GuilFest 2006. The 3 Day Guildford Music Festival on 14th, 15th and 16th July 2006

About the bands
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Artist: Songdog
Genre: Ambient Rock
Performing: 16th July 2005 /The UNCUT Magazine Stage
Website Address: [http://www.songdog.co.uk]
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Songdog are really all about the songs. Dark, literate songs sung from the prison-cell of the heart (from where you can sometimes see just as far as from the top of any mountain).

Their third album “The Time Of Summer Lightning” is due early summer 2005 on One Little Indian Records.

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” - the closing lines of Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ nail the brooding heart of this record perfectly, a dark and poignant collection of songs about dreams gone wrong, loves left behind, new lusts and old obsessions. Loss and Time Past haunt this beautiful album like muffled footfalls in an empty old house.

THE BAND:

The band consists of Lyndon Morgans (vocals, acoustic guitar and songs), Karl Woodward (electric guitars, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, keyboards) and Dave Paterson (drums, keyboards, percussion). Lyndon and Karl are from Blackwood in South Wales , Dave from Dundee . They met up in London and self-released Songdog’s debut album “The Way Of The World” in 2001, followed by “Haiku” in 2003 on Evangeline Records.

INFLUENCES:

Lyndon reveres Leonard Cohen, James Joyce, Joni Mitchell, Samuel Beckett, Tom Waits, Marcel Proust, Bob Dylan and Emile Cioran best. (Plus Roy Orbison and Franz Kafka, the Beatles and Baudelaire).

He doesn’t really like to hang out, but if these people were to book a coach and ask him along for a summer-afternoon’s chilling in the hills he’d definitely go, because they’re the people he grew up reading and listening to, his role-models if you like. (Some of them he’s seen live, some of them he’s just visited the graves of. And he taught himself French so he could read some of them in their own language).

For Lyndon, if it’s not about poetry (the shorthand of the heart) and great tunes it’s probably just a career move. Sure, poetry can encompass anything from “The Waste Land” to “Long Tall Sally” but just so long as it’s there! In earlier bands Lyndon used to yelp his stuff in front of Marshall-stacks and big fuck-off bass-bins, but with Songdog he changed tack and sold his gold-top Les Paul for a Martin. So there’s as much attitude in his songs as ever, only now it’s murmured sotto voce.

A NEAT MERCHANDISING ANGLE:

‘Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll and Art’ might be a good slogan for a Songdog T-shirt. When rock n’ roll pretends to disdain art, that’s just its inferiority complex showing, says Lyndon. Art-schools have been the cradle for all the most important British rock music, so we should just quit acting dumb and embrace the

‘A’ word. (‘A’ is for Animal Rights too. ‘The way we exploit animals is just ….. heartbreaking’).

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE:

Before Songdog, Lyndon wrote plays and won the Verity Bargate award for one called “Water Music”. He found the theatre world a bit of a snake-pit, all farty and no arty. Only times he ever goes now is for Howard Barker plays or Robert Wilson extravaganzas.