“Our favourite space to create music in is ‘Baselab’, located in the basement of an architecture firm in Nottingham city centre, run by local legend Simon Ashdown. Baselab is a one off… a practice room where you can take your time, and feel comfortable. Behind the drum kit are shiny silver reflective strips and the uneven roof has plastic ‘70s oversized round lights. There’s also a huge broken old Mitsubishi television, some busted up keyboards, two-string guitars and two foot drummer’s ashtrays.
Simon uses vintage Watkins tape echo and spring reverb for vocals and a Fender Bassman head for guitar or bass (as used by Pavement and most other notable bands). There’s also a one inch eight-rack tape machine and some old mics for live recordings. It’s very important for us to have a lot of room to move around and no time limit on a session. In Baselab, we like to have some odd yet familiar items around us to look to for inspiration.
We book this place out but once we’re down there, there is no limit – it’s an ‘evenings and weekends’ space. We don’t like to practice when there are other groups in the other rooms mucking up Zeppelin solos, this is a place to create music with other people.
We get started when somebody writes part of a song and we play it together until another one of us comes up with some more ideas. Equipment-wise we use a Fender Jagmaster, Moog Moogerfooger ring modulator, electro-Harmonix graphic fuzz, Akai headrush, Selmer treble ‘n’ bass guitar head, Musicman Stingray bass, Proco Rat distortion, TC electronics vintage distortion, Ampeg svt 6×10 bass stack and Watkins tape echo.
What we love about our space is that you feel like you’ve stepped into a secret place and you know you’re in the best room in town.”
****************************************************************
Based nowhere and residing pretty much everywhere, Lovvers is compromised of four ambitious nobodies. They are a strange mix of music’s forgotten blank generation, re-calling the spirit of Darby Crash’s Germs, the weirdness of Flipper, Wipers-style pop and the careless attitude of The Replacements. After the release of four noisy 7″s, the band have now found a home at Wichita recordings. They have played nearly 200 shows up and down the UK, sharing bills with the likes of Butthole Surfers, No Age, Times New Viking, Jay Reatard, Awesome Color, Mika Miko, Fucked Up and Black Lips. Their new ep ‘Think’ is released on October 10th. Lovvers play the Boom Boom Room on 34 O’ Connell St, Dublin on Friday October 3rd and Lavery’s Bunker in Belfast on Saturday October 4th. Doors for the Dublin show are 8.30pm, admission is €10 and support is from Bats and Weil Rats. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/letscommunicate or www.skinnywolves.com/lovvers.htm.
Musical Rooms 
Leave a comment