The Electric Soft Parade are an up-and-coming British indie guitar band, based around brothers Tom and Alex White, from Brighton, England. Both were still in their teens when they released their acclaimed debut album Holes in the Wall, but they already had a long history of music-making. Tom, the main songwriter, sings and plays guitar, drums and keyboards. His older brother Alex plays guitar and sings.
They gained their love of music in part from their father, who played clarinet and piano, and the brothers grew up listening to classical music and classic pop like The Beatles, whose influence is plain on their own records. But you can also hear in their music echoes of the more recent bands they've grown up with, artists such as Ash, Supergrass, The Boo Radleys, Six by Seven and The Charlatans.
The band are named after the album The Soft Parade by The Doors; initially they simply called themselves The Soft Parade. However, there is a pre-existing American Doors cover band with that name, and they threatened legal action. Rather than call themselves The Brighton Soft Parade or something equally silly, ihe band inserted the word Electric into their name, apparently modeled after The Electric Prunes.
Before that, they had released three self-produced and self-financed albums under the name Feltro Media, the last of which began to pick up critical attention and radio play on London alternative music station Xfm. The first Electric Soft Parade single, "Silent To The Dark", was released in Britain in April 2001. "Empty at the End" and "There's a Silence" followed later in the year.
They released their debut album as the Electric Soft Parade, Holes in the Wall, on independent label dB Records in February 2002. The White brothers had to record it as a duo, when their bassist left to concentrate on his schoolwork. The album contains a mix of guitar pop, sometimes resembling The Boo Radleys and Teenage Fanclub, combined with a harder psychedelic rock edge. Legendary music paper NME awarded it 9/10, saying with customary understatement: "Electric Soft Parade may just have saved British pop music. It's got melody, it's got invention and it rocks like a beast!"
In October 2001, they set a world record for recording and editing a music video in just 3 hours and 46 minutes, as a stunt to promote Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and Windows XP. Footage for the "There's a Silence" video was shot at the Windows XP UK launch party in London, and HMV's Oxford Circus store, and the finished results webcast immediately on completion. The previous world record was four days, held by Mick Jagger and David Bowie's cover version of "Dancing in the Streets".
Most information for this write-up comes from their official website at http://www.electricsoftparade.com/
Additional sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/artist_area/electricsoftparade/
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/Press/2001/Nov01/11-14MovieMakerPR.asp
http://designermagazine.tripod.com/ElectricSoftParadeINT1.html