Skip to main content

Unicorn Kid - Exposed

Exposure
This issue: Unicorn Kid

At just seventeen, Leith-dwelling wonder-boy Oli Sabin, aka Unicorn Kid, has already had more than a million MySpace hits tuning in to his manic brand of pop-eyed toy-box techno. He played the London and Glasgow launch parties of so-hip-it-hurts teen TV drama Skins, and has just released his first single, ‘Lion Hat.’ All this and he’s still studying for his Highers. The List puts Sabin to the test.

How did you become the Unicorn Kid?

When I was fifteen I started messing around with kids educational toys, sampling Casio keyboards and putting them through my computer. Then when I got all these MySpace hits, I started taking it more seriously. If you look at the 13-18 demographic, I suppose it taps into their interest in Gameboys and stuff. It’s cute and its fun to dance to.

How did the Skins connection come about?

I applied for a Skins competition, and they asked me to play the launch party. They were going to use my stuff in the programme, but they said they couldn’t find an appropriate place for it, which is quite unbelievable, really.

Are you a fan of Skins?

I liked the first and second series, but I’ve not really seen the third one. I hardly ever watch TV. I‘m always on my computer.

What’s the future hold for Unicorn Kid?

If I got to thirty and was still doing it, it might be sad and a bit creepy. I want to go to art school. Art’s my passion.

Unicorn Kid supports Fangs at King Tut’s, Glasgow, April 5

The List, April 2008

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more