Contract Killers
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A Belfast native, Cassidy started his music career as a teenager in the mid-80s, playing bass in the Manchester group B.F.G. before launching his own orch-pop outfit, Butterfly Child. He came to Chicago on a promotional stop in 1996 and recorded the band’s 1998 opus, Soft Explosives, here with locals like Tortoise’s John Herndon and Euphone’s Nick Macri. Not long after that he decided to settle here permanently. In 2001 Metro owner Joe Shanahan asked him to open a pair of shows for fellow Irishmen the Saw Doctors, which is how Cassidy met Aaron Miller, a Metro stagehand who played in the local group Marvelkind. They hit it off and began writing and recording together; early on Cassidy invited singer-guitarist Merritt Lear, a sometime Butterfly Child collaborator, to join the fold. (Cassidy and Lear soon began dating as well.)
That spring the band signed a deal with Arista for one album, with an option for more. They had tracked enough material for a record on their own, but the label enlisted veteran producer Stephen Hague (New Order, Erasure) and Radiohead engineer Graeme Stewart to help them finish it. The band spent six weeks that summer at Hague’s Woodstock studio, followed by a trip to Virginia Beach, where Serban Ghenea (Jay-Z, NER*D) mixed the album. The disc was slated for a mid-2004 release, and the band’s prospects looked bright: Reid was personally championing the group and pushing plans to market the Assassins in the UK before breaking them in the States. “He was listening to what we had, picking out possible singles, and talking about getting the Neptunes to remix some of the tracks–it was looking really good,” Cassidy says. “And then the whole thing went pear-shaped.”
Despite his experience in major-label limbo Cassidy is still hunting for a deal: the Assassins have two more records’ worth of material, and they plan to spend much of 2007 in the UK promoting the record and label shopping.
Blacks, Detholz!, For All the Sweet Children
