HIGH HOPES
From Foo Fighters covers in a garage to GN’R in Hyde Park, the Welsh rockers are going up.
WHEN PEARL JAM’S Stone Gossard contacted James Joseph on Instagram offering to sign his band, he didn’t believe it was him. “I didn’t even reply for a day or two,” says singer/guitarist Joseph. “I said, ‘Oh yeah? That would be fun – tell me more.’ Next thing you know, we’re on a Zoom call with him.”
Now James And The Cold Gun’s self-titled debut album is out on Gossard’s revived Loosegroove Records (which released Queens Of The Stone Age’s debut back in the day). Gossard had heard the Welsh rockers’ tune Long Way Home on Seattle’s KEXP Radio – atune they had donated to a charity compilation in Cardiff, their home town, and had made its way across the Atlantic. Talk about good karma.
Until three years ago 28-year-old Joseph had been the bassist for rising pop rock outfit Holding Absence. But when he and housemate, guitarist James Biss, started blowing away lockdown cobwebs with jam sessions in their garage, things changed. “It was like we were fifteen again,” says Joseph, “playing these horrendous Foo Fighters and Zeppelin covers at first. We wanted this band to be fairly simple, high energy, cathartic rock. We didn’t overthink it.”
Joseph quit his old band for the new one, taking its name from the Kate Bush banger that doubles as their walk-on music. James And The Cold Gun released DIY singles (early track She Moves has just over a million Spotify pla
