Pumajaw are one of a few acts I discovered exclusively through Last.fm. I don't listen to Last.fm "radio" that much these days — mainly because there's too much good human-powered radio on the BBC. But I still pop back to Last.fm occasionally: it's not the same as radio, but it's mostly satisfying (much better than listening to my own 'library' on shuffle, which I almost never do), though recent licensing-driven cutbacks have compromised its usefulness for foraging. Occasionally it throws up something like Pumajaw, who I feel I ought to have already heard via other sources, but haven't.
And Last.fm tells me exactly when this started: on 4th October 2006, I heard Pumajaw's Weather Potions and their version of Brel's La Chanson des Vieux Amants. A lot of people were starting to combine folk traditions with splurges of electronics around then, but something about the way Pumajaw did it had the same quality as early Roxy Music or Pere Ubu. And I liked Pinkie Maclure's voice, which has a range from Nico to Charlotte Greig (you might say that's not a very broad range, but I'd argue it's the right one). In those days, you could tag an act — I used "check out" to tag anything that I wanted to hear more of — and then listen to "check out" radio, a random compilation of everything with that tag. Thus I listened to quite a lot of Pumajaw over the couple of months that followed.
Though I liked pretty much all that I heard, I felt I wouldn't get the measure of Pumajaw until I saw them play their songs. Eighteen months later I caught them at The Slaughtered Lamb, the same evening I got Laura Gibson's EP. It was an odd evening, as it wasn't clear who was headlining and what the running order was. Pumajaw were the major draw for me, but I think they played just after I arrived, followed by Laura, with a band called Hexicon — of whom I've never heard before or since — topping the bill. It's a small venue and it was far from full when Pumajaw took to the corner of the room that passes for a stage. There was an unavoidable sense of disappointment hanging over the performance, with Pinkie Maclure and John Wills (whose initials make up PuMaJaW) underwhelmed by the shortage of audience attention, and radiating a lack of commitment back at us.
So, not a massive validation of my interest, but I bought the CD there anyway, and I keep up with their new releases periodically on eMusic (and, yes, their subsequent collaboration with Alasdair Roberts was on their Curiosity Box album a validation). I'm still curious enough to want to see them play again, if they come back to London.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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