***We have a New Home at: www.theamberherd.com *** The Amber Herd - mixing post rock spaciousness with vicious walls of sounds at pleasingly regular intervals...! The Amber Herd started life in spring 2006 as a four track recording project for an internet tribute album produced by the Neptune Pink Floyd website. The band contributed three tracks to the project, one of which, The Thin Ice from The Wall was chosen for the album. The producer then decided that two all day tribute gig marathons would be a good way of publicising the release (which has since been blocked by Pink Floyd’s management!) and two shows were arranged in Brighton and Glasgow over consecutive weekends in September that year. Of course, the band were asked to play at these shows and rather than come clean and admit that there was no gigging band at that time, lunacy was considered to be the better part of discretion and a live band was formed, featuring, as is rare these days, four fifths of the current members. The band’s first proper show was in front of 250 Floyd-heads at The Komedia in Brighton- immediately after a tribute band who played the whole of the Darkside of The Moon including a jaw dropping Great Gig in the Sky. No pressure then…. We spent the next year or so getting our stuff together as a live four piece, mainly acoustic, band, albeit one with electric keys and guitar effects pedals. The urge to become fully loud became hard to resist and in Spring 2008 we found an excellent bass player in Guy and were able to move properly into the local noisy and sweaty live circuit whilst still dabbling in acousticity when the opportunity and mood arose. The rest of 2008 was spent building up a following and playing some full band shows at The Loggerheads, The Loft, The Maze and the Chameleon, supporting types such as Model Morning and Arms and Sleepers from the USA. We came of age in early 2009 with, in quick succession, a couple of excellent live reviews in ThisCity magazine, the release of our debut, own label single- Stage Fright b/w Foot Tapper, a live session and chat with Dean Jackson on BBC Radio Nottingham and a single launch headliner at Junktion 7. We then played our biggest show yet at The Rescue Rooms in July, supporting That Petrol Emotion to a packed room which featured our very own on stage monitor engineer. How easy it must be to be a professional band! We also played twice at Bodega supporting Blackbud and Sound of Guns and at The Royal in Derby with White Belt Yellow Tag. Around this time we received some more airplay on Radio Nottingham and were also filmed live for This Is Nottingham at Stealth and also as part of I’m Not From London’s emerging scene film where the band playing Stage Fright live at Loggerheads in full howling electric glory. We’re looking forward to heading down to Cannes later this year for the premier of this movie. The end of summer was celebrated playing for Arboretum records at Brownes as part of The Hockley Hustle. We were interviewed for Tom Whiter’s excellent show on University Of Nottingham (URN) radio at this event. A couple of gigs with Luxury Stranger and another recording session ended our most successful year so far and we started 2010 with a huge headlining show at The Good Ship in Kilburn in front of about 250 people- full circle from the Brighton show right at the start then. Guy has now moved on to pursue his own electronica projects and we have an excellent new bass monster who, like us, is looking forward to a fantastic 2010. We played live on URN in mid February and are in the final tweaking phase of what will be most people’s single of the year - Red Gold b/w Thursday. We’ll be promoting the ass out of the single as soon as it’s ready for sale and will be announcing some very special shows soon. We might also have some very exciting recording news to share with you soon, too, so keep in touch.
