For the last nine years Toupé have entertained with their uncompromising sound. It's the sound you hear when you read a good book, its the frequency that vibrates you when you're laughing so hard you get a stitch. You know the sound...
It's the sound of one bass guitar being manipulated through groovy boxes dancing with the sound of another bass guitar plunking around to fill the gaps all mingling with drums being played like the sort of controlled explosion that the people who run the Large Hadron Collider would be proud to achieve.
Toupé aren't easily defined...we've been trying for 9 years to wrap it up in a catchy little niche, pigeon hole catch phrase for them to use when they tell their friends. But we just can't.
Terms like Punk Phunk have been muttered near us. We are funky, we're very punky - but in terms of the attitude, not essentially the music.
The music, that's just what happens when we three guys get together. We are Karl Evanson the silly bass, Jason Havelock on the drums and Grant Sharkey on the other bass and the singing.
We write to make each other laugh and slap our bellies with joy. One of the only rules to the whole band is that we've never set a genre for ourselves.
So, if you're sat at your desk reading this and you're trying to work out what we sound like from a biography, then the best we can do is guide you to a few places where you can hear our music. So follow this link to our Myspace page, for that instant gratitude.
Read on for a bit of other stuff...
We've made three studio albums so far, each named after consecutive letters of the alphabet. Alopecia was released in 2003 with former drummer, Adam Bailey. Recorded in a living room, it was an album we made for Hackpen Records.
This was a good year for Toupé. We entered the Emergenza Battle of the Bands as a laugh and ended up coming 8th in the world. Winning awards for Best Song, Drummer, Bass Player and Live Show. Not bad for eighth!
We're one of those bands that picks up loads of friends along the way. Enjoying the company of other bands. This is one of the most rewarding aspects of playing in Toupé for us (after all, you don't do this for the money!). With these friends we've managed to play all over the UK as well as go out to the USA and do some shows over there.
In 2005, we released Burgers. A really big album about integrity in the music industry hidden behind a flimsy veil of being about the fast food industry. We tried to cram as much on to the album as possible, 21 tracks in total.
On this album was to include several of our most loved live tracks, including 'Werk Jerk', 'Peepers' and the ever evolving 'F*ckin''.
This last song was a reaction to Justin Timberlake when he first went solo being able to say to a group of twelve year-old girls 'I want to get you naked by the end of this song' and us not being able to say what we want to say to adult women on the radio. Always a live a favourite, here's some YouTube clip of it live from London in 2007:
In it you can see we how we improvise some comedy on stage at the same time as playing the song. That's how genius we is!
Put us in front of a live audience and we'll entertain them in a way that is unique to them. We don't plan anything, we just have fun. This is why we've never been on X-Factor or the like.
Well, for that reason and the fact we're not too afraid to treat the people who enjoy our music like adults. This has led a lot of kids to enjoy our music.
We recorded Chat! in 2007 with Gordon Clark at The Lantern Studios. Which is actually a part of a school near Southampton. This is how down with the kids we are.
Shorter than Burgers, less hard rock than Alopecia, Chat! is a work of wonder considering it's multiple themes, including stories from the US, running into evangelical women with large beasts in Tennessee and urging everyone to join the BNP so we can change the name of the party, en mass, to stand for 'Be Nice People'.
Chat! stands as the current album, though we're working on some new stuff right now. It's going to involve Dice and having a good time with each other.
2008 was spent consciously not doing very much with Toupé whilst we all got on with various things. Jay toured hard with his energetic pop-punk band, Kids Can't Fly. Karl carried on being a musical whore, sucking off bands to let him play with them. He's good at it, that's why he keeps coming back to Toupé. Just kidding, he's been lending his talent bass talents to bands like Captain Morengo's Penis Cheese and the brilliantly amazing Caroline's Capuchin. Grant has been pursuing his career in stand up comedy, going out to the US to play shows in Boston and NYC, whilst also polishing off another novel and some ginger nuts. This is a video he made after he got back from the States in October 2008:
Grant, Jay and Karl - TOUPÉ.
Jan 2009.
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