THE SILVER PANDA
Read the story of The Silver Panda here
Watch the videos here
Endless harmony…
The Silver Panda came into being during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 &’21… Myself and Maree Choie have sung harmony together in many different contexts over the years, beginning with the group August in the early 2000s, live and on record with Art Terry, Joy Joseph, Kaoru Noda and others, as well just for our own enjoyment… And when we were stuck inside on account of the virus, Maree had the idea that we should make some recordings based around the two of us singing together… I was keen, and we considered various ideas for what form it could take…
Slanted & Enchanted…
Then we happened to hear Sonic Youth’s ‘Teen Age Riot’ (from their 1988 Daydream Nation LP), which started me reminiscing about how much I liked it when it first came out…whereas Maree’s tastes as teenager back in Dunedin, NZ had taken a different route, and this particular corner of musical history was basically new to her… I started pulling out singles by Pavement and Dinosaur Jr and Pixies and My Bloody Valentine that I hadn’t played in years, and tried to convince her how good some of this music was… How it wasn’t all just about the guitar noise, and there were some really interesting songs beneath all of that…
A little orange guitar…
I had this little orange half-size guitar, that I’d found in a charity shop in Ramsgate for £5 (About ¥1000 or US$6.29)… I’d originally bought it thinking my daughter might play it… But, you see, I hadn’t really been able to play guitar much myself for a couple of years… I had quite a nasty spinal injury in 2016, and was told by the specialists I’d never play again… Didn’t take too much notice of that, and got myself gradually back to gigging over the next few years, only to wind up in hospital again in an even worse mess… And at the point where our story starts I was struggling to be able to play a full-size acoustic instrument… But I found that not only could I get around ok on this little half-size guitar, it didn’t sound too bad at all…
Blame it on the Bossa Nova…
Anyway… I picked up the orange guitar and started messing around with ’Teen Age Riot’… “It’s basically a bossa nova…”, and I started playing it as it if it were… And that’s more or less how The Silver Panda was born… We cooked up a little harmony arrangement, with just the orange guitar and our two voices; and then started casting around for other songs in a similar style that might work in a similar way…
‘Weird covers’…
We soon had a set of noisy guitar songs from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s… All records that I’d loved when I was a teenager starting out in my first bands, trying to copy those groups… And all arranged in a sort of acoustic ’Tropicalia’ style, mixing Brazilian Bossa and Samba rhythms and chord voicings with UK folk finger-picking, and jazz touches, and a sprinkling of punk attitude and Dada weirdness… Maree plays clarinet (she hadn’t yet got back into playing flute), and we decided the guitar solos should become clarinet solos; and I even persuaded her to add a bit of baritone sax to one track…an instrument she’d never played before, but we just happened to have one lying around…
The Silver Panda…
The project needed a name, and we delegated this job to our daughter Mika, then five years old, who decided on The Silver Panda, after a squishy rubber toy that she was fond of… Mika also found her way onto our recordings as guest vocalist (appearing briefly on our versions of Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Freak Scene’ and Pavement’s ‘Summer Babe’). She’s nine at the time I’m writing this, and she’s a good enough musician and singer herself now to be a fully-fledged member if and when we do another Silver Panda album… (watch this space…)
Freak Scene…
We started recording right away, with the rule that even though lockdowns were loosening up by this time, we would restrict ourselves to using only equipment, and people, that we already had at home… This was something of a challenge; we were renting a little flat below an antiques shop on Ramsgate’s Addington Street, run by a very grumpy and unhelpful man who insisted on shifting heavy furniture around all day above our heads and playing loud music through the floor… So we had to pick our moments… But we did have a enough gear around the place to make it work, and it felt like a positive challenge to restrict the sound palette, and to play all the instruments ourselves… The album was titled ‘Freak Scene’, after the Dinosaur Jr. song that kicks it off, and also in tribute to the…um…freakiness of that scene… We liked how expressive and free, and diverse, the ‘indie music’ of that era still was, in comparison to what came later…
Werewolves Of London…
We carried the DIY ethos over into the artwork and videos for the release, doing everything ourselves, with help from little Mika when it came to the videos, and the album was released in September of ’22, preceded by a string of singles and videos… We then followed straight up with a Halloween special cover of Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves Of London’ in October (with Maree making her recording debut on flute, since we’d picked up a cheap secondhand one locally around that time), and a version of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ in time for Christmas…
Bride Of Freak Scene…
At which point things began to get truly busy again with other projects… Recording studios were opening up again and my production diary had got busy… I’d also begun work on a solo album, with Maree playing clarinet and flute and singing harmony… (more about that here)… And The Silver Panda had to take a back seat… We did get as far as working up another set of songs; this time focusing on hippie rock songs from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s…but as yet we haven’t found time to record them… I’m sure at some point that we will…
VIDEOS