We love playing live.  To us great music is created by a group of people playing live together. To record live is special.  Whatever we played is all that we recorded and all that the listener will hear. The interplay between the band, the producer and the slight imperfections and  vibe in the room has created a never-to-be-repeated ‘moment’.

The 4 tracks are 

Granton Ska Cause    Wake and Bake 

Honeymoon Without The Wedding    Yellow Pages

Buy Now!

It has been brought to my attention that there are some people reading this blog who are under the age of thirty five, so I’ll keep the references to masturbation to an absolute minimum, unless it’s sexy.

We don’t want anyone to panic but I’m afraid we might be going on strike in a month’s time, so there could be a Ska shortage.   We’re striking over appalling work conditions; do you know that we sometimes have to play up to a two hour set, with no toilet or cigarette break?  It’s like a Dickensian novel.  As to the impending Ska shortage our advice is to panic.  Panic as much as you can.  If you are not running around with your hair on fire then you are not panicking enough which means that there is a good chance you don’t understand the gravity of the situation.   You see our fragile economy is a lot like the board game Monopoly, except of course in Monopoly the rich pay taxes and occasionally go to jail.  It’s a game nonetheless, and we have been left with no other move to play but industrial action.  No one underestimates the impact this will have.  Ska is used for many things; it powers our iPods, it’s lubricates our radio telescopes, it’s a vital component in the building and construction of pork pie hats.  So we take this very seriously.  We recommend stocking up on Ska, filling up jars of the stuff and burying it in the garden.  You’ll need them after the apocalypse.  Also take all your money out of the bank, sell your house and download as many copies of ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’, our award winning Punk album, as your hard drive will permit.  I would suggest buying extra hard drives to fill up with Ska, but honestly, you don’t have the time, just go to iTunes now and email us all your money.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Is this not a diabolical scheme on our part to inflate the Ska bubble?  Aren’t we using our insider knowledge to cynically create the panic of a Ska shortage to manipulate people into spending money, thereby avoiding a second straight month of zero economic growth, and thus avoiding a ska recession?  That’s crazy talk, and possibly slanderous.  Only a bunch of right fucking assholes would do that.  We’re more like loveable idiots than assholes, and anyway we don’t have that much insider knowledge.  We get most of our information from Colin, and he gets all his news of current affairs from the radio in Grand Theft Auto, so you see we have our own problems.  Like everyone else we have financial difficulties and are exploring all sorts of new avenues to raise cash.  Just the other day we were talking about buying Rangers Football Club from the adminstrators, for two pounds, and turning them into the world’s most expensive Ska band.  It’s not as deranged as it sounds, they have twenty thousand fans who turn up and pay through the nose to see them play a ninety minute set every week.  Imagine if we could harness the power of Rangers and use them for good, by turning them into a Ska band.  They would be formidable.  We didn’t buy them in the end, because of the tax thing, and put the money towards a twelve pack of Stella instead, a much more sensible investment in these turbulent times.  So it’s back to our original plan, ‘Bombskare Presents – Karl Marx: The Musical, starring Andy P as Karl Marx, Murray Graham as Jenny Marx, and Papa Joe as Marx’s Theory of Value.  It’s bound to be a money spinner, which would be ironic.

We’ve been busy recently.  We have been building yet another stunt drummer to add to the ranks of our elite unit of Ska drummers for our ever busier Ska commitments, and it is a difficult business.  Building a basic, stand-alone drummer is easy of course, you can buy a kit online from soyouneedanidiottoplaydrums.com, but programming them for Ska is tricky and potentially hazardous.  Eye protection should be worn at all times.  And a gum shield.  Once you’ve programmed the basics, you know, left and right, one-two-three-four, you then have to install the Bombskare update, which is a massive download, lots of complicated patches and security modifications, much bigger than Windows Service Pack 3.   You also have to be very careful installing it correctly or the subject can become dangerously psychotic with a messianic complex, and that’s the last thing you want; the second coming of Jesus and he turns out to be a drummer.  Yes, I’ll never forgive myself for what happened with Cammy.  There’s no Windows help file to sort that out.  However no such problems this time around, we definitely are getting better at constructing cyborg Ska rythm machines from the future.  Drumbot 6.0 aka David Morrison is working out well.  We had a quiet warm up gig last week down at our buddy Baz’s party so that Dave could try out the Bombskare set before his first proper gig with us, down in London next week.  He passed his basic training no problems.  Next step is his advanced training which involves two full days with the band, a lot of alcohol, a lot of inappropriate touching and of course the exciting possibility of blind, ugly violence.

