Happy 3rd Birthday to us…

Flecking Records is 3 years old today. To put it into perspective that’s 36 months, 1096 days 26304 hours 1,578,240 minutes or 94,694,400 seconds. That’s a long time, and way more maths than I ever intended on doing post secondary school.

A masssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive thank you to all the bands, artists, actors etc that we have interviewed over the past few years. Almost everyone has been a complete pleasure to interview.

Thanks to all the hotels we’ve stayed in, interviewed in, filmed in… special thanks to Hotel Ibis across the country. You don’t mind the masses of people (usually large, loud groups of men) that we’re constantly in and out of our rooms with, you serve us cups of tea at 4am when we’re in reception without shoes or proper clothes, when we couldn’t get High School Musical 3 to work on our TV you did laugh, but you waited until you’d left the room and your porn is second to none. Oh and we’ve never been in trouble over unknown stains in the bed, tipped over kettles or shoe prints in the shower…

Thanks to Reemer for letting us have a wee on their tour bus! Good guys, great band, dependable in a toilet related emergency!

Huge thanks to Matt Willis! Thanks for doing our birthday Q&A; and chatting to fans, thanks for all the support over the years and thanks for all the DJ guestlist spots!

Thanks to all the bands we’ve toured with! All the bands we’ve spent time on buses with! All the bands we’ve enjoyed hotel antics with – extra special shout out to Second Chance, also Hill Valley High, Just Like You, Summerlin and Severn (the porn WASN’T ours we promise, HvH put it on, Chocolate MILF is not our thing…). Severn we’re good fun in the stairwell!

Thanks to everyone working at Flecking, and everyone working with us. Special thanks to James, our tech guy. Everything you can see on the screen, every link you click that actually works… it’s all James! In fact, should you click a link that doesn’t work, he’s made an AMAZING not found page, it’s such a shame no one ever sees it…

Thanks to Celebrity Soccer Six for letting us stand on the pitch with famous people in shorts every year, thanks to all the Party In The Parks we’ve crashed, same goes for T4 On The Beach, Underage Festival… pretty much thank you to anyone who has ever put us on a guestlist, ever.

Thanks to all the lovely PR people we deal with!

Thanks to all our fans! If you didn’t read it we wouldn’t be able to keep doing it! One fan in particular that needs thanking is Chas Newkey-Burden for giving us a lovely shout out in his amazing Amy Winehouse biography – buy it!

Thanks to the HvH fans who waited outside our hotel for ages! It was great to meet you all!

We’ve probably forgotten most of the people we should be thanking… but we do love you all! Thank you soooo much to everyone who’s ever read any of our magazines, helped us, partied with us at gigs. Thanks to all our friends and families for their support.

If you’re reading this now, even if it’s by mistake… THANK YOU!

Flecking Records started out back on 1st October 2006, originally as a music promotions company infecting the internet with signed artists such as Matt Willis, Son Of Dork, McFly and unsigned/upcoming bands like Mirrorview, Superkicks and Hypo Psycho.

We had a blast promoting (read: partying with) bands in ’06 and ’07, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bowling For Soup, Army Of Freshmen, Wheatus and Son Of Dork on the Get Happy Tour, all the bands playing the Sic Tour, Matt Willis backstage on his tour, McFly, Fightstar, Rooster, Gareth Gates, Chico… and even Jason Donovan to name a few, but in January 2008 we decided it was time to make better use of our journalistic flare and celeb contacts and start an online magazine and since then we’ve never looked back.

