Bored In Belgium: a four-track seven-inch, delayed a week by snow

On 19 January 2010 the band posted a notice announcing a new seven-inch called Bored In Belgium, described in their own words as being made from rubber, holes, oil and grey. It was the first release after Love On An Oil Rig, the last single they put out, and it is chiefly remembered for the reason it came out late.

The record

Four tracks over two sides, which is generous for a seven-inch and tells you the band had more material than they had places to put it. Bored In Belgium and The Woodsmen take the A-side. Bored to Death in Belgium and Death on an Oil Rig take the B. The single was released on vinyl and as a download, with pre-orders running through HMV and Norman Records.

No catalogue number was published for it, and none has been added here. That is the one gap in the release list that is genuinely annoying: it means the record is harder to look up in a database than the four-year-old singles that came before it.

A week in the snow

The original date was 25 January. What happened instead was the winter of 2009–10, which was the coldest Britain had seen in thirty years: weeks of lying snow, closed roads and a freight network that gave up in stages. The pressing was on a lorry that got stuck near Sheffield, and the release moved to 1 February.

It is a small story and a completely typical one for a band releasing physical records on an independent budget. A major label absorbs a week's delay without anyone noticing. A band with four launch shows booked and a pressing plant's worth of stock on one lorry does not.

Death On An Oil Rig, the album that stayed on the B-side

The two B-side tracks came from a separate project the band had been working on: a slowed, blackened, deliberately grim rework of the second album, which they were calling Death On An Oil Rig. Another piece of it had already gone up on their MySpace page. As far as any release listing shows, those two tracks are the only part of it that ever came out.

The idea was not new to them. The Parrot seven-inch in 2009 had closed with something billed as Parrot (Death of the Parrot Version), a wrecked rendering of its own A-side. What started as a bonus track on one single had turned into a shadow version of a whole album by the next one.

Four shows in nine days

The single was launched across four dates at the turn of the month: Exeter Cavern on 27 January, Oporto in Leeds on 2 February, Buffalo in Cardiff on the 3rd as the launch show, and The Moles Club in Bath on the 4th. The Cardiff date landed two days after the record finally arrived.

Where the title came from

Belgium had been on the itinerary since 2009 — Minnemeers in Gent that October, Madame Moustache in Brussels on the 2011 tour, and the country sits on the road between every other date a British band plays in mainland Europe. Boredom is the standing joke of touring at this level: long drives, early load-ins, and six hours in a venue with nothing to do until the soundcheck. A song called Bored In Belgium is not a complaint about Belgium. It is a complaint about vans.

What the notice also said

Two other things sat in the same post, and both turned out to matter. The band said they had been writing every day, and that the new songs were showing rather too much influence of both Sting and Gorillaz — a joke, but a joke about material that became the third album. And they said they were working out tours in Europe, with Italy and France in mind, and asked any Russian promoters who happened to be reading to get in touch.

The European touring did happen, on a larger scale than this notice suggests: the seventeen-date Winter Lake Swimmers run of autumn 2011 took in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and five dates in Switzerland. The Russian tour did not. Bag of Meat came out in 2011 and was the last record.