Pastels/Tenniscoats

Over the last decade, The Pastels have brokered a particularly fruitful relationship with the underground pop music coming out of Japan. Their label, Geographic, released compendiums from Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Nagisa Ni te, and Kama Aina; they’ve played in the always-revolving Maher line-up, and Two Sunsets contributor Bill Wells has recorded albums with Maher as well (the latest of which, Gok, was released on Geographic). Two Sunsets, by The Pastels and Japanese pop duo Tenniscoats, thus feels like an absolutely natural development. Both groups have a history of collaboration – Tenniscoats recently recording with Secai and with Tape, both Saya and Takashi Ueno taking part in countless one-off projects and being part-time members of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and The Pastels releasing records with Al Larsen of Some Velvet Sidewalk (as Sandy Dirt), Jarvis Cocker (as The Nu-Forest) and Jad Fair (as Jad Fair And The Pastels). ‘The idea of us recording together came from Tenniscoats,’ Stephen McRobbie recalls. ‘They suggested they would like to record with us at the end of a Scottish tour in 2006. I know we were excited but maybe wondering if they meant some kind of completely improvised session. But it turned out Tenniscoats already had a song, Two Sunsets, which they wanted to record with us and another, slightly more abstract piece called Welcome To The Sea which was also beautiful.’ Two Sunsets thus took shape across several years’ worth of collaboration, involving recording with Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub), and several sessions with Bal Cooke (who helped with The Pastels’ soundtrack from 2002, The Last Great Wilderness), which McRobbie remembers as ‘sunny and productive, we were never stuck.’ Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.