MacD on Music: Pieces of PILOSA

It’s a tale as old as music itself. It happened with Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass in 1962 with ‘The Lonely Bull’. It happened in 1995 with Dave Grohl with the Foo Fighters self-titled debut album.

A single musician creates a project where they play (almost) everything themselves, then decide to form a band to deliver these songs to the world in a live setting.

This week I’m talking to a man adding to this fine tradition, James Tomlinson of the band PILOSA. PILOSA have been making a splash on the local scene in recent times, with a line-up that also features James Graham on lead guitar, Rosa Walsh on bass and Tom Carlin on drums. I met with James recently (well, back in April. I’ve had a busy few months here, column-wise), and we spoke about a variety of topics.

Talking first about the origins of the band, James told me “It started with an EP which I recorded in 2020, and I played all the instruments myself. My brother featured on one of the songs.

"Then I realised I wanted to take it to the stage, so I talked to a friend of mine, James Graham, and he put me in touch with Rosa Walsh and Tom Carlin. Probably at our first practice, I realised it couldn’t be a solo project anymore, because every song was made about ten times better.

"When I was recording the EP alone, I was kind of silly and prideful about always doing all the instruments, and I ended up doing a lot of passionless recordings, but they each were a lot better at their individual instruments than I was, and they added so many parts to it that I can’t credit it as a solo project anymore. It just wouldn’t be fair.”

“The story is a three-part story, as well as a four-piece band. Our plan is for every album to be a different chapter of the story. It’s all written about or from the perspective of a character.

"The story sort of developed as a result of the music, but it has become as important. Our story is about a sloth princess who, when her mother passes away, is left with, and in control of, a Queendom in the jungle, and it’s an area of the jungle where, for whatever reason, sloths have developed as high an intelligence as humans.

"They’ve developed a society, but she’s too intelligent for her own good and is too terrified of her own narcissistic tendencies to take control of this whole Queendom so she flees to a city. About halfway through our first album, a lot of our songs are about Capitalism, because she’s someone who’s used to living in a Monarchy, planted in a city like Derry, or maybe closer to Manchester or something, and it doesn’t make much sense to her, and that was probably my muse when I was writing most of the music.

"Anything I felt like writing about, I could just write into the story. Realism was out the window already, so I could just go as far into the fantasy as I liked.”

Next, we moved onto the band’s live history. “We’ve played in Bennigan’s twice, Sandino’s once, and we did our first headlining in Barzu in January. We played with the likes of Cosmic Treacle, Selador and Delta Fuse. I think playing live is great because you can’t hide.

"When I was recording, if one part was weak, it didn’t matter so much, but it does a lot more live. I can’t hide behind double tracks or anything, so I started writing better songs when we started gigging, for sure.”

After that, we spoke about the Derry music scene in general. “I’m really picky with music, so it’s a testament to how many good bands there are that I’m this invested in the scene. A lot of the time, music sounds like white noise to me if it doesn’t have a certain element, but there’s so much good music in Derry at the minute.

"My favourite bands would probably be TRAMP, Cosmic Treacle, the Switch, Emily MacCormick’s really good, Rachel Craig, I’m sure there’s a lot more. You go to so many gigs and there’s four bands a set, and your mind’s blown by nearly every one of them. It’s really vibrant at the minute.

"When I heard TRAMP, it made me want to be more outspoken and political with lyrics, which isn’t a place I’d usually go to at all, but now that I’m kind of musing against the city, there’s a lot to say.”

High praise, from one of Derry’s finest rising stars to another. And with that, our conversation wrapped up.

Now, on to other business. Last week saw Parker announce the release of their first album, ‘Never Let This Go’, which will be released on the 30th  June. It can be pre-ordered now on their official Bandcamp page, bandcalledparker.bandcamp.com. For more information, find them on Facebook and Instagram @bandcalledparker.

For more about PILOSA, be sure to check them out on Instagram @pilosa_music.