New Blood: Endor

Theirs is what pop music would have been if John Lennon had listened to Belle and Sebastian, smoking hash and strumming in Kelvingrove Park.

Feature by Jasper Hamill | 16 Apr 2006

Grassroots Adoration, underground pop penetration, collective effort: all rather rude sounding concepts but nonetheless apt for describing the musical strategies of Endor, the first band to release a record on the West End's own Say Dirty Records.

Nubile young pups, still coming to terms with the appearance of a beard on their lead singer's face, Endor's winsome, naIve charm recalls Yo La Tengo if they'd grown up shivering through interminable Scottish winters. At just nineteen, the band hooked up with Say Dirty through their gigs at the Goat, a pub around which a fledgling scene focused around members of the Reindeer Section and the tweedy gents of Wake the President. Sharing boozy Sundays and hanging about at the increasingly influential Cold Night Song evening on Thursdays, Endor quickly attracted the attention of the bloody mary sipping Goat crowd.

The boys are distrustful of the press' demarcation of artificial scenes, citing the "ludicrousness of the NME when they coined this phrase 'The New Jock Revolution.' It was just bloody ridiculous." It's not as if they've needed a scene so far, having scored airplay on Lamacq Live, witnessed teams jogging onto Parkhead to their single and corralling their fans into the 'Help the Endorly' campaign which saw Vic Galloway's mailbox stuffed with pleas to play the single Hold On. Such was the response that Vic phoned Bjorn, the manager of Say Dirty, to get him to stop the barrage. You can join in the fun at the link below, although I can't imagine Vic would thank me for telling you that.

Having sung in a choir for the recording of Snow Patrol's new album, during which they met Eugene Kelly and felt as if "we should call him sir," youth is no barrier to Endor's unaffected ambition. The band's easygoing charm and breezy, sun-through-the-clouds melodies, carry a weight of feeling you'd expect from a band twice their age with their success driven by no other desire than to "play for as long as possible." Their "quirky Glaswegian pop" is unabashed in its flirtatious, unpretentious frolic with tuneful beauty. They see no point in being "obscure for the sake of it," and claim to want to make music that resounds with heartfelt emotion, tips its hat to the underground yet sets off straight for the gleaming shores of the pop world.

Theirs is what pop music would have been if John Lennon had listened to Belle and Sebastian, smoking hash and strumming in Kelvingrove Park. Arresting, ethereal and blissfully evocative, Endor's tunes manage to pull off the trick of sounding instantly familiar whilst being utterly unique.

Have a Listen to the single at www.myspace.com/endor

http://www.helptheendorly.com