Straw Bear

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Straw Bear began life as a rather tiresome acoustic duo when school chums with rhyming surnames Ian Ray and Chris Gray decided to do a spot of recording.



Ian wanted to put down some songs he’d written over the last couple of years and Chris agreed to help him out. Thankfully, their work transcended its origins as a vanity project and the pair began writing material together…but already, the cracks were beginning to show in this decades-old “friendship”.



As the complexity of their songs grew and their arrogance snowballed to an unhealthy degree over the next two years, the pair realised they were going to have to take this project semi-seriously, and decided to name it Straw Bear after a pagan festival in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. It was a festival they had intended to visit that year, but opted instead to spend the weekend making the kind of vain, indulgent recordings which have since become their staple.



Megalomaniacal egotism and crippling laziness are hardly what one might call a winning combination, and yet these are the traits that best describe the duo’s working pattern when they found a kindred spirit in Tom Shipp.



Ian had met Tom a couple of years earlier as each of them sat down to take an aptitude exam for a large local newspaper group, but it was to be some time before they were able to truly enjoy their indifference to one another as they trained together as reporters…they could hardly have known what lay in wait for them.



What began as a polite invitation to “come round and have a jam” soon became an epic clash of personalities, as Tom “Loveboat” Shipp began to vie for power in an already fraught contest of wills.

Having two people at whom to direct their rage proved useful for each of the members, however, and a fruitful, if acrimonious song-writing triumvirate emerged.



At times, the aforementioned laziness (the band has since been described as “a black hole of discipline and hard work that hoovers up every good intention it finds”) threatened to become an insurmountable obstacle…yet somehow, the trio has managed to create what used to be called a long-player.



The preposterously-titled Victims of the Engineers is the result of their occasional labour.

Named in honour of the band’s propensity to blame the sound engineer when they sound dreadful on stage, the album is a genre-straddling, sprawling work that belies the narrow world-view of its authors.



Not content with a Toto-like studio band existence, the band decided to spend more time playing live, to genuine, authentic human audiences in 2007. Backed by their ever-reliable, yet sadly departed (some would say stolen) MacBook, the early-live Bear shows resembled an Eagles-obsessed incarnation of the Pet Shop Boys. They were rescued from the doldrums of this electroclashfolkgrunge existence when veteran stickman Pas - of the sadly retired Ghears - joined the band on realdrums. Realdrums worked well for Straw Bear and the band's popularity increased minutely as a result. Appearances have been recorded so far at Barfly, Cambridge; the Concorde 2, Brighton; the Dublin Castle, Camden; the Hope and Anchor, Islington; the Key Theatre, Peterborough; the Met Lounge, Peterborough; and many many more similarly salubrious establishments.



If they can hold it together, who knows what the future holds for this morally bankrupt group of loathsome individuals…