PICTURESHOW: OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT

The last few months have been pretty crazy for us in OSA, here are some shots from our adventures.

They’re not chronological or anything like that, but they cover pretty much everything we’ve been up to. Enjoy.

Lawrence,
OSA

A friend of ours managed to sly us onto Sky’s Christmas Party Gig. There was a crazy amount of people there (5000+?) and there was free food/drink and lots of security making sure people didn’t get drunk and invade the bands’ changing rooms. I’m fairly confident people wouldn’t have got drunk and stormed our changing rooms, but you never know at these things? This is us going out on the big screens around the venue, it was a very fun night. Tom, Alex and Mike managed to run back into Camden afterwards to see Black Kids at some crazy hour, but the party was round the corner from my house so I stayed till stupidly late and then crawled home at daybreak.

Alex has covered his drums in the pages of his favorite novels, I’m not sure what they all are but I know one is “As I Lay Dying” by Faulkner, and maybe some “Catcher In The Rye”. They look amazing on stage and you can read them when you are sitting next to them in the tour bus.

This was our first ever T.V appearance, it was for Manchester’s Channel M. Of course you can tell Tom and Alex are completely focused on the job in hand. It was loads of fun, Clint Boon from the Inspiral Carpets was on and telling lots of stories from the early ‘Madchester’ days, and he invited us on to his XFM show later in that week which was lovely. Manchester is such an amazing city for music and for a band that’s half Scottish/half London to go down well there is always really cool. All the team on the show (The City Social) are brilliant and are always finding great new bands and putting them on the Tele early doors, so hats off to them.

Alex and Mike are from near each other in Scotland so when they do backing vocals it’s amazing how their voices blend together. We call them the Celtic Choir. Here they are relaxing after a take. Me or Tom have probably said something into the monitors that doesn’t bear repeating. This was for a demo of “Little Birds” that we did with our friend Nick. He gave us as much whiskey as we needed and let us stay at his flat while we were recording as long as he got to watch the football before we went into the studio. We didn’t complain.

It’s always nice doing Radio Sessions, and Marc has been really good about getting us on to do them. We finished writing “The Girl From The BBC” about 3 hours before our first session with him, so maybe it’s name came from walking around the endless BBC corridors before the session. This is after our second session with him this June. Mr Riley was a bit under the weather but Alex’s glasses cheered him up. I’m holding a bottle of OSA wine. It’s limited to a run of 1 bottle which we gave to Marc as a thank you for having us on.

This is us after playing Dance Magic Dance at the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch. Mireia, Laura and Belle put on the most colourful nights in London and have also done some amazing photoshoots for us. Alex is honoring their efforts by wearing a rather fetching yellow crash helmet, Tom has the world’s most old school headphones in history and I just look knackered. That is our trusty van in the background. She has been very kind to us, she has belonged to some other bands in her time but she’s settled down with us now.