Everything you need to know about The Wheelies & a lot of stuff you don't
Who are The Wheelies?
THOMAS SLIGHT JR (Also known as Slight, Tamsabam, The Sly, Tommy, The Bear) - Founding father of the band & responsible for the name. Plays laserbeam lead guitar solos when he can be arsed, in charge of plugging cables into the correct sockets and any other technical issues that may arise.
STEVEN SMALL (Also known as Smally, Smallywheelies, Stevie, Stevo, Steve, Ste) - OK, so as I'm writing this I'm going to try and keep it as realistic & low-key as I can. In a nutshell though, I'm the band's creative mastermind. Write virtually all of the songs, play them on any instrument I can find - acoustic guitar, moothie, maracas, keyboard are my favourite weapons of choice - lyrics scribbled on the back of scrap pieces of paper in 5 mins. Just want to write one truly great song and then I can quit for good. (I've lost count of the number of times I've quit The Wheelies...).
ALI WRIGHT(Also known as Aliwheelie, Tin Pan, The Sparrow, and "that guy from that band" that I can't quite remember right now, but it'll come to me...) Bass player, design and tech guru, and writes the "occasional line from the occasional song". Solo album under the title "!" seems to have been getting written since forever - I think he started it back in 1998, deals with issues like Cannibalism, drinking Irn Bru, and vaguely racist conspiracy theories. Ocean Colour Scene.
CRAIG MOYES (Also known as Moppy, Mo, Maurice, Hen Broon, Rodney) Now playing guitar with up and coming Glasgow band THE PEOPLE who are hopefully going to take the world by storm, thus giving The Wheelies back catalogue some monetary worth in the process. Hard as he might try to get away from it, he remains to this day the talismanic figurehead and most photogenic member of The Wheelies. Back in the day he was like the odd-job man of the band - rhythm and lead guitar, bongos, keyboard, black bullets, whistling, reading a weird story at double speed... if there was a dirty job needing done, then Moppy was your man.
MARTIN GILLANDERS(Also known as Martino, Franco, Jose, Gillandrez) Most recent official addition to the band, although he's been making music with us since 1997. Cack-handed guitar, vocals, cartwheels, shaking his head at songs that go over 3 minutes, denying his Divit past. It's unquestionable that getting him into the band has added a touch of real class to the whole outfit. Only he still doesn't know that he's in the band. If you see him, then please don't tell him - he'll run a fucking mile.
(Sometimes/You're So Gone/Falling/Ask Papa/#6/Lovesong/Moppy's Song For Nobody)
"Freewheelin" (1995)
(Light Up Or Leave Me Alone/The Blue/Freewheelin'/The Bill & Etta Blues/Sweet Jane/If Only I Were With Her Now)
"The Grassmarket Recordings" EP (1996)
(She Loves Liverpool/The Yahs/Give Peace A Chance/Spaceman)
"Rubba Kola" (1996)
(Introducing The Weedcatz/Maurice MacKay (intro)/The Rock & The Shirt/Little Bobby Balding/Ring The Bells/Interview 1/Oh Yeah/Maurice MacKay (chorus)/I Love You/Suzanne Speaks)
"The Wild Lettuce Recordings" (1996)
(I Guess You've Got To Be A Believer, Maybe We're Amazed, Pictures From An Upside Down World, Wild Lettuce)
"Simple Songs For Complicated People" (1997)
(Intro/Morning Star/Right Here, Right Now/Gonna Be Alright/As Mad As Me/Johnny Walkingstick/Open Door/In The Corner Of An Empty Room/Kaliedoscope/Stick Around/From A Paper Mountain/Find A Little Love/Psychedelic Blues/Today/Time To Go/Coda)
"These Are The Songs..." (1998)
(Some Stars Fade So Fast/Melody Man/This Is Gav's Sexual Confessions/The Doodle)
"The Shite Album" (2004)
"Oh Happiness" (2006)
(When, Stand On Me, Dharma Wheel, There She Goes Again (Again), Hold My Hand, Tumbling Down, It Doesn't Have To Be Perfect To Be Perfect, I Slept In & Missed The Revolution, Kick Me When I'm Down, Scrub The World, Further, If You Only Knew, Blowing Me To You, Oh Happiness, Anybody's Guess, Song To You, This Time, Thanks For The Ride)
"Oh Happiness Recordings" (2006)
"Wake Me Up When It's Over" (2006)
(Go (A Million Shining Minds), Pick Up The Pieces, The Ballad Of Jim Jones, Tide's A-Gonna Turn, Song For The Little Guy, Love It, There Goes The Sun, Give Me Back My Mojo, Come with Me, If You Love Me, Mary Jane, Don't Get Me Wrong (I Really Don't Mind At All), Revolver, Go, So Long)
"Cosmonaut" (2006)
