Kid Carpet - Ideas & Oh Dears

Hello,
I’m Kid Carpet and I make Kiddy Disco Punk and Shit-Hop music out of plastic instruments and toys and a sampler. It’s all stuck together with Sellotape and sometimes I shout over the top. I do guitar solos which are ACE and I fuckin love it.

So reads the first paragraph of Kid Carpet’s biography. And I can think of no better way to describe what the man (or should that be boy? Probably) does. Ideas & Oh Dears is a wonderfully, joyfully childish collection of tunes built from the most unlikely of musical sources.

The music is indeed composed through a sampler out of sounds from electronic toys, play instruments, sounds recorded from television, and probably a few other things too. Over the top Kid Carpet sings with the right mix of naivete and tongue-in-cheek. The guitar solos mentioned come courtesy of a touch button children’s red “guitar”. Or at least they did.

Red Guitar keeps getting poorly. I’ve found out that if I take it apart and bend a bit of the insides it’ll work for an evening.
So the axe is back. If a bit temperamental. I’ve got a back-up. A flame coloured axe with the same sounds in it but it’s much harder to play and has SHOCK !! NO FLASHING LIGHTS. So obviously it’s rubbish in comparison.

Armed with all this information it’s a bit hard to imagine exactly what Kid Carpet must be like in life, especially since the bio also claims to have played “about four million and six” pop shows in the last year. Fortunately Ideas & Oh Dears comes with a DVD documenting Kid Carpet’s one day tour of London (11am – Tate, 1pm – Accidental Records, 3pm – MTV, 5pm – Hoxdon Square, 9pm – Catch Club) to put it all in perspective. It’s incredibly enjoyable to watch as he drags his array of toys all across the city, playing before unsuspecting crowds in public locations. ”Seeing as we’ve come to a house music specialist shop,” he announces from the back yard of Accidental Records, “we’re gonna concentrate mostly on rock guitars”, before climbing on the furniture and pressing buttons to create one of his “solos”.

All of these could seem a little pretentious and gimmicky (the song 1 Trick Pony suggests Kid Carpet has been told this before), if his enthusiasm for what he does wasn’t so damn charming. And the songs aren’t half bad either. Shiny Shiny Now and There’s a Shoe both jump with a passion, the former even evoking sounds from the plastic guitars which really do rock, while the latter has a thumping beat which is good enough to dance to. But my personal favourite is Your Love, a miniature keyboard (and Furby) driven pop tune which really shows off what must be an intelligence hidden behind naivete for the sake of fun. And sometimes, a bit of fun is all you need from music. Rock on Kid Carpet, it’s not just your solos which are ACE.

(Originally published on FasterLouder)