Issue 1 was originally going to be a one off to showcase a few interviews and plug our mate’s bands. Our cover boy Chico Slimani was at the height of his post X-Factor fame and he provided our main interview. You can say what you like about Chico, but he’s a seriously nice, friendly bloke, and genuinely concerned that a young fan might see the indecent photos of him that are easily found on Google Images. His interview was hilarious, when asked what time it really was he insisted that it was Chico Time and probably still would if we asked him now. The serious, journalisty questions came in the form of ‘If you were a superhero what would your name and special power be?’ to which he replied “The Rainbow Warrior, he’s a spiritual kung fu master that comes to the aid of anyone that has a Chico Time watch and calls out ‘What time is it?’” Amazing.
We also had interviews with Son Of Dork stars Steve Rushton and Danny Hall (separately) in the aftermath of Dorkgate (you know, when guitarist Dave left the band and changed the MySpace password, huge drama!). This was back when Steve Rushton wasn’t a clean cut Disney star, so we got to chat about his love of getting naked as well as SoD falling apart and his plans for the future. Danny Hall provided the comedy telling us about the weirdest gift he received from a fan (“a wanking kit”), his favourite position (“all of them!”) and confessing to voting for himself in the SoD favourite band member poll while on our message board.
We also had interviews with Chris from Bowling For Soup, Brigade, Saving Aimee and David Wilcox. We were interviewing David about his new band 10 Reasons To live, although we remembered him from his Triple 8 boyband days. We thought we’d tease him slightly about this and asked “David, David, David… haven’t we seen you somewhere before?” to which he replied “You may remember me from the Spider Man films, I played Toby Maguire’s stunt double. Triple 8? Never heard of them!”. David has since left 10 Reasons To Live but we know he’ll do big things.
So mixed in with a few features, that was issue 1. It wasn’t until we started getting great feedback and noticing that the magazine was getting thousands and thousands of hits all over the world that we decided we might just do another one.

Our issue 2 covers boys were London ska band and friends of Flecking Hypo Psycho. We crashed their tour with Spunge to film a mini documentary/interview with Kris (who was their drummer at the time) and Steve (ex Make It Better Later) who now make up one of our favourite bands, Second Chance. We partied at the gig and by the time we got round to filming interviews it was coming up to midnight, we were in some seedy hotel in Leeds and everyone was drunk … it’s probably one of our favourite interviews ever because it’s just so genuinely funny. We always have a blast with Second Chance. The best moment of the night has to be Steve’s acoustic “performance” of Hero by Enrique Iglesias, seeing/hearing is believing people, it’s possibly even more enjoyable than the original.

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We had an awesome time with both bands on the few days we did of the tour, in fact the only bad point was waking up on the tour bus at 6am with some random bloke just stood there with a weird look in his eye. Scary.

So we had the interview with Hypo Psycho, and the wonderful MC Lars reviewed their EP for us. We also had interviews with Wheatus front man Brendan Brown who wasn’t too happy to hear his songs had been played in the high court by one of the guys trying to sue his friend James Bourne (“I thought ‘You c*nt! How dare you use my song to try and steal from my friend? I’ll reach down your throat and pull your fucking skeleton out’ Pwned!”), Steve Rushton who once again insisted he is NOT getting married anytime soon (“No no no no no”) and Bo! Selecta legend Leigh Francis who actually gave us fit Fabio’s number (“What his favourite number? Probably 69!”).

Between issues 2 and 3 we decided to do something a bit different. Music piracy/illegal file sharing were getting more press that ever before, so we thought we might give some music away. We got some wicked bands involved to create the Flecking Records free album Legitimate Piracy which featured tracks from MC Lars and Jaret Riddick of Bowling For Soup, Army Of Freshmen, Kobe, Hypo Psycho, Second Chance, The Story So Far, Make It Better Later, Not Your Hero and Sliced Peach. Loads of you downloaded the album and we got some great feedback, so thank you.

Scott Whyte was our issue 3 cover boy. We were head over heels in love with Scott when he played Chris in City Guys and after interviewing him we’re in love with him even more so. He’s charming, a talented musician, a snappy dresser and he’s got a great sense of humour. We tried to summarise his look and landed on “Keith Urban meets modern day Billy Ray Cyrus”. Scott laughed and replied “I’ll take it as a compliment! I’m always just changing my look, so this is kinda my flavour of the month, or perhaps few months. I didn’t consciously think to myself ‘What would Billy Ray Cyrus and Keith Urban look like if mixed?’ although I do see that concept in myself now you mention it.”
Our second main interview was with Alex and Jack from All Time Low – now they were good fun. They graciously accepted the penis shaped lolly we gave them and they were very keen to learn English slang – feed the pony in particular. They said they’d use the phrase more often and later that evening when we attended their packed-out gig they were shouting it on stage. Proud moment.

