Parrot: the yellow seven-inch, the video, and the record it opened

Parrot was announced on 4 June 2009 as the first single from a second album called Love On An Oil Rig. It came out five weeks later on This Is Fake DIY Records as TIFD0030, free as a download and limited as a heavyweight yellow seven-inch. It is the best-remembered record the band made, largely because of the video.

A free download and a yellow seven-inch

The release was handled the way a lot of 2009 releases were handled, which is to say twice. The title track was given away as a download from the band's own site from Monday 6 July, and the physical record was a limited pressing that had to be bought — a heavyweight yellow seven-inch, announced on 18 June with the colour spelled out letter by letter as though it were the main selling point. For a band whose previous four singles had come out on clear vinyl and plain black, it more or less was.

Pre-orders opened on 30 June through a site the band had rebuilt a few weeks earlier. The seven-inch carried three tracks rather than the usual two: Parrot itself, Make You Not a Man, and a third listed as Parrot (Death of the Parrot Version) that did not appear on the download at all.

The video

The Parrot video was directed by Casey Raymond and Ewan Jones Morris, a Cardiff pair who had been making short films and music videos around south Wales for several years. It appeared on NME's site on 20 June 2009, a fortnight ahead of the release, and it is the reason the song travelled beyond the people who already owned the first album. The band flagged it on their own site the same day with two words and a link.

Filming happened earlier that month. The only account of the shoot that the band published is a single line about being bitten by a terrifying blue parrot, which is either a description of the shoot or a good joke about it.

The three tracks

Parrot leads, Make You Not a Man sits on the reverse, and the Death of the Parrot Version closes the record. That third track is the interesting one: a slowed, degraded rework of the A-side, exclusive to the vinyl, and the first sign of a habit that produced a whole parallel record. By the time Bored In Belgium came out in February 2010, two of its four tracks (Bored to Death in Belgium and Death on an Oil Rig) came from what the band described as a drudge version of the second album.

Make You Not a Man never appeared on an album, which makes the seven-inch the only place to find it outside a download store. That was normal for the band: the 2006 singles carried Train and 42 Boxes, neither of which made the debut either, and the 2008 shared single carried a French-language version of La Mer that exists nowhere else. Anyone assembling the full picture from the albums alone ends up four or five songs short.

The tour that carried it

Parrot went out in front of a summer of touring. Two shows in early July, at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff and The Lexington in London, then eleven dates through August running from Manchester to Brighton, with We Are The Physics joining the Edinburgh and Glasgow nights. September took in London and Exeter; October took the band to Frankfurt, Münster, Hannover, Gent, Berlin and Tilburg.

Love On An Oil Rig itself arrived in the middle of that run. Three years had passed since the debut, and the album that Parrot introduced is a denser, slower-burning record than the one that came before it — closer in temperament to the Death of the Parrot Version than to the sharp two-minute songs of 2006. The band marked its release with a show in the wooden Norwegian church in Cardiff Bay that September, and flagged it at the time as their last Cardiff date for a while.