Though it doesn’t mirror any of our current events (hello Decemberists leak!!), its fitting to follow up a post about Rose Polenzani with a post about my favorite defunct band that no one ever heard of: Pooka.

In 1994, I travelled to a couple of nearby Kristin Hersh solo gigs, and at one of these gigs, there was an opening band from the UK. An acoustic duo. Sharon Lewis and Natasha “Tash” Jones were witty, they wrote brilliant songs with strange and beautiful harmonies that immediately knocked my wife and I over (which is especially hard to do with acoustic music, where everything sounds like G, C, and D chords) and had us combing local rekkid stores afterwards looking for their Elektra debut. That debut cd is now out of print, but it is the kind of cd that I buy whenever I find one, simply because it is so good and what would happen if each of my copies got so scratched that I couldn’t listen to it anymore??

Pooka is no more; they came and went and what a shame that when you google “Pooka” you have to wade through two screens of garbage before you finally come to the real deal. They were hard to pin down; I know I said above that they were an acoustic duo, but they had this love for electronic music that they could not eschew from who they were. Maybe that made them difficult to market; I don’t know. But I do know that although their acoustic stuff meant more to me, I really got into a couple of their synthy songs, including this one:

Pooka - One In A Million (off the 2001 album Shift on Rough Trade Records UK)

The reason I can’t mention Rose Polenzani without mentioning Pooka is that I met Rose through the Pooka fan email list. I had come across a cd of hers when perusing KPSU’s library of music, and thought her name sounded familiar. Not long after, I saw a post of hers on the mailing list and the lightbulb went on. That was when Voices On The Verge were just about to release a record and tour and folk audiences would get to know not only Rose, but also Erin McKeown, and Beth Amsel and Jess Klein. But I digress……

Have a happy Friday, and a wonderful weekend.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 9:05 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.