A DEBUT album is something most bands would celebrate.
But for The Pictures frontman Davey Lane, the road to releasing his band's debut album Pieces of Eight has been a bit of a sombre one.
Lane has had to prove himself away from his better known role as a member of You Am I. ``Last year was pretty depressing and pretty frustrating,'' Lane said. ``We sent our demos out to all the major labels and indie labels and we were knocked back by just about all of them.
``Then we were thinking, `What are we doing wrong?' I think maybe they had this impression that it was just the guy from You Am I's side project so they probably didn't take it too seriously.
``But it's extremely frustrating because the songs are all my little babies. It's like someone's insulted your child. So you take that a little personally.
``Then last year we were tossing up with this label in England but that fell through and then our drummer, who was a pretty integral part of the band, we had to part ways with him so that wasn't a great deal of fun.'' Despite having experienced a seemingly endless stream of hardships The Pictures have come out on top with a new drummer and an album of good old fashioned rock'n'roll.
Lane and fellow members bassist Luke Thomas and drummer Johnny T had around 30 tracks to choose from when the band entered the studio ``The record that we've ended up making, there's a lot of different sounding songs and a few slower kind of songs that we put a lot of emphasis on,'' Lane said.
``People who would see a picture of a band and put us in that retro-rock-Jet-style basket, I just wanted to hopefully pleasantly surprise some of those people who think they know exactly what to expect.'' Pieces of Eight was released through Smash Music last month and has been followed with a national tour that lands in Newcastle at the Cambridge Hotel on Saturday night with support from The Vandas.
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