‘I am called Erik Satie like anyone else’.
Stavroula Kounadea – voice, lyrics and vocal interventions.
Sam Kidel – guitar, electronics.
Malcolm Atkins – keyboards, violin, lyrics & backing vocals.
Jon Seagroatt – bass, saxophone, electronics.
Chris Hills – drums.
Honorary members:
Miles Doubleday – vocals, lyrics, culinary advice and band image.
Pat Thomas – keyboards.
Past members:
Efthymios Chatzigiannis – guitar, electronics.
Dariusz Dziala – video projections.
Dom Lash – bass.
Nonstop Tango was an Oxford-based Anglo-Greek-Polish anarcho-situationist Morton Feldman/Funkadelic mash-up collective. Daft as a box of frogs, but gloriously inventive, this is the band that got me back into playing bass again, and I am eternally grateful to them for that.
Fronted by vox-poptrix and lyric disassembler, Stavroula Kounadea, and square-bashed by the Dear Leader, Malcolm Atkins (He is the Red Sun in our hearts), NST was in a league all of it’s own.
We released one ‘concept album’, (no – really; it was a concept album) ‘Unnatural Selection’ in which our live set got the benefit of a richly-textured narrative framework woven around a surreal trip along Oxford’s Cowley Road as dreamed by Stavroula. This allowed for the appearance of such Dear Leader-favoured luminaries as Erik Satie, John Cage and William Burroughs. Yup. Well, you get the idea.
Truly great people to work with.
The front of ‘Unnatural Selection’ looks like this:
The album comes with a free fun-for-all-the-family-laugh-a-minute board game which looks quite a lot like this:
The whole ensemble can only be described as unbearably pleasant.
‘Unnatural Selection’ is available as a CD from Discogs,
or as a download from Bandcamp.
Below are some examples of what goes on when the Dear Leader convenes a rehearsal;
Here’s some footage from a gig. Nonstop Tango’s former sixth member and cloakéd master of son et lumière, Dariusz Dziala, cunningly fashioned the following video for ‘Guitar Song’ from footage he shot at the gig.
If this kind of quark, strangeness and charm floats your boat, we would be very pleased to have you befriend us on Facebook.
Jon Seagroatt 