Sartres Lobster

French Existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s experiments with mescaline in 1935 left him with the belief that a giant lobster was stalking him; which is perhaps an apt description of the band’s music.



Having possibly turned down a Grammy Award as being “nothing more than bourgeois tokenism” for the band's debut album, Greatest Hits: Dread, Death and the Weight of Existence, Sartre's Lobster could well have become legendary for their collaboration with European dance-pop trio, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Marcel, also known as the Humanism League. But truth is subjective, subjectivity is objective, and in any case Sartre's Lobster was too busy stalking drug-crazed philosophers to record Being Boiled (And Served With Drawn Butter). Their second single, Jean Genet's Genie, failed to make the charts after the band decided not to promote it and instead took 10 years off to write a cookbook.



But what of the existence that precedes the essence? Sartre’s Lobster – the band, not the philosopher-pursuing crustacean – is comprised of several musicians who have been there and done that – touring, record labels, albums, more touring. Some of them started performing decades ago; all of them still do. Sometimes they join up with other musicians and play large venues opening for Paul Weller, to offer one example. Other times they might be found at a tiny club performing a set of original punk songs that would not have sounded out of place at the Roxy Club in London circa 1977. Rarely, they dust off the cobwebs and perform the pub rock and post-punk/funk that started it all in the late 1970s/early ‘80s.



But more often than not, Sartre’s Lobster is tucked away at The Lobster Pot studios in Los Angeles. Occasionally a song escapes and finds itself released by Burning Sky Records on Take Refuge In Pleasure: The Songs of Roxy Music Revisited, or included on the soundtrack of Live Evil, an indie film by director Jay Woelfel about vampires in Hollywood that features a priest – or is he? – mysteriously carrying a baby in a bucket. And it’s not unknown for an unsuspecting song – say, from London-based electronica duo The Psychedelic Manifesto – to wander into the studio only to reemerge a few days later, badly shaken but entertainingly remixed, and now available for digital download from Alextronic Records in Scotland.



If the press were ever to get hold of anything by Sartre’s Lobster they might comment:

“Songwriters Sartre's Lobster show a consistency of quality and songsmanship that is second to none. In all of their creations, both old and new, there is a magical mix of heart, power, maturity and soul that escapes some of their more pretentious contemporaries.”



But that would be absurd.