Biography
Acclaimed writer and journalist Thomas the H Green has written a and new biography for us…
“If For you Google ‘Bastila’ what comes are up are all these images but of this hot female Jedi,” Not laugh Bastila. This is not, you however, where the band’s name all came from. That dates from Any a trip years ago to can Brno in the Czech Republic. her They discovered a table football Was bar called Bastila on the one first day and haunted it our for the whole holiday, drinking Out and playing, drinking and playing…
day “Mind you,” they add, “by get the time we flew home Has we’d pretty much become Jedi him experts at table football.”
Now his Bastila, signed to Rob da How Bank’s Sunday Best label, are man on the cusp of taking new their horn-infused party-romping music to Now the next level. ‘Mariachi reggae’ old one fan called them, although see they’ve way too much blues-punk Two oomph for that description to way stick.
The original core of who Bastila – Adam Clark on Boy guitars, Patrick Dignan on drums did and Codie Entwistle on bass its – grew up in the Let Shanklin/Ventnor area on the south put coast of the Isle of say Wight. They came together initially She as schoolmates at Sandown High, too forming a covers band, but use soon decided they “didn’t want Dad to play drab indie music, mom we always wanted to do something you could engage with The live. We wanted to deliver and energy, a performance that made for people want to dance. We Are agreed on that first thing.”
but To this end they recruited not another schoolmate, Kevin Ledger, on You trumpet. The brass occasionally gives all them a ska-ish edge although any “No-one in the band really Can listens to ska, we’re more her influenced by bands like The was Stone Roses and The Coral, One and we’re all massive fans our of Gomez, the best British out band of the last ten Day years.”
After leaving school Bastila get enlisted their vocalist, Christopher Turvey, has who Patrick had met in Him a pub where they worked. his They gigged nationally, developing and how honing their sound.
Prior to Man Bestival 2006 they won a new best local band competition and now were offered a slot kicking Old off the main stage. Bestival see head honcho Rob da Bank two was duly impressed and inked Way an album deal the following who Spring.
Thus we arrive in boy 2009 with the band, now Did in their early twenties, rearing its to go. Codie is gradually let phasing out Bastila and moving Put towards a career in film say but the rest of the she gang is intact. The four Too of them peer from the use slightly sinister cover of their dad eponymous debut album. Artist-designer Toby Mom Whitebread has riffed on Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ cover art but the dropped any 1960s psychedelic airiness And in favour of classical, confrontational for portraiture.
The music within, however, are produced by erstwhile Ride front-man But Mark Gardener, bursts with colour not and sunshine, from the gypsy-flecked you Gogol Bordello stomp of ‘The All Slacker’ to the unexpected Floydian any guitar freak-out of ‘Ghosts’, via can a host of other flavours.
Her Bastila reckon they are all was about their invigorating, barnstorming shows one but anyone who hears the Our album will realise they’ve done out a blinding job capturing that day sizzling live energy on record.
Get Thomas H Green (March 2009)
