Toodar – a flood of success

Three years ago, on Halloween, heavy rain in Leamington flooded Tom Grundy’s basement, the rehearsal space for his band. When Tom returned home he found instruments, amps and recording equipment completely submerged and destroyed by the flooding.

Although the unfortunate event led to the end of his band, it made Tom rethink the direction of his own music. Salvaging a guitar from the wreckage, he began writing and performing songs on his own.

Isabel Seeliger-Morley, a producer and housemate of the band’s drummer, heard Tom’s new material, and offered to help put a couple of recordings together. She later went on to join Tom and become the second half of pop duo Toodar.

Of the duo’s coming together, Isabel said: “I heard Tom’s stuff on Myspace, actually. I thought, ‘that sounds amazing’ and there was some free studio time going so we went in and ended up putting an EP together in the dead of night using this borrowed studio time.

“I was already a sound engineer and from that I ended up becoming the other half of Toodar.”

Tom looks back on the flood which destroyed most of his musical equipment in a remarkably positive way.

“Sometimes you don’t know it but you need things like this to happen,” he said. “At the time I was devastated. I’d been playing music with a group of people and it was ruined, but having all of our loud amplifying sound equipment destroyed actually caused me to completely rethink the way I approach making music.

“It was one of those times when something bad happens, and you panic and think that everything is ruined, but then you give it some time and think actually it was probably a good thing that happened.”

Whereas sound engineer Isabel works in music full-time, Tom leads more of a double life, having worked in offices, shops, restaurants and even in a laboratory in recent years.

“I tend to stay away from the industry side of things as much as possible,” he explains. “But that means that when I step off the stage I have a very boring existence working different jobs here and there.

“But I think if I was able to do what I loved all of the time I would have less to write about, maybe.”

Toodar describe their music as ‘deeply personal pop’. This comes from Tom’s decision for the band to make music in exactly the way they want to make music.

“When I started again from scratch, I wanted to make the music I like and not be constrained by what other people want to hear or by the instruments or by who I was working with.

“Funnily enough, when I started making the music it got a far better response than anything I had ever done before.”

The Hackney-based electronic duo’s music has continued to get a good response, with BBC 6 Music DJ and singer songwriter Tom Robinson counting himself as one of their biggest fans. Toodar are steadily building up momentum, after receiving radio play on over 70 stations worldwide as well as being asked by the BBC to headline a stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Tom and Isabel may be the foundations of the band but they have performed and recorded with many other musicians and artists. Isabel describes the band as more of a ‘collective’ with herself and Tom at the centre of it.

This collective extends beyond just the musical side of their work. Recently the band was contacted by Luke Dash, a fan and artist who enjoyed making art while listening to their music. Dash has since gone on to design the artwork for the band’s single, ‘So’.

“It’s an amazing feeling to create this work and then find out that it has inspired someone else to go out and make their own creative work.” Isabel explains. “It’s not something you set out to do but it’s a great feeling.”

The band has no solid plan of what they are going to do over the next few months but according to Tom it will involve a great deal of hard work, creativity and possibly even some body paint.

“It’s really important that everything changes once in a while and that we move forward and try something else,” Tom adds. “People get in touch with us quite a lot asking if we’d like to write a song with them or collaborate on different projects, even to the extent of Luke Dash calling us up and asking if he can paint all over us while we do something.

“We just want to continue to make music, experiment and collaborate with other great artists.”