(Keep Moving, Sell My Soul, Far Out, The Sometimes Song, I Want You To Be With Me, hanging Around, Buddha Loves You, The 17th Floor, Buddhaman, Hey!, Oh Girl, I Ain't Got Nobody, Devil In My Bones (For Onibaba), When The Morning Comes, I've Got A Good Feeling, Cosmonaut, Dream On)
"The Bright Side" (2006)
"Respun" (2007)
(The Beginning Of The End, Morning Star 07, Stick Around 07, Indigo Wings, Ride That Cloud, Is This You? 07, Here It Comes, Whatever You Like, Romancing The Stoned, I Did Acid With Caroline, The Boy Who Kept Saying Goodbye, Beautiful Bones, There It Goes, Your Dad's On Drugs, Dharma Wheel Respun, The End Of The Beginning)
"...and on the 8th day God saw that he'd accidentally created The Wheelies and he thought 'Oh fuck, what have I done?'" (2007) *
(Feel, On My Mind, Kaliedoscopic, Out Of Luck, Forevermore, A Song To Fill The Space Between Us, X-Ray Specs, Cry Cry Cry, Idiot At The Wheel, Wild Mountain Thyme, It's Alright, I'm So Happy, Caught Between The Sky & Ground, Come Back Lovely Lola, Where Knows When, Let It Be Love)
"Strange Kid In A Daydream" (2007)
(Springtime, Everybody Dreams About Something, The Day That I Played God, In And Out, Smally's Dream #2, I'm Not Sayin', The Utica Flower Company, The World Is Fucked, Strange Kid In A Daydream, When The Morning Comes, Spun Away, Shining, Illumination)
"Strange Kid Recordings" (2007)
"YLFNOGARD" (2008)
A Protracted & Probably Completely Pointlessly Calamitous History Of The Wheelies
Officially the first record of the The Wheelies’ existence can be traced back to 1993, but the origins go back even further. Moppy and I were friends from before I can remember, then in our teenage years, the two of us and Slight formed an unholy triangle of minds, carrying out petty revolutionary mischief staggering up and down the Fife after dark. From school, Slight and I went to study in Edinburgh, and Moppy headed out west to Glasgow. Towards the end of that year I hooked up with fellow Saddo Indie Team-mate from school, Ali – and the triangle became a square. That summer, for reasons I can’t remember, Slight came round to my folk’s garage with his electric guitar and we were suddenly a band. In a rare moment of inspiration he called us “The Wheelies” (from a kid’s TV programme “Chorlton & The Wheelies”) – don’t think any of us would have expected we’d still be called that so many years later. In hindsight, it’s pretty strange that we didn’t form a band much sooner. I’d been singing and writing songs with our good friend Johnny B Elski in a dire duo called “Fade” from when I was 15 – just him playing an acoustic and me “singing” (I use that word very loosely), doing covers of The Stone Roses and Northside (haha), and wrote a couple of albums of our own stuff that maybe one day will be found at the bottom of some manky drawer somewhere. Highlight was a song called “StoneRiver” which incredibly managed to use the word “stone” no less than 76 times. It was memorably terrible. Curiously, Ali got involved with Fade before it faded from existence contributing lyrics to a song long lost called “Sunshine Sublime”. At the time he was the only other person in our school who could tell his Verve from his Telescopes, and his Sultans Of Ping from his Stone Roses, so it made perfect sense for him to be involved. While I was fannying around with Fade, Slight was melting his eardrums with Metallica, Led Zepellin and Jimi Hendrix, simultaneously mastering the art of fretboard wankery. Somewhere along the line, Moppy got Hippyfied, grew his hair and switched his childhood cello for an electric guitar. It didn’t take a lot of persuading for Ali to go and buy a cheap, second-hand bass to complete the set-up. OK, so I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it would have made more sense for one of us to have played the drums. And with the benefit of hindsight, yeah I’m thinking that too. The drummer issue was one we never really got our heads around. We tried a few friends, pinched a drummer from another band for an album, experimented with drum machines, even advertised in a music shop once… but no one ever stuck. The drummer “issue” was but a drop in an ocean of “issues”. The playing live issue was another one - in a nutshell we never had the guts to find out just how shit we actually were in front of a live audience. It was one of the few things we ever got right.
