14 Iced Bears

...or possibly Fourteen Iced Bears depending on who you believe (I'm going with the numbers, I like a good number in pop) are another Sarah Records band and this time they're from Brighton.

Formed in 1985 by Rob Sekula, Nick Emery and Alan White, the line-up was pretty fluid over the years and featured, amongst others the fantastically named Dominic Minques, Kevin Canham, Will Taylor and Rob Colley. I've got a page of a book called "The Great Indie Discography" in front of me and, while they might not quite be up there with The Fall, there's certainly a few names on the page...

Anyhow, the band started off with some cracking jingly-jangly-Sarah-twee (I'd thoroughly recommend getting hold of "Come Get Me") before moving on to what the book calls "a more focused retro sound", which to my ears means going a bit rock, but hey! The featured track today is 14 Iced Bears - The World I love in the natty embedded player below (if only I'd realised what everyone else did 5 years ago you'd have had it more already!), and is from the latter stages of the career and is a bit more 'focused and retro' but still a cracking bit of very late 80s indie.

(right click and 'save as' to download)
The band released a good lot of singles (see Tweenet) including one on Sarah (which is why they're here, I'm finally doing a sweep of the label), recorded a couple of Peel Sessions, were on the semi-legendary Alvin Lives in Leeds compilation, belatedly released an album and split in 1991; not a bad half dozen years by anyone's reckoning.

There is of course a wiki page and a myspace. Happy Friday the 13th!

Oh, and you can buy the best of here: 14 Iced Bears - "In the Beginning"or 'Come Get Me' as a new-fangled mp3here