A CASUAL FLING. HARD-PANNED STEREO. GLASGOW LEFT / LONDON RIGHT. MESSAGE: OBLIQUE.

Last year’s introductory press release for improvisational group Trans left a fair amount to the imagination. Time revealed London Right was mesmeric guitar shaman Bernard Butler, while Glasgow Left was Jackie McKeown, frontman of 70s NYC punk influenced band 1990s, whose album KICKS had been produced by Butler in 2009.
The choice of TRANS’ name, of course, was an enticingly deliberate announcement of impermanence. But the very European moniker also suggested motion – entirely in keeping with the sound of four track debut EP TRANS RED and follow-up TRANS GREEN, issued on Rough Trade. If the message was oblique, the method of delivery was not; jammed out somewhere between the metrononic engine of Krautrock and the taut push-pull of Television.

On a recent stop-off in Leeds during a short UK tour, Bernard Butler met up with The Mouth Magazine to record a new edition of The Mouthcast in which he talks about how New Order was a major inspiration on the philosophy of the project – and why, for him, the idea of ‘playing the hits’ is “the most boring thing in the world”…

On 13th April Bernard will be running the London Marathon to raise money for the Bobath Centre, a North London facility for children with cerebral palsy. The centre has physio, occupational and speech and language therapists who specialise in helping the children to do ordinary things – like playing, going to school or making friends. “I have seen first-hand,” says Butler, “the difference that the Bobath Centre can make to the lives of children and their families”.

If you listen to this edition of The Mouthcast please make a donation to Butler’s London Marathon fundraising efforts, here. If you would like to be in with a chance of winning an exclusive TRANS poster for the band’s show at Leeds Brudenell – picked off the wall and personally signed by Bernard – please donate and then let us have sight of the acknowledgement as proof, via our usual e-mail address.