1) Amateurs were formed in 2003 in Scotland by Seth Chanas. Seth was always making up funny little songs on whatever musical instruments he could get his hands on and discovered a talent for quickly mastering them. By the age of 14 Seth found himself playing in most of the bands in his home town, at one point as many as five at once.

After playing in a succession of other peoples' rock bands, Seth found it hard to find musicians who shared his vision of a band where ethos and logos were as important as pathos and that properly rendered, missed birthdays, bad weather and bus passes could be as compelling to the listener as sex and suicide. So he made one up.

Amateurs thus came into existence as an imaginary band; Seth writing the songs and recording all the parts, occasionally roping in friends and flatmates for the odd contribution. Seth began selling these, Amateurs' first recordings, through local music shops.

Around this time Seth met Ina Hanisch. Ina, originally from Saxony and living in Amsterdam, was in Edinburgh visiting friends with whom Seth was flat sharing. Ina eventually moved to Edinburgh and Seth wasted no time in roping her in to the project. Followed by his brother Simon, school friend Chris Summerfield and disgruntled colleagues Damian Malone and Sarah Weatherston, Amateurs were finally realised and began playing gigs around Edinburgh and the North of England, building a reputation as a great live band with an eccentricity and lack of ego that distinguished them from others.

[from: www.letterboxrecords.com]

2) Amateurs are a three-piece band based in Brighton. Jonathan Baker plays drums. Tobias Hayes yelps and plays guitar. Alexander Petersen barks and plays guitar.

The following is quoted from HTTP://WWW.MYSPACE.COM/THREEAMATEURS
". . . so we all dug each other's stuff for quite a while there: Toby did St. Louis and Shield 'em (and currently plays as Shoes and Socks Off) while Al and Jonny did Hikikomori and The Robot Vs. (and still play together in Crowns on the Rats). Seemed a swell idea to get together and play. We got together. Got all trashy with the Tubescreamers and Octave Clangs, bang and woof, all sounding pretty slipshod but in that nice kinda way. Hey - but most songs kinda suck though, don't you think? All that rubbery omphaloskepsis over girls and so on. Hey - how about writing one dedicated to the 19th century Russian futurist that looked to the cosmos for solutions to immortality, foreseeing cloning, AI, and cryonics in the process? How about the American population geneticist that developed a formula for evolutionary altruism, then, after giving his money and possessions to the homeless Londoners he befriended, cut his own throat with a pair of nail scissors? Shit, when you start looking into it, there are a million fables out there . . . a million million fables . . ." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.