Hello 2011 and hello you. It’s been a bit of a quiet few weeks for The Sweet Nothings, but we’ve just had our first practice of the new year, at which we worked on our first new song of the new year. We’ve also booked our first popshow of the new year. And we’re just about to do our first recording session of the new year!

Let’s take those one at a time, shall we? The practice was last night, and Tim’s dodgy ankle is just about alright again. If Pete writes some lyrics for the new song in time, we might be able to play it in Nottingham on 4 February (more details on the gigs page). Yay, Nottingham! Hope we can see you there.

Our return to the studio is this Sunday in Manchester with the very excellent Mr Pete Bowers, when we will be working on tracks for our debut single (the A-side having been completed last year). We’re hoping we can tell you more about this release soon, but don’t hold yer breath!

Calling my band The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut was like every idea anyone has ever had when they’re drunk. At the time it seemed brilliant, but before very long it was getting more and more embarrassing.

Some of you have asked me why we changed to The Sweet Nothings. It was because the old name, besides being a bit daft, had outlived its usefulness. When I formed the Juggernaut with Dan and Rob in 2008, the people who’d be listening to us knew me already from my solo stuff. So I wanted to include the Pete Green part to signify a continuity with what I was doing before – to let existing listeners know that it was still me. A couple of years down the line, I’m only playing solo gigs here and there and it’s the band that’s centre stage, so there’s no need to put that message across any more.

Indeed, while the old name might have been keeping existing listeners onside, it might have put off potential new ones. I put myself in their shoes and imagined seeing a name like that on a line-up at, say, Indietracks. A jokey name that included within it the name of some random bloke I’d never heard of. And I concluded: (1) that I’d presume the music to be laced with awful, ‘zany’, trying-too-hard, sub-Terry Pratchett humour; (2) that I wouldn’t watch the band; and (3) that said bloke would probably be a terrible arse.

And I don’t rely on humour in my songwriting as much as I used to. I don’t think I’m turning into a completely miserable bastard just yet, but while the Juggernaut name sat nicely with ye olde knockabout songs like ‘Share Your Kit’, it really didn’t suit newer, wistful-sounding things like ‘Where The Music Still Plays’.

So after extensive brainstorming sessions, branding workshops, and exhaustive market research conducted with our hand-picked focus group of aspirational C2s, we decided to junk the Juggernaut and embrace The Sweet Nothings. Oh, alright, we were down the pub again. But it was early in the night this time, so we weren’t drunk. Well, less drunk.

In the interests of historical completeness maybe I should post the list of alternative names we looked at and rejected. But that’s for another day. In the meantime, we hope you’ll embrace The Sweet Nothings too. As long as you’ve showered and cleaned your teeth, obviously.

We have a drummer! Please give a warm Juggernaut – er, sorry – Sweet Nothings welcome to Mr Tim Boyd!

2010 has been a bit frustrating really. We lost a good drummer when Fairy lost his car and couldn’t travel to practice any more. We told him to look behind the fridge, but these youngsters, they never listen. Then Rob returned to fill in for a few months, commuting from Cleethorpes. This gave us some great moments, like the first time he came back, when we hadn’t played together in seven months and I texted him to ask if he wanted to come over for a practice the next morning and then travel down to Bristol to play a popshow on the night and record a radio session the day after, and he texted back simply: “I would fucking love it.”

But Rob’s work has moved him down to bloody Guildford now, which is a bit far to nip over at short notice. And the whole lack of a drummer in Sheffield thing has made it nigh on impossible for us to work on new songs this year.

That’s where Tim comes in. Tim was suggested by Vinnie, partly because he’s in her other band The Marygreenes, so she already knew what a good drummer he is. Partly, I suspect, it’s also because they both support Tottenham, so they can gang up on me and Dan for supporting teams that are less glamorous and relatively quite crap. (The Wednesday have had a half-decent start to the season, while the Mariners… have had a start to the season.)

At the time of writing we’ve practised three times with Tim. He plays fast and dead tight, and I am frankly amazed at how quickly he’s picked up the songs. We’ve one more rehearsal this Friday, and then it’s to Nottingham for the Indiepop Weekender. Eeeeeeeeeeeee!

Tim also hits the drums really, really hard. But please be gentle with him in Nottingham, because we’re all bound to be slightly nervous. And finally, if you get chatting, ask him to tell you one of his amazing stories about when he used to be a meter reader. I’d type some of them up here, but I just don’t have the kilowatt hours.