Rock'n'Roll and Other Lost Causes
Scorpio Leisure
For Your Audio Pleasure
Scorpio Leisure was an accident waiting to happen. Like the songs on Audio Pleasure, this parallel universe supergroup may have roots in Edinburgh’s musical underground, but their organic mix of lamp-lit street corner noir and nouveau torch songs spans generations and continents.
With a collective pedigree reaching back to post punk’s anything-goes first flourish and a slew of cult soothsayers that followed, Scorpio Leisure found each other in the shadows, before coming blinking into the light to cook up a witchy stew of squat rock scat and trouser flapping dub sh’boom.
Dervish-Like Narratives
In the beginning there was rhythm, with bass player Colin J Whiston (Gin Goblins, Voicex) and drummer/producer Russell Burn (Fire Engines/Win/Piefinger) cutting loose in lockdown with a stream of off-the-cuff instrumental soundscapes recorded in the dead of night.
A chance meeting between Burn and Hettie Noir (The Gussets/ H.R.H.) saw the mercurial drama queen unleash her demons.
Guitarists Mungo Carswell (Night Caller) and Ricky Maymi (Brian Jonestown Massacre) heard the clarion call, travelling across oceans and roadworks to flesh out the washes of sound driving Hettie Noir’s dervish-like narratives.
Low Slung Monologues
Scorpio Leisure fully revealed themselves to the world in November 2022, when they made their live debut opening for No Wave punk-lit provocateur Lydia Lunch and Marc Hurtado reimagining the back catalogue of fellow travellers, Suicide.
Hooking up with Last Night from Glasgow, Scorpio Leisure finally got physical with their Apology EP. Hettie Noir’s vocal is by turns conspiratorial and confessional on a cinematic set of aural trailers for a panoramic and possibly epic X-certificate exercise. The censor’s scissor awaits…
…But so does Aural Pleasure.
The ten sonic sculptures that appear on Scorpio Leisure’s debut opus were zapped together at Rusty’s Yard. The result is an organic stew of high anxiety litanies of love and despair that sound groovy, laidback and nasty
