It’s fair to say I’d been a fan of Adam Smith’s shambling indie pop band, the Hector Collectors, for some time. A perfect example of a live band that skirts the line between brilliance and it all falling apart. Oddly enough, the first mention of Adam in my diary of the time is that he and Lisa of Glasgow band My Legendary Girlfriend got a bunch of us invited to the Yummy Fur’s John McKeown’s wedding party after a Macrocosmica gig. I mean, if you had told me right now that this had happened, I’d have laughed you out of the room. Am I glad that I saved my LiveJournal before deleting my account, or what?! Anyway, Adam’s brilliant – as is his band.

Like Mateusz Franczak in Poland, there are artists in Scotland who were pivotal to the direction that Too Many Fireworks was to take over the 20-odd years we were releasing records. One of those was Graham Fucking Peel of Flying Matchstick Men. Andy Bonar introduced me to Peel as a possible keyboard player for our band, Troika – though that seems bananas in retrospect. I didn’t know Graham’s band at the time, but after our meeting in a busy Nice N Sleazy, I was excited to hear them. Peel talks a good game.

Dialogues

In September 2002, I had been sitting in a hotel garden in Manchester and decided that Too Many Fireworks would start a split 7″ singles club called Dialogues — more of that madness when I write about the first one. The second, however, Dialogue Two, was a serendipitous encounter of Flying Matchstick Men and the Hector Collectors; two chaotic bands meeting at the perfect time and place.

The Hector Collectors

The Hector Collectors, named after Glasgow slang for someone who gathers glass bottles for the deposit, opened the single on the A side with the fabulous Celebrity World War. Gavin Dunbar of Camera Obscura produced the track and also provided keyboards for the record. Speaking to Adam, it’s safe to say he feels Gav was the unsung hero of the record both for his expertise and his support. After we finished recording, echoing The Beatles’ producer George Martin, Gav quipped, Congratulations, gentlemen, you’ve just made your first No. 1 record.

When I started Too Many Fireworks, I think it would have been a stretch to imagine one of our first records opening with a wonderfully witty, Half Man Half Biscuit-esque depiction of an international conflict carried out by many, very turn-of-the-millennium celebrities. I mean… Danny from Hearsay, for goodness sake. When I asked what he was listening to around the recording of the single, his list was very suitably Adam, containing as it does The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles Giles and Fripp, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The United States of America, though as he says, not that they had much of any influence on this record whatsoever!

Flying Matchstick Men

Flying Matchstick Men took the flipside of the record with their song, Kids! Revolution! A raucous, sorta-anticapitalist, sorta-teenageriot blast with an almost soviet refrain and a lot of Heys! The song was produced by the Neqtunes – Joe Howe (Germlin) and Gavin Thomson (GRNR), the latter of whom would join the band on bass and production not long after collaborating with the band on their first album, also released on Too Many Fireworks. I remember the overwhelming excitement I felt the first time I listened to these songs back-to-back. My diary describes it best. Jesus. Christ! On release, we packaged the 7″ vinyl with a download code where listeners could find some exclusive remixes of Kids! Revolution! made by Gav and Joe.

Writing with Adam about that time, the time of release, something he said chimed with me more than I imagined it would. I asked what he misses most from that time, and he replied that he misses the open frontier/finiteness (paradox but it’s true) of Web 1.0 and that nascent excitement of the 02- 06-ish Glasgow music scene when everything seemed more exciting. It was truly a great time, particularly when Flying Matchstick Men appeared.

I was in awe of their rizz and their fearless stripe of eccentricity, says Adam. I don’t think either of these songs is our best, but theirs has much more presence and excitement, and the pairing made sense. One of Adam’s best gig memories of this time is seeing the Matchsticks, for the second time, at the 13th Note in January 2003. They opened with this loose, crazy version of The B-52s’ Love Shack. It was the definition of lightning in a bottle, youthful FUN.

Careless Talk

One thing Adam reminded me of, which I’m astonished I’d forgotten, was that Everett True reviewed the single in one of the only 12 issues of Careless Talk Costs Lives he ever published. Slampt kids at the indie disco was the line remembered, much praise in True’s book, I think. My diary, I’m glad to say, also reminds me that Everett True featured both the Hector Collectors and Flying Matchstick Men (and my own band, Troika from Dialogue One) on his Careless Talks radio show on the TotallyRadio website.

The artwork for the record was a crude photo of the inside of a rehearsal room, from yours-truly long before I had any idea of what I was doing. I believe I made it on a disposable camera, too. Much more impressive was the lyrics sheet for Celebrity World War that Adam drew and asked us to include with the record. I’d forgotten it was in there. I love it!

