THE EVENINGS
Late in 2001 The Evenings were formed by three young like-minded music enthusiasts, Mark Wilden, Tom Maitland and Mary Thomas. The three recorded the "Let's Go" album over the winter of 2001/2 with homemade instruments, primitive samplers and obsolete computers, and released it on their own Concourse Recordings label in a limited run of about twenty copies. The band probably would have stopped there, but for Wilden's increasing enthusiasm for live music in and around Oxford - the proving ground for bands like The Rock of Travolta, Dive Dive, The Young Knives, Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies and Fell City Girl - and an enthusiasm to see how far The Evenings could be pushed. Thomas and Maitland, having no interest in performing live, parted ways with The Evenings in the summer of 2002 just as Wilden performed the first Evenings show with nothing but a laptop, a microphone and a drum kit. It wasn't very good.
Luckily for The Evenings, Sexy Breakfast's Phil Oakley (bass guitar) and Sebastian Reynolds (keyboards) were watching the gig and realised immediately that the band would be much better if they joined. This quickly proved to be true. Suitable Case For Treatment's Jimmy Evil (guitar) and The Brickwork Lizards' Bruce Douglas (percussion, drum machine) soon followed, and became semi-permanent fixtures in a fluid lineup that for several years never repeated itself for two consecutive performances. Other occasional additions included dancers The Uninvited Guest, visuals from Memetix and Kazimier 22, shredded newspaper, stage invasions and "performance art" from friends and colleagues.
The band followed the "Let's Go" single (Shifty Disco) with the double release of the "Dying" and "Firefighters" EPs in July 2003 (both Concourse, re-released together by Unlabel in 2006), including the Channel 4 News sampling live favourite "See For". The "Listening" EP followed in Spring 2004 and the lead song "I Didn't Remember" received its live debut at that year's Truck Festival. By now The Evenings comprised the fixed lineup of Wilden, Oakley and Reynolds with the addition of Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element's Stuart Fowkes on keyboards, eeebleee's Jo Edge on double bass and Anonymen's Luigi Cibrario on drum kit. The symmetry of two keyboard rigs, two basses and two full drum kits made The Evenings undoubtably one of the most annoying-to-soundcheck bands on the scene.
In 2005 the band made friends with London's Brainlove collective and garnered a small collection of enthusiastic reviews for that year's "Louder In The Dark" EP, the first time the band had attempted to capture their live sound on record. A tour followed, which helped the band build on their gigging experience supporting the likes of The Faint, Trans Am, 65daysofstatic, Gravenhurst and KK.Null to become gradually less slapdash. Interest in the band was building nicely when, in early 2006, Wilden decided to take a long summer holiday from music and encouraged the others to agree to put the band on ice.
2007 sees the band starting again with a few new songs and a slimmer lineup, with Cibrario, Fowkes and Oakley taking their business elsewhere. They have carried on performing in Vin Mariani, Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element and Borderville respectively.
