From the Moshi Moshi Records site - Elle s'appelle are in the most conventional sense of the word, a band. More specifically, a three piece guitar band from Liverpool without guitars, but with a girl and a keyboard. Bass, Keys and drums. Courtesy of Andy (vocals/guitar), Lucy (vocals/keyboards) and Owen (vocals/drums).
Formed early 2007, Elle s'appelle played their very first gig together on June 1st at their local Barfly (they've since supported Operator Please, Hot Club de Paris, Shiny Toy Guns, Does It Offend You Yeah? And Johnny Foreigener), and were promptly featured as Steve Lamacq's 'unsigned band of the week' the following week. Their ridiculously good debut single 'Little Flame' was written and recorded in Andy's mum's house soon after, and the band were promptly approached by Moshi Moshi to release the track as a 7" on their Moshi Singles imprint. And so here we find ourselves..
Names originally suggested when the threesome first got together included 'The Next Most Obvious Things' (Andy's fault), 'Our Survey Says' (Lucy's fault) and 'Self Help Group' (Owen's fault).. Thankfully from nowhere in particular (Actually, Hot Club de Paris..) the idea of having a name using a foreign language appealed. The Spanish......[Read More]
From the Moshi Moshi Records site -
Elle s'appelle are in the most conventional sense of the word, a band. More specifically, a three piece guitar band from Liverpool without guitars, but with a girl and a keyboard. Bass, Keys and drums. Courtesy of Andy (vocals/guitar), Lucy (vocals/keyboards) and Owen (vocals/drums).
Formed early 2007, Elle s'appelle played their very first gig together on June 1st at their local Barfly (they've since supported Operator Please, Hot Club de Paris, Shiny Toy Guns, Does It Offend You Yeah? And Johnny Foreigener), and were promptly featured as Steve Lamacq's 'unsigned band of the week' the following week. Their ridiculously good debut single 'Little Flame' was written and recorded in Andy's mum's house soon after, and the band were promptly approached by Moshi Moshi to release the track as a 7" on their Moshi Singles imprint. And so here we find ourselves..
Names originally suggested when the threesome first got together included 'The Next Most Obvious Things' (Andy's fault), 'Our Survey Says' (Lucy's fault) and 'Self Help Group' (Owen's fault).. Thankfully from nowhere in particular (Actually, Hot Club de Paris..) the idea of having a name using a foreign language appealed. The Spanish El, seemed to work with anything, although, anything that sounded good meant something dreadful or totally irrelevant, and anything which meant something fun or nice sounded dreadful.. Whilst trying to google their way to a solution, one name tried was El Sappell. Google promptly corrected the mistake and came up with Elle s'appelle, French for She is called. It looked beautiful when typed or written down, it sounded good to say and in some small way was relevant (Neither Andy or Owen had been in a band with a girl before / Lucy is a blatant Francophile).
A theme which is constant throughout Elle s'appelle's lyrics, is story telling. The literal telling of stories and tales. In putting the band together, Andy took on a lot of children's literature. Compulsory reading list: The Melancholy death of Oyster Boy Tim Burton, Dirty Beasts and Rotten Rhymes Roald Dahl, The Complete works Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Within the band, Children's literature is a genre or device, as opposed to writings specifically aimed at children. The short story 'The Little Flame' is told from start to finish within their song 'Little Flame'. The story tells of a little boy who is fascinated with fire and who runs away from home to build a new one. The little flame comes to life and manipulates and follows the boy around so that it can feed on/burn whatever it pleases. It's choc full of fuzzy Mates of State/Yeah Yeah Yeah-esque promise.
In August of 1998, the group announced disbanding with a message from Andy on their MySpace page:
It's with a great big sad face that I write to you all. As of last week Myself, Lucy and Owen decided to not to play together as band any more. There are lots of little reasons why, which it would be a bit pointless to explain, as they all lead towards the same conclusion.
We're all going to be doing different things as of now, unfortunately not all of us will be doing musical things... I'll be lending guitar skills to my good friends 28 Costumes (www.myspace.com/28costumes) for basically as long as they'll have me or until musically I'm no longer an eligible bachelor. There are already some exciting wheels in motion on that front! I'll be sure to keep anyone interested well informed. Also, for the fucking hell of it I thought might do a 'where are they now' type of article in the future just for the nostalgic amongst you who come back to our page every now and again.
As always I'll do my very best to keep up to date with any messages you might send us. All of us are eternally grateful for your support over the last year (It feels like years!). Thank you, take care x
Andy x......[Read Less]
