With instruments ranging from ukuleles to yoghurt pots, Lulu and the Lampshades are a passionately ramshackle, upbeat and harmonic folk-pop foursome.
Their songs cover everything from drinking summer wine to old nautical handbooks, and their quintessentially English sound has been branded as jolly and jaunty ‘good mood’ music. Their 2009 single ‘Feet to the Sky’ was described as “so cheery they could use it to advertise fun” by The Guardian.
The Lampshades started life as a pretend band in Bristol, before unleashing their talents for real on the London circuit. Their name eventually led them into persuading two friends to put lampshades on their heads and dance for them at their gigs, and their song ‘National Express’ involves using an old typewriter as percussion.
Lead singer Luisa Gerstein, who recently collaborated with Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, providing vocals for the massive track ‘Garden’, confesses the band have a shared love for cycling, stating that the title track for their single ‘Feet to the Sky’ was even “written on a bicycle”.