Peel never did join Troika on keyboards, but in a strange quirk of fate, Gav Thomson joined us a couple of years later when Iain, our bass player, left the band. Funny how things like that happen.

Dialogue Two was released on 7″ vinyl and digital download on March 19th, 2003, and we gave it the catalogue number 2mf003. You can listen to the single here

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Electroral Rage

In 2010, Britain’s centre and centre-left sent a clear message to Gordon Brown’s Labour by voting for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in their droves. That electorate certainly didn’t want David Cameron’s Conservatives, and the expectation was that Clegg would enter into a coalition with Labour, in the public’s eyes, setting the country on a moderate path. Clegg, of course, knifed his voters in the back and joined a coalition with the Conservatives, and he is partly responsible for everything that came after, Brexit included.

In the 5 years the Tories shared a coalition with the Lib-Dems, those forced by circumstance of ideologically driven cuts to services and welfare had to turn to food banks to feed their families, and in fact, in 2015, the year of the next general election, over 1 million families were being fed through the food-bank charities. Newspapers told stories of people dying after the government took away their disability benefits, leaving them unable to feed themselves or heat their homes. A disgrace.

On 7th May 2015, Scotland voted overwhelmingly for the welfare-protecting, migrant-welcoming, NHS-defending, Trident-abandoning Scottish National Party. The majority of the UK, however, voted for another 5 years of Conservative Party austerity – a sickener for Scots already heartbroken at 2014’s Independence referendum. With Clegg out of the way, Cameron, now with no guard rails (such as they were), announced plans for an in/out referendum on the European Union—and we know how that turned out.

For the next term, Chancellor George Osborne laid out plans for another £8 billion in welfare cuts, and the Tories clearly had no plans to curtail austerity, even while the richest got richer, and people in dire need of support and care were left without it.

How on earth does this relate to Too Many Fireworks, or this release?

At the time, I was playing guitar in the prog-post-rock band, The Frozen North. I had collected an embarrassing array of effects pedals, and in my Mogwai, Godspeed, MBV obsessions, I loved nothing more than spending some time in our rehearsal room alone just making noise.

The evening following the election, I stayed late after rehearsal and expressed my sheer frustration, disappointment, and anxiety with noise, feedback and effects while recording some of the improvising. From the 37-minute session, I cut the best 13 minutes, called it Shark, and released it as a single on the label to raise money for the food bank in my home town of Airdrie.

While of course attractive to only a very niche audience, I nevertheless felt strongly about doing something, anything, that I could do, and so Shark was part of that. In the end, we raised £143 from the single across its various releases and gave it to the food bank. Given the abstract noise of the track, I imagine some of that was donation.

Still, I’m quite proud of it. It feels like a different life, when I had 2 huge cases of pedals and some other bits and pieces, and a room in which to destroy my hearing. In the “liner notes” on the label’s website, the single credit read: rage, anger, disappointment, disillusionment, hope, optimism, belief and guitars: Neil Milton

Trussell continues to raise money for food banks in the United Kingdom.

Shark was released on digital download on May 15th, 2015, and we gave it the catalogue number 2mf019. You can listen to the single here

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Fair’s Fair

In the mid-2010s, while I played in The Frozen North, the Polish music industry held several fairs in and around Warsaw. The weekly listings supplement Co Jest Grane 24, distributed with the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, organised the most famous event: a national music fair at the Palace of Culture and Science. Over time, some smaller independent music fairs began to spring up.

For a few years, Too Many Fireworks took out a stall at several of the fairs, including one of the more popular, held in the garden of the music bar, Eufemia. At the time, we had only a few physical releases remaining from the old days, and even fewer that Polish audiences would have recognised, so we used the opportunity less to sell records and more to introduce ourselves to the Polish market and build friendships — and boy, did we.

Mateusz

It was a beautiful, sunny August afternoon. A girl I was a little crazy about had visited our stall earlier, and it had subtly become clear she wasn’t into me at all. The stall was having a poor day, stuck – where we were – at the far end of the fair. I wanted to go home. One of the few visitors we had that afternoon was a quiet, bearded lad named Mateusz who had an album he wanted people to hear.

Mateusz Franczak was unknown to me at the time, which, given how much he’d been doing in music in Poland, was a little unforgivable. Still, this former saxophonist and talented improvisationalist, and maybe the kindest bloke in Polish music, had recorded his first solo album earlier that year in what he recently described to me as lonely nighttime recordings in the countryside, at a summer cottage overlooking a lake.

