Great Lost Bands no.16: Jacob's Mouse, with an interview

and also a very quick glance at the John Peel Archive's J and K selections

For various reasons I took a week off the site and, such is the relentless nature of the John Peel Archive, I missed a couple of their posts - specifically the first 100 of J and K.

Hopefully you have all had a look by now, but 'J' features an extraordinary amount of acts by the name Jackson, and the only releases that I actually have are by the site's featured artist, Jacob's Mouse. More of them in a minute.

'K' has a similarly poor overlap with my own collection, as a couple of albums by the KLF are the only common items. I'm pleased to see Kanda Bongo Man as the featured artist, as he was one of the guests at the World Service 80th birthday party which I was lucky enough to attend. I'm pretty sure it was John's World Service programme that broadened their audience.

However, let's go back to Jacob's Mouse for a moment because I have a bit of history there. In 1993, I met and interviewed the band in Belfast for my fanzine, The Weedbus, although as they ended up in an issue that also featured an up and coming band called Radiohead, all copies sold out very quickly. Earlier this year I decided to republish my archives but I hit a snag in that I lost my only copy of that issue, but I have now been able to scan it from the original layout sheet.

The other thing about Jacob's Mouse is that, approximately seven years after I interviewed them in Belfast, a new guy started at my work - at the aforementioned BBC World Service - and after a few weeks he told me he used to be in a band that "I wouldn't have heard of." It was Hugo from Jacob's Mouse, and we were both pretty amazed that we had chatted that night in Belfast, seven years earlier.

The main thing about Jacob's Mouse though, is that they were awesome, and also criminally under-rated and over-looked. They ended up sounding like a great collision between the grunge of the time, and the post-punk which pre-dated them by ten years.

Anyway, I've uploaded the PDFs of the interview at weedbus.posterous.com, and I will transcribe them here soon as well. Enjoy. Have a listen to some Jacob's Mouse below.