Things in Herds first shuffled awkwardly into existence in in a Brighton flat back in 1999 when Pete Lush borrowed a fancy 8 track recording device from a friend. After plugging a battered microphone into a hole in the back he set about writing and recording some unreasonably sad songs, enlisting the help of the mysterious Miss Ping on backing vocals, harmonica and pictures.
Soon there were fourteen of these, enough, perhaps to collect into something vaguely resembling the ‘album’ format so beloved of late 20th century followers of popular music. Close enough for the Things, anyway, who named the whole mess ‘Pardon?’, stuck a picture of some horses on the front and began hawking CDR copies from their poorly designed website.
Meanwhile Pete was busy writing and recording the songs that would become the ‘I Can Dancing And Walking’ LP. Drawing it’s name from a vague childhood recollection of a Taiwanese bird puppet it would be filled with yet more melancholy and synthesizers, all draped in a pig-based mystery about the Great Wall of China.
With two albums now under their belts Pete and Miss Ping decided the proper thing to do was to pretend they were a record label. They issued each release with an official sounding number and, following the careful application of glue and scissors, G-Folk Records was born. It wasn’t long before this crass commercialization of noises sincerely made with hands and mouth attracted the attention of other labels and ‘I Can Dancing and Walking’ was released by Trust Me in the UK in 2002 and across the USA in 2004 by Undecided Records.
The Things took a couple of years off for reading and drinking, but inevitably the songs began to pile up. The fact that Pete had got hold of a new microphone and computer, and that Miss Ping’s mind was full of plans for a war of horses almost certainly didn’t help to prevent their making another CD.
And that’s where we stand, with the release of the album ‘Everything Has to End Somewhere’, a collection of songs as optimistic in tone as the title suggests.
