Our NME tour aftershow parties were almost always wild nights and we advertised this one with a flyer which paid tribute to past glories (pictures of Florence and the Machine and Friendly Fires’ visit are in the gallery here):

The Flying Duck wasn’t available so we booked Stereo, a lovely big room with a huge high stage. We had asked Fangs (glamorous and theatrical) and French Wives (exquisite chamber-folk/indie-pop – a last minute replacement for Nacional) to play live between 11pm and midnight, and the room quickly filled up with hundreds of folk who had been at the NME tour show at the Barrowlands. The only drawback with Stereo was that because it was a single room, we knew that everyone would be a hostage to whatever tunes the Guest DJs would play. This was happily never a big problem at normal Pin Ups in The Flying Duck, because most Guest DJs were actually pretty good and up for a fun time, and on the rare occasions a Guest DJ were a disaster folk could take refuge in the second “Kitchen” room until such time as we could politely eject the guilty party from the DJ booth. (I am far too discreet to name and shame these party poopers, but if you are intrigued then Iain OC alludes to 1 or 2 in his blog article “Amazing Guest DJs”.)

So there we were in Stereo welcoming The Big Pink and Bombay Bicycle Club (and also the Maccabees, who had tagged along) and hoping they would rise to the occasion. Things started great with Bombay Bicycle Club playing My Girls, Young Adult Friction, 1901, and The XX’s VCR. In fact, there were quite crazy scenes involving about 50 folk jumping about the stage (including Bombay Bicycle Club-s, Big Pink-s and Maccabees-s) and we had to give Stereo staff a hand to identify non-band members and ask them to come off the stage. Robbie Furzse from The Big Pink then took to the decks about an hour (and a bottle of vodka) later and dished out a string of early noughties hip hop which did scare off some folk but not too many. Us Pin Ups chaps played out the final hour and even got the crowd to sing happy birthday to our very own Paul Smith. Enjoy the pictures below!