BAND BIO

Sleepy People formed from the ashes of Wakefield's 80's jangle dream pop band The Rainy Days by then husband and wife duo Paul and Rachel Hope in 1991 after relocating to Newcastle music college, where they were joined by various Wakefield oddities falling headlong into the twisted world of Cardiacs
Mingling the countercultural clowning and cosmic glissandi of Gong with bursts of twinkling synth melody, pulses of ska and post-punk guitar chug, set off by moonstruck flute, and held together by Paul Hope’s odd yet jaunty songs which chunter along like sugar-frosted tank engines
They released a cassette album "Blunt Nails In A Sharp Wall", after which Richard Tiny and Andy left to form Ultrasound. They then released another album "Typhoid And Swans" before morphing themselves briefly into Blue Apple Boy and releasing "Salient" (with Tiny on vocals) and then promptly disbanding in 2002.
Among the tales of the frieze of myth and of men turning themselves into birds, they also sing about the encroachment of shopping malls, about futile attempts at freezing yourself into immortality, or about modern-day nightmares in orphanages and retirement homes. At other times they cast halos of wonder around everyday occurrences (a winter walk home which slowly becomes freighted with significance; the joy of a child running across a beach, or the travails of a newly-hatched turtle perilously navigating by the moon).
In 2017 the wilful eccentrics decided to foist themselves back on to a still uncaring world because they thought it would be funny...bloody idiots.
They have recently played support slots with The Monochrome Set and Gong, and played at the Lindisfarne festival.
The players:
Paul Hope - guitars and thoughts
Tiny Wood - gurgles and grunts
Rachel Hope - tinkering and whistling
Graeme Swaddle - hitting things incredibly accurately
Mr. Wallis - quark strangeness and charm

Albums

Blunt Nails In A Sharp Wall (1994), cassette release (reissued as CD, Org Records 1999)
Typhoid And Swans (1997), Edgy Records
Salient (2002) Soma Sound (as Blue Apple Boy)

Singles

"Home Is Where Your Telly Is" (1996), Edgy Records
"All Systems Fail/Every Wave Is Higher On The Beach" (1998) cassette release
"Who’s That Calling?/Sunshine Valley Paradise Club" (2000), Shifty Disco (as Blue Apple Boy)
"Freak" (2000), Bad Apple Records (as Blue Apple Boy)

Mini-albums

Paint A Ceiling On The Sky (1997) cassette release
Sampler (2018) remastered

Here's some quotes about us:
'Teasers and tinkerers at the coalface of psychedelic pop'
'Psychedelic elevator music made by hyper-intelligent pre-schoolers'
'Some kind of Wacky Races jalopy; fuelled by wayward stubbornness which keeps crashing into flames, makes surprisingly effective repairs , disappears from the race for ages and then comes roaring back from an unexpected angle while acting as if it had never left.'
'Sleepy People are a conscious continuation of a particular kind of serious English whimsy – the kind that simmers and zigzags through Cardiacs, Syd Barrett, Gong, early Genesis'.
'The flutes, arcane keyboard twinkles and glissando guitars are beefed up by proletarian disco drive, bullish post-punk and a pumping sugar-rush art-punk ferocity more akin to Bis than any psych or prog act'.
'There’s a diffuse swirl of rebellion running through their music – often touching on people’s freedom to think and express in their own way, and on the misunderstandings, deliberate dismissal and persecutions they’re met with'.
'Another common theme is that of rippling the skin of reality to apprehend the mysterious processes running underneath'.

We will be playing in Newcastle at the Cluny on 7th March 2020 supporting the Monochrome Set