Karmadillo
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom | SELF
Music
Press
This band has no press
Discography
Albums
2010 Bard For Life, UkeyLove Records
2008 Covering All Basses
2006 Crunchy On The Inside
2005 Women Are Aliens From Venus, Men Are Monsters From Mars
Singles
2010 Noone Else, UkeyLoe Records
Photos
Bio
The Born Identity
The very start of Karmadillo sees Rishi returning from South America suitcase in one hand and a charango in the other. What's a charango? I hear you ask. Basically its a ukulele style instrument that used to be made from armadillo's. Larger than a uke, it has a fuller sound, making it more versatile.
After a bit of tinkering and figuring out a musical direction he was joined by James Thomas on bass. In 2005 they supported another band who had an oboe player. She was invited to record Oboe on the song Still, and then she didn’t leave, so Karmadillo welcomed the multi-talented Kate Newell to their ranks on vocals, oboe, flute and a variety of other instruments. This period saw the launch of their self released first full album in 2006 – ‘Crunchy On The Inside’. From then the move was too a full on band, complete with drums and guitar.
The period tied down the uplifting singalong songs to sad ballads. The Divine Comedy and ELO were the initial influences, channeling a Zappa-esque approach to song structure gives Karmadillo a wide variety of styles that they have stamped their authority on.
In 2010, Karmadillo made the transition to being a solo act, though still using recordings from the full on band live as backing tracks. It started off well, with Rishi's charango being used on a T-Mobile ad and the summer seeing Karmadillo voted Champion Busker at the Cambridge Buskers Festival.
2010 also saw the release of the first ever single with UkeyLove Records, Noone Else and the ‘Bard For Life’ album. Unfortunately there was a knee injury sustained over the summer which curtailed touring plans and is still being recovered from. The most recent operation was the final one and hopefully a fully fit and scissor kicking Karmadillo will be back on the road properly in 2012.
Involvement in a festival called Geekpop also saw the dawn of Professor Karmadillo. This is a project to write songs about science and is currently being developed as a stage show, with first performances due in the second half of 2011.
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