Intro
If you live in Utah (which there’s a good chance you do if you’re reading this,) one of the most fun, energetic, and entertaining local shows you can go to would be Kid Presentable. Kid Presentable is a Ska Band out of Springville, Utah, comprised of a few kids that all met in high school band. Drummer Miles, Saxophonists Tommy and Perg, Sam the keyboardist, Zach on bass, and Harrison the guitarist and lead vocalist. Davy, a friend of mine got to do a quick interview with them, which you can watch in full on our YouTube channel. Here we’ll just be sharing some snippets.
How Kid Presentable Came To Be
The immediate question on our mind’s was how the group became Kid Presentable. When asked this question, Miles had this to say about it. “So our junior year, we played at prom for Springville High School. I think it was 2022. So we auditioned, we played Somewhere Beyond the Sea by Bobby Darin. And then we were like, ‘Nobody wants to hear this.’ So they told us to play one song, and we chose two. ‘Toxic’ (Britney Spears) and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ (Chuck Berry). And that was when Sam joined the band, because he knew all the words to Toxic and none of us did.”
“I had a list of band names on my phone. Probably 100, or 150 band names. And so we just went through the list like we were shopping. We’re looking through all of them at the same prom. The DJ was like ‘what are you guys called?’ And so we just picked it. We said that’s the coolest one, Kid Presentable. We didn’t know it, but we just stuck with it because it’s a dope name.”
“It’s actually from The Simpsons episode ‘The Homer They Fall’. Homer Simpson becomes a boxer, classic hijinks ensue, and Moe Szyslak, the bartender in The Simpsons, he’s great, He’s going to teach him. Moe is like ‘I used to be a boxer. I was Kid Gorgeous, till I started losing some fights and then I was just Kid Presentable.'”
Kid Presentable’s Influences
One of the best ways to learn about a band is to learn about their influences. So we asked them exactly that question. When asked, they had attributed some of their biggest influences as two tone ska bands like The Specials, English Beat, Madness, and Selector. They also said they’d been picking up a bit of a garage rock style with bands like The Rolling Stones and The Zombies. They also specifically mentioned Australian Psych band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
Harrison: “I feel like there’s always been a King Gizzard Influence as well.”
Tommy: “Especially in the Guitar tones is where most of the influence goes. I feel like that’s where it shines the most in our music.”
Miles: “There’s a lot of times we’ll play and song and then go, “I feel like that part needs to sound a little more ‘King Gizzard’, how do we do that?”
After hearing about this influence, Davy had to ask them about one of the tracks on their album, The Ballad of Kid Moe.
The Ballad Of Kid Moe
The Ballad of Kid Moe is a track that also harkens back to The Simpsons bit that inspired their name, it’s the final name Moe went by in his boxing days. The Ballad of Kid Moe is a song that takes a more spaghetti western kinda style with narration from their band manager’s Texan grandmother to accomplish the southern drawl. Miles shared, “It’s our friend and manager of the band, Ian Jarvis’s grandma. She is from somewhere in Texas, and so she has this nice old lady Southern drawl and it was just perfect for us to put on this song. And so we like, go into her house and set everything up and we get all the takes of the audio and we leave. And afterwards she goes. ‘Now, Ian. What was that all about? What was that for??’”
Davy had to ask them if they took any influence on this track from King Gizzard’s album “Eyes Like The Sky“. They said “Oh yeah, it’s a total rip off.” Miles said specifically, “As we were recording that one, we kept like listening to it over and over again like ‘how did they do it and what can we do?’ And then we just copied it.”
The song is a story of a Sherriff arriving on the scene of a robbery. A traveling circus had passed through a small town where their prized white tiger had been stolen. After catching a description of the bandit, the Sherriff knew it was his old rival Kid Moe. Kid Moe had caused nothing but trouble since the Sherriff took on the role. If you wanna hear the rest of the story, you’ve gotta go listen to it for yourself.
More Kissing!
July 14th of 2023 was a big day for the band. It saw the release of their debut album, “More Kissing!”. In the interview, Miles had shared that the builk of the album was done pretty much in one week during their spring break. The album runs at about 25 minutes, containing 6 original songs and 2 covers. Those covers being “Rude Boys Don’t Cry!“, a cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry“, and “Chop Steady?“, a cover of System Of A Down’s “Chop Suey!“.
In the title track “More Kissing!” We get a track where the band sings about a love story about crushing on a big shot, “king of high school” member of the football team. There seems to be an unhealthy obsession, letting them cheat off their homework if they can smell their seat, begging them to get married, hoping they’ll get it on, or even just get noticed some day. This whole idea of sports, and more specifically, seeing “More Kissing!” in sports seems to be a joke permeating the whole album.
Davy: “So you know, More Kissing, right? and being one of, like, the biggest advocates for more kissing in Utah sports, I’d love to know what the proposed benefits of this social change are and how you guys plan to normalize that in the future.”
Perg: “You know we are just going to keep spreading that message.
Zach: “As much as we can we should humble our sports players by having everyone get mono. And then once everyone has it we will just be a little more immune.
Miles: “Starting with kid presentable. We are all going to get mono by just kissing on stage. I think as a group of 7 super unathletic dudes, the most we can do to promote kissing in sports is just to spread the word.”
Outro
To close out this post, we’re gonna talk about Kid Presentable’s future. Davy had asked them what they had planned and where they see themselves in a year. Perg had shared, “Hopefully have some more music recorded. We’ve been like half working on it. We’ve been just kinda messing around with new songs.” Miles added, “The first album we did was all like one week for our spring break. We just did the whole thing. This one, we’ve been recording bits and pieces here and there, so it’ll be a little slower moving, but yeah we’re working on writing and recording some more songs. Mostly just waiting for summer to start.”
In the more foreseeable future, this coming Thursday, March 21st, you can see them live at The Velour in Provo, Utah. They are performing all the time, so don’t be too upset if you miss this show. You can follow them on Instagram to stay up to date on any future projects or shows. I hope that I’ve convinced you to give them a try, they totally deserve it!
“Yeah yeah remember to listen to More Kissing on Spotify and Apple Music. And follow us on Instagram thats where we post about shows and stuff. Thats @_Kidpresentable.” – Miles
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