Bio /picture/ links
Bio (from www.bodyinthethames.com)

BODY IN THE THAMES is a single human male of standard quality & construction.

A dual Swedish/British citizen born in Manchester, England. Living & working in the EU since 2001 with two years in Paris, France and the last 20 years in Stockholm, Sweden where he currently resides. Prior to that he spent eight years in London. The music of Body in the Thames is undeniably informed by those four major cities and their musical and artistic culture & heritage.

Although making music that is nominally 'electronica' via programming synthesizers & drum machines he is absolutely no purist - quite the opposite - he is a charlatan, a cuckoo, a magpie, a tourist and a journeyman. Rock, pop, hip hop, konstmusik, bass music, club culture, post-punk, afrobeat, funk, electro, freestyle, indie, prog, soul, ska, dub & even folk are his musical background & influence.

He is also influenced by ideas & the history of ideas; politics, power, art, technology, literature, film, environment, cognitive psychology, sound & colour theory, psychedelia

Picture

BITT blown mirror selfie.jpg

links
bodyinthethames.bandcamp.com
bodyinthethames.com

3. A paragraph explaining why you covered this song
On the way home from school one day when I was a snot-nosed little scamp, I found a blank cassette by the side of the road which simply had 'The Cure' written on it in blue biro. At that time I was mainly a listener of shiny FM rock from the United States, stuff like Mr Mister (I was only 12 after all). Though I was aware of the song 'Love Cats' I had only the vaguest notion of what 'The Cure' was. Nevertheless I picked up the cassette, took it home and adopted it. It turned out that one side was blank and the other side was filled with the album Head on the Door. I fell in love. It changed my life and my listening tastes forever and opened a gateway into a whole different world of sounds and emotions and experiences with music...but it was also chock full of pop tunes. Result. The Cure undeniably soundtracked my years from pre-teen to young adulthood (both good times and painful times) and Head on the Door was the guiding light.

Fast forward 20 years and I'm in my concrete basement studio underneath the streets of central Stockholm making some synthesizer and drum machine sounds and quite suddenly it's beginning to sound like my Swedish electronic compatriots The Knife ...and yet, the words & melody that is stuck in my head and which glue themselves to the track is from that dusty blank cassette from all those years ago '"I've waited hours for this, I've made myself so sick, I wish I'd stayed, asleep today." And so the track became a kind of double cover version that, enjoyable as it was, would probably never see the light of day or be heard by the masses. I closed the project and put that afternoon's efforts down to experience and forgot about it.

That was 6 years ago. When I heard GIIITV was doing a Cure covers charity compilation I suddenly remembered that afternoon's work and wracked my brains for what I called the project. Could I find it? Did I still have the files? Was it any good? It took a little digging in old hard drives but I finally I found 'Close_to_the_Knife.als' ...and here it is