White House Demos

Legendary shoegaze band Chapterhouse share their first ever recordings on a new EP, White House Demos, released via Sonic Cathedral. The four tracks were laid down at The White House studio in Weston-super-Mare on January 15, 1989, when the band were only four gigs old and reveal their heavier and more psychedelic origins, inspired by the likes of Loop and Spacemen 3.

“They were the first songs we wrote as a band,” says the band’s singer and guitarist Stephen Patman. “At the time our live set consisted of Stooges and ’60s garage-psych cover versions which we mixed with these original songs.” The tracks weren’t included on 2023’s career-spanning Chronology boxset because they had been forgotten about – until the intervention of Slowdive guitarist Christian Savill.

He and Patman worked together in an office in Reading as their respective bands were starting out and he says the demo remains “their best record”. “When the boxset was released, Christian got in touch and reminded me of these demos and how much he loved them,” says Stephen. “He was probably the first person I gave a cassette copy to. He still rehearses and records at The White House and was going in for a session the following week, so I asked if he could ask the owner/engineer Martin Nichols to check if he still had them in his archive. Thankfully he did.”

Of the four tracks that make up the EP, ‘Ecstasy’ has appeared in various versions and permutations on Chapterhouse compilations over the years, but never in its full eight-minute glory; a much later version of ‘Guilt’ was included on the band’s 1991 debut album and shoegaze classic Whirlpool; a version of ‘Die Die Die’ was also included with that album on a bonus 12”, and remained part of the band’s live set for a while. The stunning ‘See That Girl’, however, has never been released before. With 36 years of distance, it sounds like something of a lost classic, and the White House Demos as a whole feel like a brief moment in time captured forever.