Grandaddy

Grandaddy are...

• Jason Lytle - vocals, guitar, keyboards
• Jim Fairchild - guitar
• Tim Dryden - keyboards
• Kevin Garcia - bass
• Aaron Burtch - drums

There is something touchingly fitting about the adjectives which describe Grandaddy's career trajectory: botched, understated, luckless, very sad and equally sweet. For ten years, these bearded indie rockers produced the finest songs about drunkard robots and nature hikes this side of...well, we're unlikely to see their like again, put it that way.

Jason Lyttle's hirsute crew of space rockers shuffled onto the scene in the early 90s, trying out various shapes and sizes (check out odds n sods collections A Pretty Mess By This One Band and Concrete Dunes to hear their college rock stuff) before hitting their stride with 1997's Under The Western Freeway: a fantastic sprawl of songs full of awkward beauty, stranded astronauts and rotten summers. However, it was 2000's The Sophtware Slump that saw them hit their peak; a sustained eulogy to the death of machinery, it gatecrashed many critics' best-of lists. Their follow up, 2003's Sumday, was an altogether more gentle affair which despite its top 40 lead single Now Its On failed to attract the same level of attention that its predecessor had.

Following the release of the Excerpts From The Diary Of Todd Zilla EP in 2005, Grandaddy announced their decision to split. Lyttle, the band leader, put it down to his wish to move on and the fact that "realistically, it hasn't proved to be a huge money-making venture for a lot of guys in the band". Their epitaph, Just Like The Fambly Cat, was released in 2006. They will be sorely missed.