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This issue went online around the same time as our 2nd birthday, so we decided to publish some of our birthday messages in the magazine. Not only did we have a hand written birthday message from Matt Willis but we also had messages from MC Lars, Matthew from Wheatus, State Of The Enemy, Dissolved In and our personal favourite which was from Army Of Freshmen which read “Happy second birthday! Beer is on us! Wait a minute you can’t drink for 16 more years… put that glass down!”

Issue 4 went online in early ’09, we had so much fun creating this one. Our cover boy this time was Evil Jared Hasselhoff from Bloodhound Gang. We chatted about everything from Bush to Bowels to balls! We were particularly impressed at the number of English references he slipped in for us and when we asked him to finish the interview with some words of wisdom said “I think it’s worthy to note the political progress that has been made in America. A mere two hundred years ago Obama could have been sold as a slave, Sarah Palin may well have been burned as a witch and John McCain was just breaking in his first set of wooden teeth.” – the man is genius.
One of the first interviews we did for this issue was with a new band called Just Like You, we didn’t know anything about these guys beforehand apart from the fact Aaron played Steven Beale in Eastenders. The interview got off to a bit of a strange start, whenever we are interviewing in hotels we always take our lucky charm/mascot with us – a suspiciously shaped devils tail, so the first 10 minutes were spent discussing what the tail could really be. Ross, the other member, fidgeted with the tail throughout most of the interview, something we all found very amusing. Our favourite bit of the interview had to be chatting about Bernard’s Watch, a TV show we all remembered from our childhood and loved. When Aaron pointed out that Bernard only used his watch for good Ross suggested Bernard would probably be interested in boobs at that age, and that he should stop time and undress people. We adored Aaron’s shocked reply, “To see what boobs looked like? Just go steal a load of porn, don’t embarrass people!”.

We also had interviews with Gavin and Stacey star Mat Horne and The Aliens but a special shout out has to go to Hill Valley High – we had so much fun interviewing them.
We didn’t really know the HvH boys, only drummer Danny Hall from his Son Of Dork days, but now we love each and every one of them.
You know the world record for how many people you can fit in a Mini? I think we may be serious contenders when it comes to holding the records for how many people you can fit in a lift and how many people you can fit in a hotel bathroom.
When meeting large groups of people (4 of which you’ve never even spoken to) the best way to bond is to all squash into one lift. There were two lifts
, however 2 Fleckers, 6 HvH boys and Mr Spadey all managed to squash into the one, and I mean squash – very cosy.
Similarly we all managed to fit in the bathroom, with all 6 HvH boys in the shower for a sexy photo shoot.
We played Mr & Mrs before we did the interview, as you do. The best bit of the interview had to be when Danny was on the phone and we asked him if he believed in Santa. Just watch the video.

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After a day locked up in the hotel room we moved our party to the street for a bit of carol singing and trouble causing. This is one of many encounters with the HvH boys. A few months later we got together again to film a documentary. This time was particularly memorable because Danny Hall bought pay-per-view porn in our hotel room, and left it playing (muted obviously, we’re professionals) throughout the interview, it’s interesting to see who is watching.

A true contender for our all time favourite interview, our issue 5 cover boy James Buckley – in our opinion the star of The Inbetweeners, clunge lover Jay. He chatted to us about the E4 hit show, Soccer Six, his band, bus wankers… the usual! We’re slightly disappointed he’s nothing like Jay in real life but he’s definitely just as funny and a much sharper dresser!
We also had interviews with the new and improved Blazin’ Squad (“it’s a lot more manageable now”, new found Disney star and friend of Miley Cyrus Steve Rushton (“I love wearing scarves”) and Brendan from Wheatus.
We also had another feature on DJ Willis, this time from his set in Sheffield. We had just an awesome time that night seeing both Matt DJ and then 90’s cheesy pop outfit Cleopatra afterwards. Matt was awesome, Cleopatra were kinda terrible, in fact people were actually throwing things at them. Then again it was 2am, and they did keep singing “1998”. We did get free hats though, so it was worth it.

Issue 6 is going to be epic, we’ve already interviewed/planned interviews with All Time Low, Bowling For Soup, MC Lars, 3Oh!3, Matt Edmondson, Chantelle Barry and more! We’ve also got a feature and interviews from the Vans Warped Tour which we covered in Canada!

Huge thanks again to everyone! Hopefully things are going to keep getting better and better!