Fate seems to find a way of landing at the feet of former Creation Records boss Alan McGee. Back in 1993, as everybody knows, he famously signed Oasis at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut club in Glasgow after the gobby Manchester band barged their way onto the bill. With Forgotten Pharaohs, his first signing to his latest label Creation Youth, it took a flying Croc to grab his attention.
“I was taking part in an egg-and-spoon race for the dads at a school sports day in Hay-on-Wye in South Wales, and Alan McGee happened to be there,” frontman Christian Pattemore recalls of their chance meeting. “As I crossed the finishing line, one of my Crocs came off and landed on his foot, so that kind of forced an introduction. He said he was watching me because of my determination to win, and thought: ‘Okay this kid’s got some fight in him.’”
After a demo changed hands, McGee agreed to work with Pattemore and he invited him over to his London flat for a writing session in 2018. Out of that came the stirring 70s West Coast-like anthem Drive, the first song that would eventually make the final cut on Forgotten Pharaohs’ forthcoming debut King Of Mirrors.
McGee passed the track on to Killing Joke bassist and labelmate Martin ‘Youth’ Glover, who expressed an interest in producing a record with Pattemore. But rather than go it alone, the frontman insisted on bringing in a guitarist to work with him on the album sessions.
“Alan manages the band Cast, and I said it’d be great to get Skin [Cast guitarist Liam Tyson] on this record,” Pattemore explains. “Alan asked him if he’d work with me, and he said he’d love to.”
Forgotten Pharaohs eventually went to Youth’s studio in Spain to lay down the final recording sessions for their debut album, with Pattemore’s brother Sam on drums. The result was a smoky West Coast-style record laced with blues, folk and psychedelia, with nods to Steely Dan, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin.
Blues-infused debut single Carousel is the standout track on the record, documenting a darker time in Pattemore’s life when he found himself working on a lavender farm in the Welsh mountains.
“That song is about me working in the trenches on this lavender farm and just getting covered in shit, and having to cycle up this massive hill in hail storms,” he says. “It’s about willpower and having the tenacity to keep going.”
Having played in Robert Plant’s bands the Strange Sensation and the Sensational Space Shifters over the years, ‘Skin’ lobbied Plant to listen to King Of Mirrors.
“He was so impressed with the record, he phoned me up and said: ‘Do you wanna support us?’” the guitarist enthuses. “Then he bloody forgot, so we never got to play with him.”