We’ve also been down at Chamber Studio recording with our buddy Graeme Young.  Chamber is a fantastic studio and it was great to work there again.  The tracks sound great, especially considering how difficult it was to record and mix everything live.  A lot of people don’t appreciate how much effort and time goes into multi-track recording these days, it’s meticulous and detail-oriented, so this was a step back in time to how they recorded half a century ago, back when boy bands roamed the earth.  In fact the earliest multi track techniques were developed by the German’s in the 1940′s, at a time when you would have thought they would have been busy.  They pioneered the earliest stereo technology which was developed specifically so that Hitler could improve the quality of his bands demo tapes.  He played bass in a jazz/funk trio called ‘The Adolf Hitler Funk Catastrophe’.  It’s all there on Wikipedia.  Big thanks to Toni Martone at Critical State and to Graeme and the boys at Chamber Studios who did a cracking job recording Bombskare in one go, so to speak, in all our raw glory.  We are the Mount Everest of recording live bands, but they managed to scale us, and fortunately no one fell to their deaths or had to resort to cannibalism.  Three new tracks written for the occasion; ‘Granton Ska Cause’, ‘Honeymoon Without The Wedding’, and ‘Wake and Bake’.  Also an old tune of ours ‘Yellow Pages’, that we hilariously kept forgetting to record every time we went into the studio, because of the stupid.  Not this time.  The new tunes were still being written as we started recording them, which is a bit stupid, but what can we say, we don’t like to make it easy for ourselves.  So why record in this way when we can record digitally?  Because it’s there.

While we’re on the subjects of death, cannibalism and hilariously forgetting things, we will be supporting The Skatalites onve again, which is a pretty emotional thing for all of us, and for our patron saint, Zombie Lloyd Knibb.  As mentioned last year, Zombie Lloyd Knibb currently inhabits a steel cage in our lab, that’s right we have a lab.  Actually it’s the Top Secret Ska Research Institute, where we’ve been developing lot’s of Ska related technology, for example a trumpet that blows itself and put’s itself back in the case after the gig, an atomic death trombone with electric shock collar, and a prototype for an inflatable hammond organ.  However I’m not sure how Zombie Lloyd feels about The Skatalites new drummer.  I’ve asked him about it frequently and his response is mainly the same,  ‘Brains! Need Brains!’  I have to say though, I don’t agree with Zombie Lloyd’s assessment.  Frankly dude, you don’t need that many brains, I mean it’s not Rush.  I’m sure the new guy will be fine.  Just like our new guy.

Another thing, people should be aware that when they are contacting the band on any of our social networking sites, all five hundred of of them, is that they are potentially talking to nine different people, a schizophrenic nine headed ska demon if you will, so we sometimes have some communication problems.  For instance, we were told ages ago, but I only just found out, that some of our music has been appearing on file sharing sites.  I’m actually quite impressed that we are worth bootlegging, like a cheap whiskey.  Fill your boots that’s what I say.

One last thing, in commemoration of the Titanic disaster one hundred years ago, we will be playing at Studio 24, our first time back there since our album launch party in February 2009.  What better way to commemorate freezing to death and drowning in the North Sea, than to drown in sweat, boil to death and suffocate at a Bombskare gig here in Edinburgh.  Die happy, people, you know you want to.

Listen Here

Get your hands on the first of the live tracks recorded at Chamber Studio for the Straight To Tape sessions on SoundCloud !

Critical State Records will make the rest  0f the recordings live through out the day ! (22/03/12). The download for this is full highest qualdio masters and will only be available for A LIMITED TIME , so get them while they are hot!
GET THEM HERE!

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE!

CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS HERE!

Siga los enlaces para llegar a la letra de Beatriz!

Follow the links to get to the lyrics for Beatriz!

Beatriz Lyrics

Get your tickets HERE

Visit their website HERE

They say you can tell if you are a bad person by how much time passed from the towers falling on September 11th to the next time you masturbated.  Good people waited at least a few days.  In Louie CK’s case it was between the first tower falling and the second one falling, because as he says, if he didn’t do it then the terrorists win.  Seems reasonable.  It is much more difficult to tell if you are a good person however.  With us it’s easy, the music speaks for itself.  When Bach wrote music it was like he was speaking to God.  When Mozart wrote music it was like God was speaking to Mozart.  But when Bombskare writes music it’s like God speaking to Black Jesus, who texts Thor, who emails Zeus, who leaves a post-it note on the fridge for Satan, who leaves a garbled voicemail for Cthulu, who tweets Zeus, who then leaves an ad in the classified section of the Metro for Bombskare, and the results speak for themselves. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair.  Unholy chaos from beyond the grave, better known to you as Bombskare aka the Ska Bastards of Despair.  You’re welcome.

