The Tab Meets… The Harlequin Dynamite Marching Band

The Tab catches up with one of Liverpool’s best and most unusual live acts, ahead of their new single release.


As the name suggests, The Harlequin Dynamite Marching Band are one of Liverpool’s more peculiar live acts.

With a constantly shifting membership of roughly 15 members, all made up of different local bands, the group are an embodiment of Liverpool’s special something when it comes to music.

Catching up with just a few of the multitude of members at Mello Mello, singer Lucy Mercer (also of local psych-folk trio Stealing Sheep) describes their eccentric style as “Very accessible. People can dance to it, even though its original music, it’s very easy to follow it.”

Harlequin Dynamite have made something of a name for themselves on the live circuit, working with such local names as FACT and L1, and were named among Q Magazine’s top 20 acts of this year’s Latitude Festival.

Fortunately the band have managed to encapsulate their formidable live presence to record on new single ‘Loneliness’, a hypnotic blend of looped brass riffs, primal marching drums and distorted vocals.

With a band of such huge membership, the recording process isn’t exactly straightforward. Production mastermind and band member Simon Knighton pointing out that “It’s all individually tracked, which is why it takes so long, but it also means you bring things out that you wouldn’t if it was all done live”.

Despite the arduous prospect of recording a full-length album, Simon ensures that it’s on the way: “We’ll just do it a couple of tracks at a time, which we have been doing, we’ve probably got like 6 songs recorded now, so in another 3 months we might have ten.”

The next step seems to be to establish a firmer base of band members with Joel Murray noting that “We don’t really want it to be a rotating membership”.

Once the band can stabilise, there are plans to tour Europe in support of Stealing Sheep.

Harlequin Dynamite’s new single ‘Loneliness’ can be heard on Soundcloud, and they can be found on Facebook and their official website.

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