A brief history of Dollboy
Dollboy is the name of the act through which I’ve been making records since about 2003. My name is Oliver Cherer and here is a bit of background.
I was a founder member of highly acclaimed and entirely unsuccessful big beat rockers Cooler, signed to Polydor, achieving single of the week three times with three singles in NME, Big Issue and on Steve Lamaq’s BBC Radio One show. We were regularly called upon for remixes and re-worked such bands as; Shed 7, Rare, Terrovision, Elastica and Alabama 3.
We toured with Bentley Rhythm Ace and Fuzz Townsend and did a BBC Breeze Block live session for Mary Anne Hobbs.
On Cooler’s break up in 2000, I went on to make music with no beats to enjoy privately in the bath at home. I was persuaded by friends to release some of this new gentler music and tracks started turning up on various compilation CDs. This lead to a name and radio airplay (XFM Nick Luscombe’s Flo-Motion) which in turn lead to events and a label and a first album, “Plans for a Modern City”. The record was very well received and was picked up and played all around the world. Extracts from “Plans for a modern city” were used on BBC Radio Drama and BBC TV documentary shows. Dollboy, featuring a full live band performed to great acclaim at The Big Chill in 2004 and 2006 and our now legendary roof top launch show in North London.
The second album, “Casual Nudism” was released in 2007 on Arable Records and was again played around the world and gathered rave reviews. There was a live session on Nick Luscombe’s FloMotion show on xFM and some great gigs performed by a fluid band of cool kids from bands like Woodcraft Folk, Wooden Spoon and Tunng.
In 2007 Dollboy did a lot of shows with Arctic Circle, including the fanfare at the opening of their Christmas concert in 2007 which involved a full whirly tube section and all the bells, glockenspiels and chimes we could muster, music boxes screwed to broken guitars and all played in the darkness of the Union Chapel’s gallery.
In mid 2007 I released a split 7” on Static Caravan. It had Dollboy doing Bach on one side and Robin Saville of Isan fame doing Player Piano on the other. Since then there’s been another track issued on Static Caravan, namely “One Liner” on their “Teaism” compilation. “One Liner” is taken from the forthcoming third album, “A Beard of Bees” which is out in March, again on Static Caravan Recordings.
“A Beard of Bees” is a bit of a departure for Dollboy. It’s a 12 track album of songs, with words, and singing and guitars. It’s not an organotronic ambient mood piece or anything like that. It’s a real mix of acoustic and electric guitars, three part harmonies, old radiophonic burbles and squawks and Germanic synths all bashed together into a sort of oddly English peg-leg dance in the dark with Long John Silver, Syd Barrett and a parrot. The song “Jet Age Kids” from the album is already being played on Marc Riley’s BBC6 show.
In 2004 and 2007 I wrote and performed music for the theatre; “Attempts on her Life” by Martin Crimp, directed by Biba Lille-West at The Diorama in London and Carol Churchill’s “This is Not a Chair”.
I still do a certain amount of remixing and have produced mixes for Tunng, Mighty Math, Animat, Woodcraft Folk, Vic Mars and Digitonal. I was also a winner in the 70th Anniversary Penguin ReMixed competition with “Status” featuring the philosophy writer, Alan de Botton.