Our first songs were pretty dire. Very first one was a simple three-chord ballad called “Faith”, just Slight on guitar and me singing improvised words over the top that makes my bones shudder to this day recalling it. In the autumn of 1994, the two of us moved into a flat in Edinburgh in West Preston Street (with Ali coming over so often he was virtually a live-in lodger, and Moppy coming through from the West whenever the feeling took him) and we recorded another five songs on a hired 4-track that formed the “Wheelies Forever EP”. Again, the songs were terrible – “Emily’s Chasing Rainbows”, “Dear Emma”, “Commercial Road”, and a kooky cover of The Beatles’ “Blackbird”. I won’t go into the whole West Preston Street thing in any depth again, much has been said about it and much forgotten, but it was a dark and mad time and I lost my mind and learned guitar (ish) and lost my mind again and woke up on park benches and hid under my bed and warmed my hands on a blazing carpet and somehow lived to tell the tale, minus a few vitally important brain wires. Actually, it’s a miracle we managed to record anything at all late 1994/early 1995, however crude it was. Various on/off recordings captured in the small hours on a simple portable tape recorder would go on to form the “Grooving On Up In The Sun” album. Rather than a coherent recording, it was more a collection of different songs and noises made over about 6 months, included my first songwriting attempts – “Sometimes” and “You’re So Gone” (totally shit) – some neverending Slight solos, Ali going “ba-dup” on bass for the first time on record, and some recordings produced in a couple of sessions working with the legendary telepathic Ruchir on his 4-track. Aside from the two aforementioned tracks, we also recorded “Falling” in the first session after spending the better part of an hour explaining to Ruchir what “Beatles trumpets” sounded like (“No, no, no man, that sounds like a shampoo advert… not pan pipes, fucking trumpets…”) In an unproductive second session where we were struggling to even switch on the equipment, we only managed to record “The End (shortened version)”, stuck for the best part of the afternoon in a fog of smoke deciding whether there was “echo or no echo” on the vocals (but not on the guitar). The highlight of “Grooving On Up In The Sun” marked an inevitable shift in direction, when we spontaneously recorded Moppy playing a little toy Casio keyboard my Gran had picked up for me in a jumble sale for 50p. At 2am eyes bleary, minds weary, he played “Moppy’s Song For Nobody” while I clung to a tape recorder for my sanity.
In the summer of 1995 we worked with Ruchir again, and on a baking hot day in July, we borrowed apple-munching drummer Gav Hill from local band The Modest, and headed over to our telepathic friend’s flat with a drum kit, a meagre handful of songs, and a bucket of hope, to record our second album “Freewheelin’”. Together, with Gav and Ruchir on keyboards, we blasted our way through some seven or eight songs including “Light Up Or Leave Me Alone”, “The Bill & Etta Blues” & “The Blue”. It would be the only time that we would ever work with a drummer, and if I’d known that then, well I might have made a bit more effort with the songs as they were grim to say the least.
In the spring of 1996 we were at it again - hired a 4-track and the 4 of us got together and recorded “The Grassmarket Recordings” EP at Ali & Slight’s shithole of a flat in Edinburgh's Grassmarket. Again, despite being in no fit condition to expect to create anything even remotely listenable, we somehow (with a little help from Nice David of The Blob) recorded 4 songs, including “She Loves Liverpool”, that me & David had co-written at his house – perhaps one of the most coherent moments from those fuzzy and potentially brain-damaging years. Following on from the goofing of “Moppy’s Song For Nobody”, we took it a step further, forgot about music altogether and instead the 4 of us impersonated posh English school boys on two microphones. Hopefully I’m wrong about this, but I always felt that “The Yahs” was the pinnacle of our recording career – maybe it was something to do with the fact that there were no instruments being played, but at the same time it was probably as close to a moment of truth as we’d ever get together. We also recorded "Spaceman" for our sins.
Summer of 1996 and the project reached levels of lows previously unimaginable. Fuck knows where Moppy was, but while Ali’s folks were on holiday, the other three of us got together at their house and somehow produced the album “Rubba Kola”, recording the entire thing on a portable tape recorder. It was basically some 60 minutes of ideas, experimental goofing, mock interviews, and really lame songs written by yours truly, singing the first things that came into my head. And badly. Highlights? Well, I’m tempted to say “none”, but I suppose amidst the thirty something recorded segments, “The Rock & The Shirt”, “Wheelie Laughter” and “Maurice MacKay”are a useful reference point as to the state of our minds at that particular point in time. The following “Wild Lettuce Recordings” (basically about 6 or 7 “songs” Ali & I tried to write in his garage while smoking Wild Lettuce and feeling vaguely nauseous) made in the late summer and following a similar trend is not even worth recounting.
