We at OTBT suffer from a constant and terminal case of puppy-esque over-enthusiasm – in fact, that was how the whole thing started off. “Fancy putting a project together based around stuff we have absolutely no expertise in, experience doing or knowledge of? Hell, how hard can it be? More beer? Excellent”.
We still haven’t learned our damned lesson. We’re still wide-eyed and giddy about the bands we get to film, and one of the biggest problems we have is finding the time to fit everyone in, with an absolute truckload slipping through the cracks on a weekly basis.
Which is why we get so demented and happy when something completely unplanned works out. Hell, we’re lucky if our most carefully laid plans come off, so when we get a piece of luck like this one, it keeps us up nights, grinning like goons.
While stumbling around one Saturday generally making a nuisance of ourselves filming Beerjacket (his awesome session is coming soon, too), and whilst trying to work out how to use a set of mind-blowingly expensive cameras that we’d convinced the lovely people at The Skinny to sort out for us, we’d ended up outside the Wee Red Bar with fifteen minutes to kill. And as if the gods of all acoustic sessions came together at once, we turned round and saw Julia And The Doogans just hanging around on some benches practising for their evening show. At which point our inner puppies kicked in and we bounded over and asked to get a couple of tracks down.
Unfortunately for us, since our power animals are puppies and everything, this means that we are extremely well-meaning, but that something usually gets broken – and this was, by some considerable margin, the least professional session we’ve yet stumbled our way inexpertly through. Considering that one of us once fell in a river during a session, this is some achievement. We are still not sure whether the band are convinced that the cameras were running – indeed, in a recent Myspace blog, Julia described us as ‘hilarious’. Not talented, visionary, creative, exciting, or even competent, but ‘hilarious’.
Like clowns.
Anyway – the last laugh’s on us, because we caught two tracks from a band that truly blew us away. In the weeks after we recorded the session, a few articles sprung up from the usual sources which will give you the background on the band, but we hope this gives you a feel for what everyone’s on about. Glasgow-based and less than a year old, Julia & The Doogans make a noise so rich, so charged and so damn tasty that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. In particular, you’ll never watch the X Factor again without comparing every two-bit, glory-seeking cheap hack songstress’ feeble warble to Julia’s suckerpunch of a voice, all soft and fractured one minute, and bursting your nose the next, all to a soundtrack that slips between high glory and gut-wrenching despair in the space of seconds.
So – if being puppy-like and stupid means we get to run into bands this good by accident, we think that’s fair.
