‘We didn’t even know they were there’: the little-known bands finding fans years later - The Guardian

Surprise fame has found bands decades after they recorded music, including a group who originally made an album when they were just 11 years old.

“Having a show where people have paid their money and they really want to see us is really nice,” says Owain Davies, 40, who plays guitar in the band.

Shocked that they suddenly had fans wanting to hear their old band, the members of Panchiko gradually began to put more songs on Bandcamp, then Spotify, and then later on cassettes, vinyl and, of course, CDs.

Davies had been keeping much of their music on CDs and minidiscs carefully tucked away in wallets for years (despite no longer owning a CD player), but there were some songs they had recorded that none of the band members even had any more – they had to ask around to see if any friends had them.

A few years before Panchiko recorded their first music, a band called Visual Purple was also going through a similar process in Canton, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.

Like Panchiko, Visual Purple broke up not long after recording their album, and now have also found a new following decades later.

One key difference: the three members of Visual Purple were only 11 years old.

“We just did it because it was fun,” says Kevin McGorey, now 37, the lead singer and guitarist for Visual Purple.

K Records posted on Instagram about the album, “and people were kind of freaking out”, says Shelley Salant, a musician who runs a record label called Ginkgo Records, which released the Visual Purple tape in March of this year.

By the time they recorded their self-titled album, McGorey had already been playing guitar for two years.

Visual Purple was McGorey’s first band, with his friends Paul Rambo on bass and Matt Carlson on drums, and their biggest gigs were at the sixth-grade talent show and their Dare graduation ceremony (a photo of the Dare show serves as the cover image for the album), where they played nearly all original songs except for Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (which one teacher tried to cut off, due to the anti-education lyrics, McGorey’s dad says).

“I thought they were very original,” says Chris McGorey, a musician himself.

Chris McGorey, who describes himself as “the George Martin for Visual Purple”, recorded the trio in 1996 with “one decent mic” and the four-track tape recorder he had previously used for his own projects.

There was no Visual Purple reunion gig tied to the release (McGorey still plays music professionally in Detroit, but Rambo and Carlson have moved away), but internet buzz spread, including a recommendation by Cryptophasia, a music newsletter written by Jenn and Liz Pelly, twin sisters and music journalists in New York City.

But McGorey has been playing music continuously in the decades since Visual Purple disbanded, most recently releasing songs under the name Vinny Moonshine, on a label called Metaphysical Powers.

For the members of Panchiko, there’s a similar sense of revelation that has come from connecting with fans in a way that would not have been possible when their music was originally released.