For local music fans, Valentine’s Day may involve rekindling an old flame for a band of days’ past. Kings Barcade in downtown Raleigh will host Art Lord & The Self-Portraits’ 10th anniversary show tonight. The group formed in 2003, entrancing audiences before calling it quits in 2005. Since then, three of its members have formed Future Islands.
Diversions staff writer Chris Powers talked with the band about its formation and the desire to reunite.
Diversions: What are the origins of Art Lord & The Self Portraits?
Samuel Herring: Art Lord was a group that was started by me and William Cashion, who was the bass player. We had a lot of classes together when we came to school at ECU. We were freshmen at ECU in the fall of 2002. We had a bunch of classes together and became really good friends, and we started talking about musical ideas.
Then, right before Christmas vacation after the end of the first semester of school, we had this strange idea for a performance group that would be based around this character Locke Ernstfrost. The idea was kind of a group that was more of a performance art piece, like a social commentary on how we treat rock stars and pop icons — art stars. Just how society treats them, kind of idolizes them even though they seem to be often very narcissistic or just full of themselves.
In a way, that was kind of the thing to create this character who brought his self-portraits to life because they were the only people good enough to play music for him. Basically, we were just 18-year-old kids coming to school and had an idea.
Dive: What was the motivation behind having one show?
SH: Really to pay homage to that live, to do something special for the people who that group was really important, to play a show for those old fans.
We’re also putting together a two-LP retrospective of all the Art Lord recordings, which was quite a number of songs that we wrote in that two-and-a-half-year period. So we’re putting out the record and wanted to do this one-off special show.
Dive: Why did you guys decide on Kings for the show?
SH: Well we started in Greenville, and that’s where we did our thing, but we didn’t really know if there was anywhere to play anymore. We’ve had a longtime connection with Kings since the Art Lord days. Those guys have helped us out and put us on shows and been really supportive of us when we were kids, and that’s kind of one of those things that we didn’t always get when we were doing Art Lord.
It was seldom that you come into a space and kind of feel at home and feel like people respected us because we were young’uns. You deal with some funny people in clubs, but the Kings guys and girls have always been so sweet, and they’ve been really supportive and are still supportive — they’re good friends now.
William Cashion: I don’t want to give away too many surprises — we do have a few surprises for the show. But I think it’s going to be a good reunion.
There’s going to be a lot of emotion in the air that night I think. I think we’re all really excited, and I think everyone is going to have a good time that comes out.
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