During our brief meeting at the fair, Mateusz handed me Long Story Short, a CD wrapped in a paper sleeve featuring a photograph of a zebra lit by flash against a beautiful sunset, and asked me to have a listen. I had recently parted ways with the first Polish band on Too Many Fireworks, a Lublin-based outfit, Plug&Play, and at the time, the only band making records for the label was my own, so I was open to new artists. Nevertheless, this chance meeting with Mateusz surprised me, and I had to shake myself out of the funk that my earlier romance-related disappointment had caused. I probably made some interested but, ultimately, non-commital noises about listening later with no real expectation that Mateusz would become a key fixture of Too Many Fireworks’ Polish adventure.

Long Story Short

Mateusz describes the album as ethereal and dreamy. I remember my first impression being how moving it was, soaked as it is in an ambient bath of reverb. I didn’t know it at the time, but retrospectively, Long Story Short was exactly the album I was looking for, for Too Many Fireworks. In Mateusz’s songs, there are shades of Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, and most importantly for me, David Pajo. Though there is no obvious melodic connection between Long Story Short and Papa M’s Live from a Shark Cage, Mateusz’s album opener, Lazing, put me in the same emotional room as I was when I first heard Drunken Spree.

Much later, I asked Mateusz how he recorded the album, and it was with an entirely minimalist set-up. He used only his favoured 1994 American Fender Stratocaster and a compact Roland GC-405 amplifier, which had previously only been used for practising at home, though it turned out to have a pretty interesting sound that worked for the record.

Present participles

The titles of the album are all one-word present participles. Some seem to be taken from lyrics, others from the mood of the song itself, and others still may be less literally connected to the music. As such, I wonder if the titles are related to the feelings of recording the record itself. When I asked Mateusz if there was something from the recording of the album that only he remembers, he told me there was an underlying sense of excitement and free-flowing improvisation. I do think this came through in my first listen.

Listening to the record now, I am struck by how beautiful it is in its darkness and the feeling of it being just out of reach. From Lazing‘s lilting melody to the squealing feedback on Moving, the record sways between delicate and fierce and it can get loud. In Crawling, there are strikes of distorted guitar that hit like a bell, among squalls of feedback that feel like a more consonant distant cousin of Gang of Four’s Love Like Anthrax.

Long Story Short was the first of several albums Mateusz would feature on for Too Many Fireworks. We released the record on CD and digital download on April 15th, 2016, and we gave it the catalogue number 2mf020. You can listen to the album here

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Bicentennial man

A fortuitous coincidence accompanied my move from Glasgow to Warsaw in 2010. Having then recently bought a piano, a set of strings samples, and Apple’s Logic Pro, I had been playing with modern-classical and ambient music. Following in the footsteps of Icelanders Jóhann Jóhannsson and Ólafur Arnalds, I began exploring life away from the guitar. At the same time, Poland celebrated the bicentenary of Fryderyk Chopin’s birth. With so much of Chopin’s music to enjoy, I became a little obsessed that year. I was a regular at the Warsaw Philharmonic, and from May through September, I spent every weekend in Łazienki park, where, under a large statue of the composer himself, concert pianists from around the world would perform Chopin’s music to a delighted audience every Sunday.

Over the following several years, I began taking piano lessons with a local teacher from the British School. I chose the British school to find my teacher, as I was able to then sit exams each year with the Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music. My journey ended in 2013 when, during a football match, I broke an elbow and only just scraped through my grade 4 six weeks later. In a weird twist of fate, I couldn’t play guitar for a while with my broken elbow, but my cast was set in such a way that I could easily strum my guitar. That broken bone would lead me back to delay and distortion pedals in a big way, but those are stories for the future.

Variations of Chopin

Before all of that, though, in the autumn of 2012, I invited several ambient, electronic, and modern-classical musicians to help me create the collection of contemporary interpretations of Chopin’s music that became 2mf013, Variations of Chopin, released on May 13th, 2013.

The album opens and closes with 24 Preludes op. 28: no. 7 in A major: Andantino. The first interpretation is my own straight performance, albeit soaked in reverb. Clem Leek’s version closes the record with a beautiful bath of piano, violin, and ambient washes of sound.

When I invited friends to be involved, I had no idea what the record would become. I certainly didn’t expect Miaoux Miaoux’s exhilarating, pumping electronic interpretation of 2 Nocturnes op. 55: no. 1 in F minor, nor deSelby’s beautiful classical guitar recording of Fryderyk Chopin’s 3 Nocturnes op. 9: no. 2 in E flat major. Ensemble Thing provided a superlative, jazzy performance of the Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, which I still can’t quite believe when I hear it today.

Other ambient interpretations filled out the record with music that tugged on the heartstrings, from Antonymes, Good Weather for an Airstrike, and Now Wakes the Sea, among others.

