Happy new year!
Calum here. It’s been a while since we posted on here - mainly because we’ve been busy kicking ass, writing, performing and otherwise doing ‘band stuff’ - I’m not going to elaborate in any great detail here, but suffice it to say that despite the lack of gigs that typifies the life of a band during the winter months, there is much going on beneath the surface.
We have upcoming gigs;
Glasgow - Celtic Connections at The Hug and Pint supporting NoGoodBoyo - Tickets here
Edinburgh - 10th Anniversary Gig at The Liquid Rooms with The Honey Farm and Airdan - Tickets here
Anyway, where were we? Oh yes…
This year - 2023, for those of you who’ve lost count - marks the 10th anniversary of Yoko Pwno! I can’t actually remember when Lewis first appeared at my flat on Edinburgh’s Montgomery Street armed with a 4-pack of McEwan’s Export and his Grandad’s old fiddle. To be honest, it’s probably not that important. We weren’t really a ‘band’ in any meaningful way back then. We didn’t have any notion of what it would be to be one, and only a vague idea of what music we would like to make. No one had any grand plans, and the limit of our ambitions was to blag our way into gigs and festivals that we couldn’t afford tickets to.
The other member of Yoko Pwno in those days was a lovely man named Marco Salvatore Baressi, who quit the band in 2014 (amicably) and vanished off to the Philipines, only to resurface years later working as a parking warden in Dundee. I’m told that he didn’t tell anyone he’d come back, and I only found out because he got caught trying to give my friend Kulis’s mum a ticket. Away from his work at Dundee City Council, Marco is perhaps best known for his starring role in the video for ‘Skag Trendy’ by the View, which peaked at #33 in the charts back in 2007. You can watch it here.
(Marco, if you’re reading this, I still have your Yamaha acoustic. You can have it back, but please give me notice, as it’s the guitar I use for gigging at the moment!)
We must have been writing stuff together since 2012, but the first ever Yoko Pwno gig came on March 15th 2013, when - having been suggested to the promoter by Patrick Walker (a man who deserves more than a little credit for guidance and feedback in the early days of us trying to be a band) we supported James Campbell’s excellent solo project ‘Landings’ at Sneaky Petes.
No footage of our set from that night exists, but here is some of James’s set, and I’ve attached the one photo I can be sure came from that night - a rather blurry photo of Lewis sawing away as I do something ‘electronic’ with a 1gb windows notebook. Marco is grinning at me in a manner which - I think - means that the gig is going well :)
The only other thing I remember is that before the show James asked me what we were called. I told him we were called Yoko Pwno, because I thought it was funny. “It’s cool”, I told Marco and Lewis, “We’ll do one gig now with this name, and once we’ve got our shit together and are ready to launch again we can come up with a better one.”
