Emma Kupa
Track: Emma Kupa – ‘Happy Birthday’: loving your nearest and dearest and yourself with a sweet indie-folk tune for Lost Map
NOW THERE’S a good match between two of these isles’ loveliest indie-folk musical forces. Lost Map, the cottage caravan industry label run by Pictish Trail’s Johnny Lynch from his fastness on the Inner Hebridean island of Eigg (pop: 87 or thereabouts), thus proving you can do lovely musical things far, far away from the capital …
TRACK: Emma Kupa – ‘Nawlins’: indie-folk for The Big Easy and pop art dancing
YOU know what? She’s just a bit lovely, is Emma Kupa, Sheffield songstress bringing us warm observations across the indie-folk Venn overlap. Twas only a few weeks back she dazzled us with the amorous sweetness of “Hey Love”, a naked little nugget about the realities of a relationship, the video all filmed against 70s’ wallpaper …
Exclusive: Emma Kupa records ‘Nothing at All’ live in session for Backseat Mafia
We’ve long been in the thrall of Emma Kupa, through all of her incarnations and all the collaborators she’s worked with over the years. Pretty much the first thing we ever wrote on the site for a long lost and forgotten series was something on Sheffield indie darlings Standard Fare, but since then she’s gone …
SEE: the sweetness of Emma Kupa’s ‘Hey Love’
Former singer with Sheffield cult indie heroes Standard Fare, in collaboration with Hefner man Darren Hayman in the Hayman Kupa Band, and in indie fizzbomb purveyors Mammoth Penguins, Emma Kupa has been absent from our ears over the past few years in her solo incarnation. Thankfully that gap in our musical lives is about to …
SEE: Standard Fare’s Emma Kupa returns with folksy gem ‘Nothing At All’
EMMA KUPA has been something of British indiepop’s best-kept secret this past decade. Starting out in North Derbyshire trio Standard Fare, who released two albums of cracking, bouncy guitar pop, coming on like Talulah Gosh’s knowing, insouciant, smokey voiced big sis. A solo mini-album in 2015 was followed by an album with the former front …
Album Review: Mammoth Penguins – There Is No Fight We Can’t Both Win
Back from a voyage into the world of the concept album with the excellent John Doe, Mammoth Penguins have stepped back into slightly more familiar territory. There’s No Fight We Can’t both win is another slice of their grown-up guitar pop. Which might sound a bit grim to the uninitiated. Is there really a place …
Mammoth Penguins and Friends – John Doe
This is a bit unexpected. Mammoth Penguins’ first album, while with its own style, picked up not a million miles away from where Emma Kupa’s first band, Standard Fare, left off – quality indieish guitar pop soundtracking vignettes from day-to day life. So when the needle drops on some background noise, stately strings, mandolin and …
Album Review: Mammoth Penguins – Hide and Seek
Cards on the table before we even start this review. I love Emma Kupa. Well, her songwriting at least. It was lucky that her six song mini album Home Cinema lifted me from my depressive slumber following the split of Standard Fare, one of,if not the first, group ever to appear on Backseat Mafia. A …
See: Mammoth Penguins release video for ‘Propped Up’
If you’ve been a regular reader of Backseat Mafia, you’ll have found Emma Kupa popping up throughout its history, specifically as lead singer of the much lamented (especially by us) Standard Fare. Happily, a move to Cambridge allowed Kupa to recruit bassist Mark Boxall and Drummer Tom Barden and form Mammoth Penguins. The brilliant Fortuna …