the birmingham post

weight lifted from trashcan sinatras

by campbell docherty
january 19, 2005

A band of happy bankrupts will walk on stage in Birmingham tonight - returning to the city after a decade in which they lost their record deal, their studio, and even their home.

Frank Reader, lead singer with The Trashcan Sinatras, was even hounded by tabloid journalists who thought that - because he was travelling to the US to see his American girlfriend - he must be fleeing the country.

Of course, it might have had something to do with his sister being Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction and Perfect fame.

The story of The Trashcan Sinatras is one of amazing resilience and heartwarming faith in the power of great songs and melodic guitar- based music.

Tonight's gig at Bar Academy in Dale End, Birmingham, promoting their stunning new self-financed LP Weightlifting, will be the first time the band has played in the city since the early 1990s.

The band, from Ayrshire in Scotland, were instant music press favourites with the release of their first single Obscurity Knocks in 1990.

The pun turned out to be no joke for a band which went on to produce three terrific albums to diminishing returns from a quickly disinterested UK media.

A small legion of fans might have thought they had heard the last of the band in 1999 when their studio and home, wittily dubbed Shabby Road, in Kilmarnock, became an unbearable financial millstone around their necks.

The band regrouped and, with a strong fanbase in the US and Japan supplemented by an active website, managed to scrape together the money to record their new album.

Critically, if not commercially, a hit - the signs are that, slowly but surely, people are discovering the band afresh.

* www.trashcansinatras.com

Originally appeared in the Birmingham Post .