To date only 3 Shoshin gigs have ended with the police showing up and the band getting arrested. The band has probably spent less than 20 hours behind bars in total, they have only had all their equipment confiscated once, have only spent around £2000 in fines and legal fees and can only boast of receiving one ASBO (anti-social-behavior- order) each. Not bad considering it is no word of a lie that when the band is on tour (usually for months on end) it has to deal with the police every single day. Why? Because when Shoshin rock up to do a show outside of their own territory in Northwest England, they do it right there on the street. It gets loud, it gets busy and the cops don’t like it. They don’t like it at all. Shoshin have played in at least 70 different cities in 11 different countries and the vast majority of those performances were unsolicited, unauthorized and took place on the street right up until the flashing blue lights came to shut it down.  

But why the street? Because that’s where people are. The post-digital remnants of the music industry are no longer in possession of their former taste-making cultural monopoly, and subsequently they no longer possess the money to financially back new groups, especially original sounding groups lacking a distinct market-proven precedent. So the band came to realise their fate was entirely in their own hands, and lateral thinking led them to the conclusion that if they wanted to bring their sounds to the masses, they would have to literally do just that. So they went out and bought some car batteries, and that’s when the trouble started.  

The first ever street shows took place in Holland, in the snow, and at temperatures below freezing at the January 2010 Eurosonic festival in Groningen. The festival boasted a bill of acts considered by the music industry to encompass the finest new talent in Europe, and despite applying Shoshin were not invited ‒ perhaps due to the fact they are independent. Undeterred by this, the band drove all the way from Manchester nonetheless, to demonstrate why their non-inclusion on the festival program was a gross oversight, and over the course of three days they played outside a festival snack-bar. They clocked up 7 hours of set time (with blue fingers), gained exposure to the entire festival delegation and earned 700 in donations and CD sales. Their performance got the band featured in national newspapers, coverage in several major Dutch music blogs, and recorded interviews and performance excerpts included on Dutch Radio station 3FM’s report on the Festival. The result was a number of fully booked venue tours in the Netherlands in March 2010, July 2010, January 2011 and September 2011. The venues they played included Merleyn in Nijmegan, The Stage in Arnhem, 330 live in Den Haag, The Winston Kingdom in Amsterdam, De Overkant in Wageningen and festival spots at Minirok 2010 and Appelpop 2011 (the biggest free festival in Holland with 25000 visitors).  

So who is this band anyway and what do they sound like? In short they are a 3 piece with Pete Haley on Guitar and vocals, Abbi Phillips on drums and Joe Stuart on bass. Shoshin’s style of music was devised by Pete who is also the group’s songwriter, and it’s based on mixing a fairly intense rhythmic core of Urban Music, Latin and Hip Hop with the maybe more melodic characteristics and harmonic progressions found in other styles such as Rock, Reggae, Soul and Blues. The heavy emphasis on rhythm and dance-able grooves makes their music perfect for the street and the stage alike, which explains to some extent their success so far in improvised settings. The band’s style features Pete's unusual guitar playing which has some pretty unique characteristics, one of which is the almost exclusive use of percussive arpeggios picked in tight rhythms, instead of the usual guitar manoeuvres of strumming and chugging away at chords. The bass, drums and guitar all come together in the songs forming layers of rhythms that often seem to give first-time listeners the impression that there are way more than just 3 people in the group. Over the top of this Pete’s diverse and wide ranged vocals are heavily influenced by hip-hop, rock and soul, and whilst melodic and always in harmony, they are often also extremely rhythmic too in a way not dissimilar to 

reggae toasting/chanting.  

As well as discovering the power and financial viability of playing their music on the street, Eurosonic enabled the band to receive bookings in Germany and the Czech Republic, their success here led them to believe in the possibility of touring Europe widely despite their independent status, which led to them traveling as far east as Budapest in the summer of 2010. In 2011 the band recorded their debut album, releasing and distributing it on all the mainstream digital download sites with the intention of supporting the release with a 3 month tour of Europe. The Album ‘City of Patience’ was intended for physical release, but as the album production was undertaken by the band themselves with the help of only one engineer it was delayed as they learned on the job. The result being that the bands tour had already reached Paris by the time the mastering studio sent them back the finished article. In Paris the band met with disaster at a midday street show, when the police turned up and were sufficiently provoked by the bands rendition of Darth Vader’s ‘Imperial March’ to confiscate their equipment and arrest two members found without passports. It took a VERY good solicitor and 1500 to get their stuff back, and unfortunately this was the bands CD replication budget blown. The band continued the tour, selling CDs faster than they could burn them on laptops and traveling to Lisbon where they met with great success, down to southern spain where they nearly starved unable to earn due to heavy policing and tight street music regulations, and the rest of the tour was spent traveling up again into France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland where the band also met with great success. The band improvised to fill the gaps where they lacked connections and ultimately took their independently produced debut album to many thousands of people who would perhaps not have heard it otherwise.