There's something disarming about the way Garoupa have dealt with the various triumphs and disasters of their short, but distinguished, musical career. Since forming in June 2003, the three-piece have played Wan Chai Live, opened the Rockit Festival and won a prize in the 2003 Tom Lee Sound- Base competition.
Yet calamity always seems to be just around the corner for the outfit that feature Alex Sommerville on vocals and guitar, Gary Hill on bass and Magnus Norberg on drums. Midway through their Rockit set, the band were searched onstage by the police - twice, says Sommerville. 'There were sniffer dogs under the drums and they wanted to see our guitarist's pass. He said, 'It's over there, but I am actually in the band.' It was very funny.'
During the SoundBase competition the group missed the finalists' photo and struggled on, despite a guitar breaking mid-song. Sommerville's stage act, which involved him taking a picture of the audience at the end of Take a Picture of Me, had perhaps predictably unsuccessful results. 'I lost the film,' he says.
Even their recent attempts at self-promotion have gone a little awry. In a press release to a free local magazine, Sommerville jokingly noted their nationalities in brackets after their names and put the number of games and the number of goals they supposedly had scored in football.
'It was a bit of a joke, but the magazine re-edited it to make it sound like we really were professional footballers,' he says.
To their credit, the group have a laidback, 'almost horizontal' approach to such mishaps. Perhaps it's because they're all from Lamma. 'It's a good place to play: you get a lot of genuine support and a lot of good heckling,' says Sommerville. Or maybe it's due to the lessons he learnt from his family. Unlike Norberg and Hill, when it comes to reading music Sommerville says he is terribly ignorant.