Think I must have been a bit nuts after all that because we didn’t produce anything until the following summer. 1997 – “The Summer Of Madness” as I called it at the time. I say “we”, but what I really mean is “I”. In the baking heat of one of the hottest August’s I can remember, right after Labour had finally scourged the UK of the fucking Tories (hopefully once and for all), I took 13 days out from sunbathing and beach golf at the sewage works, picking up my giro and chain-smoking, by locking myself away in my childhood bedroom at my folk's house, with Slight’s new 4-track and recording “Simple Songs For Complicated People”. Moppy and Slight were away in Amsterdam mistaking dogs for cows on their holiday job earnings, and Ali was working hard with a collapsed lung in Burger King, so I had nothing better to do than get up, get out of bed, write a song, eat breakfast, record it, write another, record it, have lunch, write some lyrics, maybe another song, then record another couple in the evenings. As patchy as they were, 23 songs in 13 days was at least an iota of genuine accomplishment, Ali chipping in with a few ideas, and Martin playing guitar on a couple of songs, thus finding himself sucked into the Wheelies dreamcanoe without a paddle. Amongst the shit, there were a few decent songs that hinted that I was maybe just moving in the right direction – “Stick Around”, “Time To Go”, “Too Many People" etc. On the back of “Simple Songs” for a short time there was a mini-revival of interest and a couple of sporadic recording sessions at Moppy’s folks and Slight’s folks houses between the end of summer and Christmas. We produced a rough collection of half-baked ideas called “These Are The Songs…” included such gems as Slight’s laserbeam guitar solo on “Some Stars Fade So Fast”, and Moppy’s wasted take on Bob Marley's “One Love”, and other not-such gems, “Fitness Explorations Of The Mind” springs to mind (Malc on keyboard and me impersonating Bill Burroughs over the top… yeah, I wish I’d read that overview before being foolish enough to record it).
And then it kind of died a death. I don’t really know why. I guess I got un-nutted, made a couple of other half-hearted experimental keyboard mini-albums on my own in 1998, most of which thankfully disappeared into The Void and then just lost interest, gave up the search for the pearl. Moppy went back West full-time and eventually found his feet in Glasgow band The People, Ali got a real job, and Slight just stopped playing the guitar.
And I don’t really know why it started again either. Think one day some 8 years later having barely touched a guitar in all that time (I only wrote 2 songs), I suddenly remembered the hit of creating, of grappling with melodies trying to bend them into a shape or pattern that hadn’t been done before. The year before, Ali’d conjured up “The Shite Album” – our greatest (s)hits, a monumental task of raking through tape after tape after tape and converting it into a 3 disk monster capturing as much as he could of everything we’d done all those years before when we were just kids really, wanting to be bigger than The Beatles but ultimately just making idiots of ourselves. I listened to it and couldn’t help thinking “shit, we can’t leave it like that… it’s terrible”. So in the Spring of 2006 I bought a £60 guitar and a cheap mic, and downloaded a free audio engine to record “Oh Happiness” – forty odd songs I’d written in a couple of months, snatching minutes here and there, first takes, scribbled lyrics. Ali chipped in with 3 songs and some basslines, I persuaded Linz to sing, got Rhys my 15 year old nephew to play some banjo. It was a start I guess.
In the summer of that year we hooked up with the Cozy Home Records collective – a collection of artists, bands, and miscreants, all trying to make either great music or a great racket. Without the interest and comradeship of the Cozy Homers, “Oh Happiness” would most likely have been a one-off. But by this stage I had a taste for it again. Somewhere in my brain I’d formulated two ideas: 1 to write a single truly “great” song and then give it up, and failing that 2 to write three albums a year for the next three years. In September 2006 we released “Wake Me Up When It’s Over” – myself, Martin, and somewhat unbelievably, Slight being 3 Wheelies in a room recording music for the first time in over a decade. That Christmas after a conversation with Bobby Rogan from the legendary Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination) I instigated the Cozy Home Box Set Project, challenging all the Cozy Home bands to come up with an album in the six weeks before Christmas. The Box Set never saw the light of day, but Christmas morning saw just about a dozen albums produced including The Wheelies “Cosmonaut”. January 2007 I wrote through a terrible case of songwriter’s block and produced another album called “Respun”. In May of 2007 the last Wheelies album “Strange Kid In A Daydream” hit the virtual airwaves. Since then I’ve been busy with collaboration projects (The Utica Flower Company with The Real Burnouts, Fig Mints, and Arthur Rules – and Kaleidonauts with Jon of the Atom, Jane Gilmore, Warchalking and others). I plan on writing and recording the very last Wheelies album in late 2008. After two years of writing and 12 albums, I’ve still not come anywhere near to writing that great song, so it looks like I’m going to have to go the distance.
Ah well, that’s about it for now. I only wrote this because my brain cells have taken a bit of a pounding over the last 15 years and I’ve got a feeling that 15 years from now I’m not going to remember much about all this. It’s a strange old paradox – the embarrassment that is The Wheelies’ music, and the love I have for being a part of it. Let’s hope it’s over soon and long may it continue to play.
