During the festival, bands play in rounds, progressing only if they get enough points to go through. Points can be gained from 4 sources:

• Text Vote = 1 vote
• Audience Vote = 5 votes
• Musician Vote = 20 votes
• Industry Expert Vote = 30 votes

Unfortunately Leeds isn’t a region, so we’ll be playing all our gigs in Manchester. Therefore getting a high number of audience votes is unlikely, but the audience can vote for more than one band so we’ll see. It all depends how friendly Jimmy is on the night!

The first stage is on March 10th at Jabez Clegg, which is opposite the Academy. It’s a great little venue, and we’re really looking forward to playing it.

If you’d like to come (and we hope you do!), you can buy tickets from us at £6. Alternatively, you can text vote; simply text North 2074 to 64343 (making sure there is a space between North and 2074!). Please note you can text vote as many times as you like, so if you can’y make it down on the night, try and vote at least 5 times to make up for an audience vote.

Over the next week we’ll be transforming the site to include more information, and we’ll keep you posted on our progress. We’re really looking forward to this event, hopefully it’ll be good for us!

16+. Texts cost £1.00 plus standard network charges. Please
get permission from the bill payer. Customer services: hello@ surfacefestival.com or contact us on 0800 434 607

Whilst some of us were initially sceptical due to the business model system it employs and the fact it’s pay to play in the first round, we have decided to enter it. We feel it’ll be a good experience, and who knows, it may actually lead to something.

We’ll update with more info on how to vote, when and where it is on February 1st (incidentally when voting begins ).

1. We have a new gig coming up. We’ll be playing at Carpe Diem in Leeds a week on Thursday (13th Jan). We’ll be on at 8pm apparently.

2. We can now be found on Spotify! If you have Spotify, either click this link: http://open.spotify.com/artist/1JmsGtq7Zf4rIsqoqeU2fo or search “Chanbara”.

3. We are on iTunes! Each song is 79p (even though we’re sure we set it as 20p per track). Just search “Chanbara” again to find us.

Also, as a bonus, we’re meeting with some festival organisers in a few weeks, and we might get the chance to play some small festivals in the UK.

So sorry for the lack of posts, but hopefully this one makes up for it!

We’ve decided to put on a gig. We’ll be playing at Milo in Leeds on December 13th. Joining us will be the great Propane Penny and the newly signed The Tabbs (who I’ll have to dig out a link for).

Door will be open at half 7, and it’ll be £3 in.

See you there!

UPDATE: Added a link to the Tabbs, and also corrected their name.

Follow the link if you’re interested in which plugins to use to create the perfect band blog!

Toddish – How to create a band website in WordPress.

Our shiny new site is live!
As you can see we have a nice new, rebranded site; hopefully we’ll keep it more updated this time. We have a new gallery section, a new gig section, and a nice mp3 player to the right.

There are still some things that could do with changing/improving, but that’s mainly just because Todd is never happy with his work. If you do notice anything odd/broken though, let us know in the comments.

We’ve also updated our twitter, myspace, last.fm and facebook accounts. Links to which you can find in the navigation at the top, and also in the footer.

Demos are done!
If you’ve been following us on twitter (and if you haven’t, shame on you! Follow us now) you’ll have seen we have completed the 5 track demo. It’s all packaged and it looks great. Thanks again to Abe Sinclair for the great artwork!

We’ll be posting how to get hold of one in the next few days.

New gig!
We have decided to put on a gig! It’ll be at Milo, Leeds, on December 13th. We are currently looking for another band to play, so if you’re interested, get in touch.

All that’s left now is to put the songs on spotify and itunes. We’ll keep you posted with more details!

The gig last Thursday went well (New Roscoe, Leeds). Decent crowd, good, friendly bands and plenty of alcohol. We also got a live CD which sounds pretty good, so that’ll be uploaded onto our myspace soon.

The upcoming gig (The Well, Leeds) should be good. We’re going to perform a new song hopefully; it’ll be good to gauge peoples reactions of it. We should also be getting some band photos done at it, so this blog might stop looking so bland!

Speaking of this blog, it’ll be undergoing some changes very soon. We’re not really happy with the look and feel of it, so we’re going to be making it much easier to use, and also putting our songs onto it. I think we’re going to move more away from myspace (it’s shocking, and do people even use it any more?) to a more custom site, but we’ll see.

Now for some good news, the EP has been mastered, and the artwork pretty much finalised! We should be pressing it soon, and then sending it out to venues shortly after. Copies will be available on our site, and also at the gigs we play. I think we’ll be putting it up for free download as well.

We’ll update again (probably after the gig on Thursday) when we have more information.

Last night we played a gig at Seven in Chapel Allerton. Not the greatest turnout ever, but it gave us a chance to play our new song live for the first time, which was great!

We’re going into the studio on Thursday to finalise and master the new songs, so they should be done by next week, we have some great artwork planned for them!

Finally, we’re playing a gig on the 1st of July at the New Roscoe, where we will hopefully launch the new EP!

We’re pretty excited about these, and can’t wait to get them finished and up online, they sound miles better than our first demo.

Hopefully, we’ll be getting some nice artwork done too, and shipping them out as an EP with a few live tracks on as well. We might even get some other merch done in the process.

Also, to carry on the good news, we’ve been given a slot to audition for Bingley Festival! It’d be great if we managed to play a festival.

We’ll post again when the new songs are up!