#24 Hearing Cape for the Mute

Everyone knows capes are cool. Capes are this year's raccoon skin hat. Everyone knows being mute is cool. Being mute is this year's being blind. So a cape that makes mute people hear is super cool! Hearing Cape for the Mute are the epitome of cool - dressed head to toe in tailored fur suits. However, as you may expect from a band who come from a country where the sun always sets and reindeer are your feudal overlords, their music is on the relentlessly grim side.

Above right - Geoff Capes in a cape (not in Hearing Cape for the Mute)

These Finnish alt rockers offer more shoegazing than if Ride and My Bloody Valentine organised a joint day trip to the Clarks outlet shop at Lakeside. Unfortunately when you spend so much time looking down you tend to walk into lamposts or make debut albums so poor even the NME don't like it before not liking it or vice versa.

The trio started out in downtown Helsinki in a student bedsit, eating pickled herring on toast and listening to Weather Report albums for years on end. Tove Hattifatteners, Jansson Pietilä and My Hemulen all found themselves working in the local Old Fashioned Sweet Emporium. The band practiced regularly but never took it too seriously until Tove, in a pickled herring stupor, had this great idea for a book in which an underwater paradise is populated by people with snorkels on their heads. Thus 'The Snorks' was born and went on to become a hit TV show, and not just in Belgium. Interestingly, you would never see a Snork surface for air and Tove never did explain why they needed snorkels if they could breath underwater already. You'd think the greedy bastards would be content with gills, but no.

Using the funds created by his venture in to the world of animation Tove relocated the band to London in 1991 where they met up with their good friends, and Finnish musical counterparts, HIM. At the time the members of HIM were working as usherettes at the local picture house. 'Salt or sweet?' they enquired and 'Show you to your seat guv'nor?' they would quip. The two bands shared a flat in Pimlico because they liked the way it sounded - PIM-LICO. Brilliant! they thought.

However, the good times and the money didn't last long. The group had bought so many Weather Report records that they could literally no longer move in their flat (and their herring contingency fund had taken a battering). HIM got a bit angry, moved out and became the goth rockers we know and detest today. So, being migrant workers Tove and his buddies popped down to the jobcentre to pick up their state supplied standard issue mobile phone, keys to their mini mopeds and brand new leather jackets. They spent their nights playing Wolfenstien on LAN and chuckling to themselves about how after five years in the country they could collect the leather trousers to go with that jacket.

Around the same time they had a residency at Copa Capybara in Camden and were gigging nightly. On the back of their minor live success they released the 1996 album 'Take You Down To Chinatown'. The morose self indulgent depress-fest was nothing if not terrible, or 'clappen trappen' as the Finnish press dubbed it.

Amazingly, the band are still going and you can catch them playing the odd gig at Copa Capybara and even The Pink Flamingo in Marylebone (yes, they liked the name of this one too 'Mary the Bone'? Crazy! they thought). Tove is currently working on a screen play for an historical love story based on the 1858 conflict between The Snorks and The Smurfs. Set against a backdrop of infighting, inbreeding and mass genocide the love of a Snork and a Smurf is quite something to behold. 'Blue is the Colour', which sees the Smurfs depth charge the Snorks back to the stone age, is under option with at least two high school film and media students.