Indie art rock from Cardiff: the band, the music, and what actually happened between 2005 and 2012

The short answer is that The Victorian English Gentlemens Club were an indie art rock band from Cardiff who put out three albums and eight other records between 2005 and 2011, and stopped in 2012. The longer answer is that hardly anyone who wrote about them could agree on what to call the music, which is usually a good sign.

Three people, one Cardiff band

Adam Taylor played guitar and sang. Louise Mason played bass and sang. Emma Daman played drums and sang. On their own site they described themselves as a three-piece contemporary music group based in Cardiff, and added, in writing, that there is no official apostrophe in the name of the band although they were aware that there should be one.

That is the entire personnel list and it stayed that way. No touring keyboard player, no fourth member drafted in for the second album, no line-up change to explain in a footnote. Whatever is different between the first record and the last, the three of them did it.

The three voices are what people notice first. Most bands put one person at the front. Here the guitar, the bass and the drums all answered back: sometimes a verse each, sometimes everyone piling onto the same line until it turned into a chant. Reviewers reached for the B-52s, for the Pixies, for early Sonic Youth, and none of those held for a whole song.

What indie art rock actually meant here

Indie art rock from Cardiff in 2005 meant a fairly specific set of habits: a small label, a seven-inch as the default format, songs built on a bassline rather than a riff, and a suspicion of the chorus. The band's own account was blunter. They said they would freely call their music pop, although they sometimes played songs without a chorus; that it had also been called rock, although they had been known to use an acoustic guitar; and punk, despite their enjoyment of effects pedals and natural fibres.

Calling them an indie art rock band explains the guitars and very little else. The art part is audible in the arrangements: songs that change shape halfway through and do not change back, endings that arrive a bar early, lyrics that read like overheard sentences. The punk part is in the length and the volume. Almost nothing they released runs past three and a half minutes.

By the second album the phrase indie art rock from Cardiff had to stretch a long way. Love On An Oil Rig is heavier and more deliberate than the debut, and Bag of Meat in 2011 is heavier still. The music thickened as the band got better at playing it.

The music, record by record

The first single, The Tales Of Hermit Mark, came out on Fantastic Plastic in August 2005 as FP7051, with My Son Spells Backwards on the other side. Amateur Man / Ban The Gin followed in April 2006, then the self-titled debut album that August (eleven tracks, FPCD016), and Impossible Sightings Over Shelton a month later, the seven-inch pressed on clear vinyl.

Three years separate the first album from the second. In between came a split single with You Say Party! We Say Die!, a double A-side of La Mer and Stupid As Wood, and a shared seven-inch with This Is Pop on LSM Records. Parrot arrived in July 2009 on This Is Fake DIY Records, on limited heavyweight yellow vinyl, with a video directed by Casey Raymond and Ewan Jones Morris; Love On An Oil Rig came out behind it.

Bored In Belgium opened 2010 — a week late, because the pressing was stuck on a lorry in the snow near Sheffield. Bag of Meat, the third album, arrived in 2011 and took the best notices of the three: four out of five in Uncut, seven out of ten in NME, five out of five in Artrocker. The seventeen-date Winter Lake Swimmers tour that autumn was the last long run.

The city they came out of

Cardiff had a working circuit when they started: Clwb Ifor Bach on Womanby Street, the Barfly, Buffalo, and promoters who would give an unknown three-piece a weeknight. The city's reputation rested on Manic Street Preachers and Super Furry Animals; what was actually happening in the small rooms was noisier and less polished, and Future of the Left, Los Campesinos! and this band all surfaced out of it inside about eighteen months of each other.

There is no dramatic ending to report. The last long tour finished in Oxford in November 2011, nothing was released after Bag of Meat, and at some point the three of them were photographed holding a hand-lettered sign announcing that they were recording a new project. Nothing from it reached a shop. The record of what they did make is collected here because it is worth having in one place: the eleven releases with their catalogue numbers, the live dates, and what the press made of it.