Introducing: The Small Corners

Leeds studio project pays homage…

YOUR NAME: Spence Bayles.
BAND NAME: The Small Corners.
WHAT DO YOU DO/PLAY? Vocals and guitar, other bits and pieces.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN TOGETHER AS A BAND/PLAYING MUSIC?
The Small Corners is mostly just me, but I refer to it as a collective as there are collaborators who help out as required, and I bring in guest musicians when an individual song needs something specific. Recently I had the honour of a musical hero, NZ legend Brian Baker, providing guest vocals and guitar on the single ‘Everyone Here Was A Stranger’. Over the last 25 years I’ve played in various bands, including Last Night’s TV, The Housekeeping Society and Nikoli.

GIVE US 3 REASONS WHY WE SHOULD TRACK DOWN, LISTEN AND DISCOVER YOUR MUSIC?
1. The new single, ‘When They Let the Stars Go’, pays direct tribute to a Prefab Sprout single from 1990 called ‘We Let The Stars Go’. It wasn’t one of their bigger hits, but as a young kid I must have heard it played on the radio and for ages afterwards, I had a recurring dream of a winter’s scene, walking along a street covered in deep snow with this song playing somewhere in the ether. It was so vivid, it’s stuck with me for literally decades. With our single, we’ve tried to emulate the lush, warm sound of Thomas Dolby’s production on the Prefab track, using the same tempo, the same chords (albeit in a different order) and ethereal backing vocals to create something new. My co-conspirator Chris Maunder played the bulk of the instruments, and his son Sam did a wonderful job on the mix.
2. My musical work-rate nowadays is quite slow, and new song ideas come along a lot less frequently than they used to. As a result, an EP’s worth of tunes may have been written over two years and come from very different places. This might explain the mix of stylistic choices – the last EP (2023’s ‘Brilliant Days’) went from spoken word to new wave pop to lo-fi electronic balladry in the space of 15 minutes. There was a narrative arc that held it all together though.
3. I made a stop-motion animated video for previous single ‘Everyone Here Was A Stranger’ which came out on 1st August (it was nice to release a new tune on Yorkshire Day), which was great fun to put together. I’m a big fan of low-budget video-making – another previous effort, for a track called ‘Town’ by another of my projects, Navigation Day, was just black and white footage taken while driving around Leeds city centre, the concept being that the city changes so fast, even just the most basic documenting of that point of time would instantly be a historical document. The idea has held true – if I reshot the same footage now, the amount of change on display would be monumental. Maybe I’ll do that for the single’s 10-year anniversary in 2026.

WHERE DO YOU SOUND BEST – FESTIVAL, CLUB, BEDROOM – OR SOMEWHERE ELSE?
The Small Corners has been strictly a studio project up to this point, so I’d say the tunes sound best in reflective moments in a quiet room, headphones on, glass of wine in hand.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST…
RECORD? ‘I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’ by Nik Kershaw. Still a favourite, and I got the single sleeve signed by the great man himself a few years ago.
CD? Together Alone by Crowded House. We didn’t have a CD player in the house until 1994, at which point I was desperate to start upgrading my Crowded House cassette collection.
DOWNLOAD? I avoided paid-for downloads for ages thanks to the abundance of freebies from MP3 download sites. One of the earliest purchases from iTunes would’ve been Josh Pyke’s Memories and Dust album in 2007 – a serendipitous moment of reading about someone online, being able to buy the album straight away and then, even better, noting that he was on tour and playing at the Faversham a few days later. That joy of instant musical gratification seems quite quaint now.

SO, WHEN IT ALL GOES RIGHT AND YOU’VE GOT A HUGE QUEUE OF HANGERS-ON AND A RIDICULOUS MANSION, WHAT WILL BE YOUR BIGGEST INDULGENCE, MUSICAL OR OTHERWISE?
A DeLorean. A few weeks ago I must’ve clicked on a related link in Facebook, and now literally every other post is something about DeLoreans or Back To The Future, so I can’t get away from it. It’s a sign! Or a very annoying algorithm.

SO, WHEN IT ALL GOES WRONG AND YOU’VE ACRIMONIOUSLY BROKEN UP CITING HUGE MUSICAL DIFFERENCES, WHAT DO YOU FALL BACK ON?
Well, I work in the IT department at one of Leeds’ finest universities, so that’ll hopefully continue to pay the bills while I dream of time-travelling back to a point where I can get a video on The Chart Show.

CITE SOME INTER-BAND MUSICAL DIFFERENCES…
My good friend Tim Hann, a key collaborator who records fantastic electronica under the name break_fold, was mixing my last EP and suggested that he’d made one of the songs sound like Bryan Adams. I took it as a huge compliment, even though I strongly suspect that’s not what he intended.

WHO ARE YORKSHIRE’S FINEST IN CULTURE, SPORT AND MUSIC?
I don’t get out to gigs as much as I used to, so I honestly don’t know what’s hot on the music scene right now. I do however retain a huge fondness for the Leeds acoustic scene of the early-to-mid ‘00s that my old band Last Night’s TV were a part of. In fact I have a dream of putting together a retrospective compilation of some of my favourite acts/songs from that era, which I think would be cool. Got it all planned in my head, the track list, limited run of cassettes… Benjamin Wetherill, Beautiful Feet, Captain Wilberforce, Monte Carlo, the list goes on… I could reminisce all day… Joseph’s Well, Steve Kind’s brilliant nights at the Royal Park Cellars… Great times!

NAME YOUR SUPERGROUP – WHO’S PLAYING WHAT, WHO’S ON VOCALS AND WHO’S YOUR BEZ?
Michael Stipe on lead vocal, Neil Finn on guitar, Paul McCartney on bass, Magne Furuholmen from A-ha on keyboard, and Macca’s drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. As for my Bez, I’d have that guy who used to do the miming with Howard Jones in the early 80s. I think he was called Jez, so at least it rhymes.

GO SEE THIS FILM: I remember being profoundly moved by Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Now I have kids I wouldn’t be able to watch it again – I’d be a complete emotional wreck.
GO READ THIS BOOK: Replay by Ken Grimwood. It’s incredible. Time-travel without being too sci-fi. I’ve re-read it three times in the last couple of years, which is kind of fitting, given the story.
GREAT LOST BAND/ARTIST: The Mutton Birds, a New Zealand band from the 90s in the Crowded House / REM vein who should’ve been huge. Their songwriter Don McGlashan is a genius.
WOULDN’T BE CAUGHT DEAD SUPPORTING: Any of those awful 00s bands starting with a ‘The’ – I’m looking at you, Hoosiers, Kooks, View, Courteeners etc. Give me their ‘90s Britpop forefathers any day of the week.
LONDON, L.A OR LEEDS?: As far as I know, neither London nor LA has a Tharavadu, so there’s no contest.

AND FINALLY… AS YOU LEAVE THE STAGE, WHAT ARE YOUR PARTING WORDS?
To quote Neil Finn from Crowded House’s ‘Elephants’: “Sweet dreams, makes waves, find bliss.”

The Small Corners’ new single ‘When They Let the Stars Go’ is out now on all the usual streaming platforms and thesmallcorners.bandcamp.com