Candid Heist
Candid Heist was a 4-piece indie rock band I was a part of, active in London, Birmingham and Reading from 2018-2019, with our final gig at Camden Assembly in November 2019.
We released 5 singles in this time, all of which I had a hand in creating. I’ll post them here alongside a brief summary, and few pictures from the band for some essential
visual context.
All of our music is available on Spotify & Apple Music,
search ‘Candid Heist’.
Claws
The first song I ever wrote and the first Candid Heist single.
Shyam and I developed the music and structure back in 2014/15 but I didn’t write the lyrics for it until August 2016. We recorded the song in September 2018 and released it the following month. Undeniably our best known tune, and I had the strange experience of having the lyrics sung back to me a couple of times. Weird!
It also secured us our first BBC Introducing airplay, which I remember tuning in to from an Amsterdam hostel.
You can hear my contribution on the vocals on Claws, alongside the lead guitar that opens the tune and plays the guitar solo.
Clicking on this album artwork (as with all album artwork on this page) links you to Spotify versions of our tracks.
Moonflowers
Moonflowers was our second single, written mainly by Shyam with contributions from the rest of the band, the song was developed in March 2019 before being recorded in the summer for an August release.
I play lead guitar on the track - you’ll hear me somewhere.
Stopwatch
Our third single, which I wrote music and lyrics for in March 2019 before being released in late August 2019.
Bit heavier than our usual stuff, but I always liked the solo in particular, and it was fun to play live. It never felt a staple of the set though for me.
I’m on lead vocals and lead guitar again here.
Faults
I do miss this one. A nostalgic CH tune for me. Shyam and I wrote the music over the first half of 2016 and he took the lyric. I thought the breakdown/solo for this was one of the best musical contributions I made to CH and live this was always our favourite to play, closing every set with it except for our last (due to ‘technical’ reasons :) ).
We should have recorded it much sooner but only got round to it in late August of 2019, releasing it in October. It was our fastest song to 1000 streams too I believe; the people said YES (in a way).
Clips of this were always super fun as well because the outro was primed for live performance, so I’ll end this post with a snippet of the outro to this at The Spice of Life in London in September 2019. It always was the closer…
The Punter
The last song we wrote as Candid Heist. I wrote a backing track demo for this in summer of 2019 then showed the band at a rehearsal that they liked and we fleshed out.
I didn’t have any lyrics or ideas for the lyrics so Joe said he had an idea and came round to mine one day to brainstorm. He was interested in this guy who kept coming in to the pub he worked at and was just loathed by all. Unfortunate! I had similar stories from working in pubs so we chatted about that for a while and wrote the first verse together. I wrote the rest of the lyric over that week and then we recorded it almost immediately in September 2019.
It came out the day before our Camden Assembly gig in November 2019 after premiering on BBC Introducing in Berkshire a few days before.
