24 April 2000

I-D, on Pilote’s debut album ‘Antenna’ : ‘something is emerging from the no man’s land between post rock and leftfield electronica.’

Pilote (in Dazed & Confused) on ‘Antenna’ : ‘someone once said, was it Keith Richards? Someone asked him how he wrote his songs, and he said that it wasn’t really about making music, more a case of taking it from the ether and using his antenna’.

Drawing from his minimalist bag of tricks, on 24th April 2000 Brighton based Pilote, nom de guerre of Stuart Cullen, AKA PILOTE, released his new single ‘National Lottery’ on Certificate18 Records. ‘Culled from last year’s debut album ‘Antenna’, which, as the Independent On Sunday said ‘doesn’t really sound like anything else around’, ‘National Lottery’ is a strickly limited edition 7” only single, and is backed with new track ‘Jelly’.

Originally set for a release last year, the single, as NME commented ‘displays a dry wit and humour which invokes a childish smile on your face’, whilst the music ‘is a hard to define as it is easy to enjoy’ (Q). Subliminal smatterings then, from a ‘star in the making and no mistake’ (Mixmag), who ‘has more ideas than his current computer can cope with’ (NME).

Anyway, having played his first ever live dates at the end of last year, when ‘his reassuringly cheap looking equipment whipped up such an impressive range of weirdness’, as Melody Maker described it, Pilote will take his solitary electronic-wine drinking’ explorations of inner city melancholy’ (NME) to a wider audience this year, but, as he says in Sleaze Nation ‘you shouldn’t try dancing to it - not unless you’re weird’. Instead, as he continues, ‘people should buy me a drink when they come to see me play - stay away unless they bring a pint over.’