Bears From Labrador are Dylan Rippon, Greg Braden and Rob Cann. They can be found writing and rehearsing in their studio in the heart of London Fields, E8. They performed for the first time a little over a year ago at the "Pretty Vacancies" club night held at The George Tavern on Commercial Road. Like a lot of bands they were hewn from the fallen branches of two promising but doomed projects, Gramercy (Rippon's outfit with Longpigs' frontman Crispin Hunt) and Cheap Hotel (Braden's post punk power trio led by Anna Calvi). They took the name from Melville's Moby Dick....

"A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador"

The whalers were outsiders, exiles on the high seas for years at a time, returning once in a while to land, unrecognisable to family and friends. And here is the music of such forgotten people and places. The songs are populated by boy soldiers, bandits and pistoleroes, the great Bella Starr, El Cid brandishing his mighty Tizona, highway killers, coal miners, Milton's satan, the mourners watching RFK's funeral train, all the world's great outsiders. And something timeless comes through it all. Bears From Labrador have been compared to everyone, from Neil Young to Beck, Credence and Nick Cave, The Rolling Stones and The Raconteurs; one reviewer wrote "Think Kings of Leon covering The Beatles". High praise indeed, and yet no one can quite pin it down because, like all great bands on the outside looking in, the music is timeless and at the same time new, now!

Their live shows are another reason to feel passionate about Bears From Labrador. They've returned to the idea that every performance should be different that no key or tempo is set in stone, that music is all in the moment. Their reputation has grown steadily since that first performance on the Commercial Road,  gaining them Critics Choice in Timeout London for their 93 Feet East show in February this year. As I write this they are packing their suitcases for their first trip to the United States to tour the West Coast. They want to keep moving, restless and free, on the high seas of their own adventure and without too much of a care for home.

www.myspace.com/bearsfromlabrador