Breaking Down Records

Arrest! Charlie Tipper have a Bristolian pedigree as long as your arm.

Longer maybe.

Lead singer Tim was in both the Flatmates and the Five Year Plan in the late ‘80’s, before joining the Beatnik Filmstars* for most of the ‘90s. In the 2000s he headed up Forest Giants and then took part in the Short Stories.

Guitarist Jon Kent was a founder member of another of Bristol’s C86 squad, the Groove Farm, as well as being the original guitarist for the Filmstars.

Bassist Geoff Gorton played in the Harpoons, then later Rorschach and major label outfit Santa Cruz.

Drummer Simon Harris played in a number of Bristol’s lesser punk bands back in the late 70’s and then the Dangerous Roundabouts. He claims he doesn’t remember a lot about it, if truth be told, so more interesting maybe is the fact that his brother was once a roadie for the Damned.

Keyboard player Rocker is/was in the Flatemates, the Rosehips and a number of other bands before making the leap into the Tippers (if you know Rocker you'd know this is most likely a metaphorical statement!).

You’d be forgiven for wondering why these people aren’t spending their final days touring the country playing the Walsall and Cricklewood PopFests with their old bands, churning out songs written three decades ago to people who were there watching them three decades ago.

Well things move on. Music should be about the new and exciting. And to prove it the ACT also feature a member who wasn’t even born when Tim played his first gig at Frampton Cotterell Youth Centre in 1982. Harry “Ice Man” Furniss brings his soulful cornet nicely to the party.

The band formed in July 2013, under their original name The Charlie Tipper Experiment. The name was chosen with a view to changing it every few years, in part to keep things fresh and in part to pay homage to those other great pioneers of the changing name, SPIZZ.

The CTE released their first single, a one-sided CD single featuring the song "Ride Out", to widespread critical acclaim from their peers and airplay on 6 Music.

Over the summer of 2013 a further 12 brand new songs were written and rehearsed and became the debut album "Mellow On" with bonus tracks, eventually released in March 2015 on vinyl and CD. A single "You Made Me Homeless" followed to commemorate the 2015 General Election.

Song-writing proceeded on apace and a 10" album "Ten" was released in Spring 2016 under the new name of the Charlie Tipper Conspiracy. The band then embarked on a series of EPs during 2016/17 as well as recording a Christmas single with the wonderful Helen McCookerybook who they bumped into whilst performing at the Indietracks festival. Helen is a long time heroine of Tim's and so a collaboration was born which delivered a brilliant version of the Velvet's "Femme Fatale", the first song Tim ever heard Helen sing.

2017 saw gigs with the Wedding Present, Vic Godard, Blue Orchids, the Wolfhounds and others, as well as bringing together the third and last "Rock and Roll for the Soul" winter festival in their Bristol hometown. At this gig the band also morphed into their third incarnation, Arrest! Charlie Tipper.

A 22-track compilation of singles, EPs, bonus and radio session tracks was released in March 2018, but the band have not been resting on their laurels - next up is a movie soundtrack "Themes from Blizzard", for which the band have written both music and script. The making of the film itself could take a while longer, but negotiations are ongoing..

*For those of you that don’t know, the Beatnik Filmstars released records for Merge Records and Slumberland amongst others, recorded five John Peel sessions and were often described as the “British Guided by Voices”. In 1995 they toured the US with the Flaming Lips.