Em Song

Ten More Minutes

Record Girl

Hit The Hay

Soup Of The Day

No One Knows You

Get out of Town @ Unit 9

Prince of Wandsworth Town @ Unit 9

King of Spain are a five-piece from Balham (famously dubbed ‘Gateway to the South’ by Peter Sellers), South London. After years of sending home-recorded demos of varying degrees of quality to anyone who’d listen, their debut album ‘Battleships & Aeroplanes’ was released in 2008 on Oxford’s pioneering Shifty Disco label. Recorded on a dairy farm near the Oxfordshire village of Steventon, the record was received by the media with a mixture of delight, consternation, confusion and downright anger. NME loved it, Artrocker did not.

Album track ‘Bacon’ was selected by William Ravenscroft (son of the late, great John Peel) as one of his gems of 2008, and received airplay on the legendary Tom Robinson’s BBC6 radio show. Once a clean edit had been hurriedly produced to remove a particularly offensive swear word, Tom also took to spinning live favourite ‘Menagerie’. Last year the band returned to the cow shed to beach some fresh tunes, and begin the process of recording Album Numero Deux, 'thirtydegreeshandsonhipsleanforwardsmile', with long-suffering producer/engineer Rowland Prytherch (a.k.a. Badger). It will be released October 7th 2011 on Shifty Disco records. 

King of Spain run ‘flux=rad’, an occasional showcase of lo-fi and alternative music that usually happens at their spiritual home, the 12 Bar Club in Soho, and sometimes at the Notting Hill Arts Club in, err, Notting Hill. They also play gigs in places from Berlin to Bournemouth, but can be pretty much persuaded to go anywhere given the promise of beer and/or food. 

'Reeking of Hefner and The Go-Betweens, this album stands as a homage to a great school of underground indie where books weren't just used for Ordinary Boys photoshoots, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Orange Juice's back catalogue is grounds for marriage...awesome'
8/10 - NME 

'All in all a promising debut' 4/5 - Subba-Cultcha

'It's genius, no doubt, but what in the world does it sound like? Sea shanty rock? The Libertines take a holiday to the seashore? It defies description.' - rocksellout.com

'Bright, jangly, thoughtful indie music that gets better and better with every listen. They have an LP out now called 'Battleships & Aeroplanes' on Shifty Disco records, which you'll be playing over and over again until everyone you know is sick of it and doesn't like you anymore.' 
- William Ravenscroft

'Playing a weird mix of indie rock and sea shanties, these guys are sort of like a British Decemberists, and are definitely one to watch.' - spoonfed.co.uk 

'It is King of Spain whose star burns the brightest.' 
- gigwise.com, review of ShiftyDisco10 compilation

"As close to underground indie-dom as you can get" - musicomh.com

"These four blokes from South London have captured that raw Britishness of a Libertines record better than twenty other bands who were trying harder could do" - Bearded Magazine

"Indie rock crossed with Johnny Cash with a grunge Ian Botham on bass - awesome!" - Myriad Creatures

kingofspainuk