Lisää Löylyä Festival

The group’s embryonic stages trace back to 1987, Palo Alto, California. Two of the groups founding members Whitfield Crane and Klaus Eichstadt bonded over a shared interest in music and by 1989 were playing together in a band based out of Isla Vista, California. The friends eventually branched off to record a demo of their own with the help of Eric Valentine (Good Charlotte, Taking Back Sunday, Queens of the Stone age). The group went through several line up changes before settling on Crane, Eichstadt, Mark Davis, Roger Lahr, and Cordell Crockett.

The group garnered it’s name from a satirization of the glam rock band Pretty Boy Floyd. Unsurprisingly Ugly Joe Kid earned a reputation not only for their catchy heavy metal tone influenced by acts like Bon Jovi, Black Sabbath, and Mötley Crüe, but also from their comedic outlook. The group slowly but steadily started building a fan base and in the early 90s were opening for acts like Scatterbrain and Ozzy Osbourne. They released their debut EP “As Ugly As They Wanna Be” in 1992. The album was a huge success producing the hit single “Everything About You”, which found it’s way on the “Wayne’s World” soundtrack and sold over 1,000,000 copies in the US certifying it as the current highest selling EP.

This EP acted as the gateway in to the mainstream for the band and helped set the stage for the success of their proceeding efforts. Their proper debut album “America’s Least Wanted” came out in the Fall of 1992 and featured the five hit singles “Cats in the Cradle”, “Everything About You”, “So Damn Cool”, “Busy Bee”, and “Neighbor”. The latter of the tracks was spotlighted in the popular TV series “Beavis and Butt-head” and garnered them even more attention. The album charted at No. 27 on the US Billboard 200 and No.11 on the UK Albums Charts and of 1995 it has gone double platinum. The group supported this release opening for Black Sabbath and Def Leppard on a sold out European tour and subsequently went on to play more sold out shows in Japan and Australia.

Ugly Joe Kid spent several more years on the road, headlining festivals in Brazil alongside Aerosmith and Poison, warming up arenas for Bon Jovi and Van Halen and fronting their own tours such as the “Excuse to Go Snowboarding Tour”, on which they shared the stage with Goldfinger and Dog Eat Dog. The band’s 2nd studio album “Menace to Sobriety” was issued through Mercury on 13 June 1995. Though the album was critically praised and spawned several successful tour legs, Mercury decided to discontinue their contract with the band. Their next album “Motel California” (a parody of the Eagles’ “Hotel of California”) was released on 22 October 1996 through the independent British label, Castle Communications.

The album failed to chart in the US, but did place at 128 on the UK album charts. After a string of small venue tours the group called it quits in 1997. Their drummer at the time, Shannon Larkin moved on to Godsmack and lead vocalist Crane joined forces with Life of Agony and later worked on two other projects: Medication and Another Animal.

Ugly Joe Kid reformed in 2010 to play several live gigs and by 2012 they released the EP “Stairway to Hell” (their 1st release of original material in almost 16 years). Their 4th studio debut “Uglier Than They Used Ta Be” is set for release in 2015 through UKJ Records.

The story of how Sonarta Arctica became the band that they are today is half absolutely normal, and half the complete opposite of what a band normally does just after it forms. To wit, the band began life with the name Tricky Beans. A patently ridiculous name I’m sure you’ll agree, but nothing out of the ordinary, and then as the band members got more serious about what they were doing they changed their name to the more agreeable (for a metal band) Sonarta Arctica.

So far so normal, right? Then you take into account what they were doing musically at the same time. The band started life as a raucous hard rock band, describing their sound as “a mixture of Megadeth and Spin Doctors”, and at the time they decided to get more serious with their ambitions as a band… they started playing power metal.

A serious band becoming ludicrous I can understand. Vice versa, I can understand. A band balancing the ludicrous and serious I can understand. But a band swapping the reasons why they’re ludicrous and serious over, and effectively becoming a photo negative of the band they formed as? It’s just as well that Sonarta Arctica own it and are a truly great band in their own right, cos otherwise they’d be insufferable.

The band came together in 1995, spent two years playing as Tricky Beans and built up something of a cult following with near constant touring and three demo E.P’s which were sold on the road. 1997 was the point that they started to rethink the band’s sound, which was obviously the right thing to do since the very first thing they recorded with the new line-up and updated sound got them signed to Spinefarm Records. By the time they’d released their first single on the label, they’d signed further deals all around the world, the stage, it’s fair to say, was set.

Their debut album “Ecliptica” was released in November 1999 and left enough of a legacy to justify a completely rerecorded 15th anniversary release in 2014. It was a top twenty hit in their home country, eventually going Gold as have seven of the eight albums they released after it, and with each successive album their profile across Europe as a whole has gotten bigger and bigger. They’re a band that any fan of heavy metal at its most silly and sublime should cherish like few other things in life, and they come highly recommended.