Three Imaginary Girls

Seattle's Indie-Pop Press – Music Reviews, Film Reviews, and Big Fun

A couple years ago I became obsessed with a UK band named The Free French – especially the song "Do You Come Here Often" (you have to go listen to it on The Free French MySpace page… the bass line kills me!!!)

Now Rhodri – who *is* The Free French – has found himself with a new mission for the sake of sociology research, or rather, a writing assignment (explained below). After scooting around the internet and perusing his various MySpace pages and blogs, I think I've found a new favorite writer! You can go listen to the songs resulting from this experiment (although none of them reach the greatness of "Do You Come Here Often") or read up on the experiment's progress.

Here's the email he recently sent about the whole matter:

I apologise profusely for the group email. If you ever see me in the street you have permission to smash a typewriter on my head, you know, like in that film "Misery" with James Caan and Kathy Bates.

You'll remember, however vaguely and perhaps with a shudder, a band called The Free French. Your email address was on The Free French mailing list. I'm sorry about that, too, but enough of the apologies, I'll get to the point. I'm writing a big feature for The Independent – ooh, an enormous feature, on the cover of the EXTRA supplement – about DIY music in the 21st century. They've set me the target of recording, releasing and promoting an mp3 single from my bedroom in one month. A tall order, but one I agreed to undertake, especially when they said they'd pay me a pitiful amount of money for doing so.

So I quickly recorded a couple of tunes. I called the fictitious group "The Schema" – god knows why, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I didn't realise that when you say it out loud it sounds like "The Schemer", and if you search for "schema" on Google, you just get a load of sites about W3C XML, whatever that might be.

If you have a myspace, maybe you could friend me? Here's the URL: http://myspace.com/theschema

And if you don't have a myspace, maybe you could just go and have a listen, and humour me. My single, "Those Rules You Made", comes out on iTunes on the 20th August. I'll probably send out another email when this happens, if you don't mind. There will also be a video on YouTube at some point, featuring some middle aged twins with ginger hair, apparently, don't ask me, I'm no video director.

The unfolding story can also be found at MySpace, or at http://www.theschema.co.uk.