind of gets really nicely."

The band has drawn quick attention from record labels with their debut EP 'Sharpshooter' (produced by Mikki James and self-released), and is currently taking careful stock of their options. Although Bloody Social is writing songs for a full-length album, they aren't entirely certain when or where it will be released, and, according to Burke, they'll release a second EP before that album ever sees the light of day.

"We're not trying to project yet," Thomas says. "It's still very new. We're going to see where we go with out writing. We'll see what happens and where it takes us."

The prospect of finding a record deal doesn't seem to daunt the foursome, who fittingly cites their mutual influences as the Stooges, the White Stripes and Queens of the Stone Age. The real trick, it seems, will be battling the rock & roll lifestyle." - YRB Magazine Fall 2007