Thee Landells

The band owe their current existence – like so many before them – to the schoolyard. As teenagers, Danny (guitar/vocals) and Luke (drums/vocals) bonded over being young, lost, and frequently drunk – and their mutual obsession with music. Danny, self-taught, has been playing and writing for as long as he can remember. The like-minded, bored-but-driven Luke was given a drum kit for his sixteenth birthday. (His old man had been in a band, once upon a time.) After school, in the suburbs of east London, they decamped to Luke’s bedroom and wrote together. Seeds were sown, embers kindled. Nothing concrete came of it.
Ryan (guitar/vocals) took up his chosen instrument after finding a battered acoustic leant against the wall outside his bedroom at his parents’ house. It seemed as good a reason as any to start playing, and it wasn’t long before he was a regular on the London live scene, moving from band to band and rehearsing with the likes of Kill City and Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong. He learned the hard way that – musically – he’s not willing to compromise.
Years later, paths collided. Luke met Ryan, and introduced him to Danny. In and around London’s South East, the three of them strummed guitars, drank, drugged, and talked about starting a band. As the months dragged on, Danny walked out of his job at EMI after a war of words with his manager, and Ryan and Luke moved in together.
Further pissed-up jam sessions and stoned experimental recordings ensued, until a blown-out-of-proportion argument over some ‘misplaced’ recreational substances meant that the three of them didn’t speak for months – not until a spectacularly messy night on the tiles at a Good Shoes show threw them back together. A couple of weeks down the line, a rehearsal space had been booked.

The first Thee Landells recordings were laid down through a dirt-cheap microphone, played on crackling, sweat-encrusted instruments, and performed with the kind of wide-eyed, boozy abandon that drunks and dreamers are all too familiar with. And the songs – those ravaged, gilded slabs of gristle and harmony – are, as a wise man once said, going to blow you out of the fucking water.