Other Notes

Variations of Chopin was the first physical release to come from Too Many Fireworks since the hiatus in 2006, and as such, we looked at ways to make it pop. Ekopaks replaced the jewel cases we used on earlier releases. To design the artwork, I asked Polish illustrator Justyna Kowalska to create her own interpretation of the composer. She chose to include the willow tree, something almost synonymous with Chopin, here in Poland.

I will come on to talk about Laeto from Dundee, Scotland, later in this series, however, at the time of this record, the band’s drummer Robbie Cooper was fighting a rare and aggressive form of cancer. To support Robbie, all profit from Variations of Chopin was donated to Robbie to help during that time. Robbie tragically died almost a year later on the 23rd April, and he is still very much missed by friends and colleagues. The record, such as it is, is still dedicated to him.

You can listen to Variations of Chopin here

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A Birth of sorts

On the 21st of January, 2002, a Glasgow post-punk band that had passed swiftly through the dark tunnels of indie pay-to-play hell to find itself in the city’s welcoming DIY scene, launched their debut e.p. with a show at the 13th Note Cafe/Bar in Glasgow. The band’s name was Troika. Its guitar player was a short fellow with a love of Fender guitars and post-rock music. He, for his sins, was me.

That evening was notable for several reasons, not least that someone mugged me shortly before I took the stage – though that’s a story for later. Primarily, though, the evening was important as the launch of Troika’s Missing Passport e.p. gave birth to a small organisation that was to take over my life for many years to come: my record label, too many fireworks.

anniversary

The 21st of January 2027 will see the 25th anniversary of the show, the e.p. and the label, which came to an end during the pandemic when I returned to the camera. The last, and most likely final, too many fireworks release was the Without You b/w You Are The Summer single by Pop-up Books.

With 32 catalogue numbers, one shared release, a club night, a film music event series, a short-lived TEDx clone for the DIY music industry, several collaborations and artist features, and one tattoo; too many fireworks had an exciting life funded almost exclusively by a succession of day jobs through the years.

Over the next 32 weeks, I’m going to share a catalogue number from the label, my memories, and I hope those of the artists that made it happen, whether from Scotland, England, Iceland, or Poland.

As I’m waiting for pictures, memories, and other bits and pieces from some of the artists, I decided to start with one of my own records from over the years, the 2018 e.p. Singing As You Leave.

Singing As You Leave e.p.

I wrote and demoed the title track of the record about two years earlier. David Cameron had resigned after his gamble to quell the Eurosceptic rebellions within the Tory party with an in/out referendum on the EU. As he finished his statement outside Downing Street, and still mic-ed up, he turned, made his way back to the iconic black door, and infamously sang a little ditty to himself before the microphones caught him saying, with some sense of washing one’s hands of something, right.

I had been listening to a lot of Superchunk, so I think a little bit of that crept in, in both the righteous anger and the arrangement. Still really enjoy listening to that guitar solo, but as I recorded it on a Vox AC30 in an apartment block in central Warsaw, I can’t imagine my neighbours loved it.

This wasn’t the earliest song written for the record, though, by a long way. I wrote Bridge Will Burn after a break-up around 2015, when I was playing in the Frozen North. This song appeared elsewhere later, but this version was recorded direct to tape in the band’s rehearsal room. Talking of the Frozen North, the band’s violinist, Aga Olek, played violin on Bird Sanctuary. I remember the only note I gave her was that it had to be scratchy.

Local Fan

My favourite song on the record is my earnest thank you to my dad. Growing up in Airdrie in the 80s, rather than Rangers or Celtic, my dad brought my brother and me up to support his first love, our local team, Airdrieonians. I’m a die-hard fan to this day. I wanted to write my dad Local Fan in the way David Scott from the Pearlfishers had written his dad, My Dad the Weatherfan. The song opens with one of my favourite childhood memories of supporting Airdrie, Stevie Gray’s superlative goal away to St. Johnstone at McDiarmid Park on a beautiful, sun-scorched day.

Not long before recording the 4 demoed songs, I’d bought a Rickenbacker 330, and while the Jaguar and Telecasters were the main guitars on this e.p., the Rick makes an appearance on all songs recorded at my place, even if found lower in the mix. Talking of the recording, this was the first record I used the JHS Colour Box with the EMI Neve chip, giving the overdriven sound of the Beatles’ Abbey Road desk.

The record came out on digital download, streaming, and on cassette tape on the 14th September 2018. It had the catalogue number 2mf029, and I straight-up nicked the Cooper font that the Beach Boys used for Pet Sounds. The cassette came bundled with a small button badge bearing the simple but direct message, Fuck Brexit.

You can listen to the Singing As You Leave e.p. here

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