It’s good to be in 2012 at last, because 2011 was a stone cold bummer.  In China it was known as the Year of the Migraine.  It was like a 365 day long Hearts and Hibs football match; or a 52 week long hernia operation.  I would have preferred to have spent the entire year locked up in solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay, handcuffed to a radiator, listening to the Smashing Pumpkins non stop.  However this year I have high hopes and no, it’s not the looming apocalypse although that is certainly cheering me up, or the new Van Halen album which is certainly cheering me down shall we say.  This year has already started better than last year for a number of reasons.

First, the government has promised to help all the victims of the recent defective boob job scandal.  Brilliant news.  I hate defective tits.  The last bunch of tits the government bailed out were the banks of course, which were then part nationalised so I’m assuming the taxpayer will own all these augmented breasts, and so the question on everbody’s lips is do we get visiting rights?  I realise that nationalising all these boobs might be viewed as controversial, but if they are anything like the railways then privatisation is bound to be a fiasco and far more costly in the long run.  Lets nationalise these boobs now and at least they’ll run on time.

Second, it’s only the middle of February and we have hit the ground running.  Gigs all over the place, Inverness and Aberdeen within a week, both were excellent.  We played at the Knockengorroch Winter Warmer in Dumfries with Mandy ‘Do Mandroids Dream of Electric Soup’ Clarke on bass guitar, and Captain Waz ‘The Waz’ Wazzster on drums which was an excellent night also.  Super Adventure Skare.  We had our old friend Jane up doing vocals on ‘Do All Dogs Go To Heaven’, which was a hoot and a holler.  It was a great night and once again our hats are off to Mandy Clarke, aka Papa Joe 2.0.

Thirdly, we went to Shetland, and then some.  It was the most memorable week that we can hardly remember.  We didn’t have Murray for this trip so we brought Phil Hopwood with us, or as we call him, Diet Murray.  It was a pretty rough crossing this time around, fourteen hours of giant waves and recycled air.  As mentioned we were going up to play a gig on the Hop night in Lerwick, and to see the Up Helly Aa itself of course, but that was it.  Subsequently we were then approached by one of the squads who take part in the actual procession, to accompany them on the night itself as their ‘backing band’.  They had been rehearsing their dance routine to ‘Fistful of Dynamite’ which coincidentally we wrote and recorded, fancy that.  Obviously we agreed to accompany them right away without a moments thought, but we had no idea what we had let ourselves in for, nor how much of an honour it actually was as non-Shetlanders can’t usually take part in the Up Helly Aa.  Basically, after the Up Helly Aa procession, each squad goes around the different halls, twelve maybe, and does their little dance routine to twelve different crowds, from 9pm until around 8am.  Forty five squads in total, between twenty and thirty guys to a squad, squad number one being the Jarls squad.  Those guys are the Vikings and the squad who actually drag the boat through the streets.  Our squad was squad number forty, called ‘This is Ska’.  We gradually managed to figure out was going to happen on our first meeting with the full squad on the Monday evening after we arrived on Shetland and realised we were going to do Bombskare – The A Team style, with bits and bobs lying around the garage which we then build into a devastating weapon to ambush the bad guys.  In short we borrowed some portable battery powered amps for the guitars, had already brought a melodica for Matt, and jerry rigged a snare to Sam with his hi hat and a clamp for a splash cymbal.  We then jerry rigged a floor tom for Andy to operate like a kick drum, and voila, Orkestra del Instant Bombskare, just add ungodly amounts of alcohol.  It was almost too easy.  We pity the fools.

I should mention at this point that I have no fear of vikings.  So what if you’ve got a big fucking axe?  I’m not impressed.  And what’s the big deal about raping and pillaging?    Back in the day they knew how to deal with vikings; a big mass of naked hairy Scotsman with broad swords and pikes, full of whisky, charging down a hill screaming.  Yes, it was a different time in the Seventies.  The squads are transported from hall to hall inside buses or in our case steel containers on the back of articulated trucks.  I’ve long advocated using cargo containers for transporting Ska, but there is no way that it is legal to have fifty guys being driven around in the back of a cargo container with crates of beer as furniture, pure genius but definitely not legal.  One of our squad mates told us that every few years Shetland gets a new chief of police, who after discovering what the Up Helly Aa actually involves, tries to shut it down, or throw the health and safety rulebook at them.  But they are soon persuaded through some Shetland Jedi shit that one night a year, all bets are off.  And sure enough, one policeman up there tried to sell me weed.  At least I think that’s what he said.  At each hall we went in with our squad and performed a stripped down version of ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’ followed by another tune so that our squad could then get a lady up to dance.  The tradition is you can’t buy a drink in the hall, so you have to dance with a lady who then gives you a drink.  So you can imagine what that was like, I mean, who the hell wants to dance with a ska band?  Idiots, that’s who.

Tickets are a steal at £6 – get yours HERE