Interview with Findo Gask

About this time last year Findo Gask were, in my opinion, just about the most promising band in Scotland. Their unusual take on electro disco pop seemed to appeal to the indie kids as much as to the dancefloor, and with Vic Galloway and Muslim Alim putting them forward as one of two recommended Scottish bands for the BBC Introducing slots at Glastonbury they seemed to be gaining real momentum.

Personally I love their first two singles, Va Va Va and One Eight Zero, and they are a band I would actually have loved to have on the label, but they seemed to be doing so well by the Spring of 2010 that I was unlikely to have ever asked them because despite being unsigned I thought they had probably progressed beyond us already.

Then, around April, they suddenly announced that they were to split. This wasn’t entirely out of the blue – I had heard fairly wispy rumours to that effect before – but it seemed so incongruous: they seemed just on the verge of genuinely achieving something.

Nevertheless, there it was. They said that their intention was to finish their debut album, release it, and then walk away, in a similar move to the recent announcement by Edinburgh’s Come On Gang!

I suppose it’s no surprise that the album shows absolutely no signs of materialising, all motivation presumably dissipating as the band’s members involve themselves in other projects. I still consider it a massive shame though, as I was a big fan of the band, to the extent that we interviewed them at Homegame last year, up in Fife.

Findo Gask Interview from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.

I’ve been embarrassingly tardy editing the video together. As I suppose must have been the case with the album, once the split was announced it just never seemed pressing, with so many other things to do. But as some sort of obituary I thought I should post a short film of the interview (above) and then a couple of song videos (below), two from their full set on the Friday night and then two from their acoustic performance the next morning in the Hew Scott Hall.

So cheers lads, and good luck for the future. I still wish I could have heard that record.