It’s hard to believe that the PYT story started almost three years ago, but it’s also hard to believe how much its grown. Pull Yourself Together came from humble beginnings: two some-time promoters with tendencies towards music journalism decided that they needed a new project. A trip to Glasgow including visits to the National Pop League and the Flying Duck sparked our imaginations, and said project began life as a monthly club night and bi-monthly fanzine with one primary aim: to shout about the music (much of it new, some of it less so) that we loved and to play records to people that we felt they’d enjoy. A bit of time and a lot of support from our host bar Common (still the home of PYT to this day), and things began to fly along.

We’ve always used the night and the zine to air the kind of music that we believe in, the bands that make a difference to our lives. The natural progression of this was to support these bands further by putting them on ourselves. Whilst the gig side of PYT is far more sporadic than the night (now fortnightly) and zine, it’s something that is very important to us. When we put our first gig on in November 2008 it was because we realised that sometimes the best way to ensure your favourite new bands play in your city is to organise it yourself – that way you can put together your ideal line-ups and share them with the kind of like-minded souls who may find they discover something new and exciting.

Since then we’ve done everything from pub gigs with The Loves and The Bobby McGees to putting Darren Hayman on in an observatory (complete with tour of the telescopes) to collaborative all-dayers featuring some of our favourite bands like Allo Darlin’ and Patterns. The last of these bands was the first we took on as a part of our fledgling record label, and PYT Records is now another part of the PYT Family. It’s definitely a family – not a business, certainly not an empire – and the label is based on exactly the same principles as everything else we do: support what you love, in any way you can. It’s probably the most rewarding thing you can do with your time.

Basically, Pull Yourself Together is all about supporting people who we think are great. Obviously the bands who we put on, whose records we release, and whose tracks we play when we DJ are amongst the main folks to benefit from what we do. Though it isn’t all about music. We commission new and exciting artists to design the artwork for the zine, and are always delighted to see what folks come up with given our brief of ‘something that you want to draw, that fits in with what we do.’ We’ve had everything from an animal marching band and autumnal leaves to various degrees of robots and dinosaurs. We’re also really lucky to work with fantastic designers in Rob and Graham from Teacake Design, who TOTALLY understand what we are trying to do; we recently sent Rob a really rough doodle with the hopes that it would come out looking like something from Monocle magazine, and he did just that!

So, that’s us. More importantly, these are the people who we think you should be listening to at the moment…

Patterns
The first signings to PYT Records, who have just got back to Manchester having stormed a quick mini-tour with Mammal Club. Over the past year they’ve evolved to become a wonderfully intense live experience.

Christopher Eatough
PYT artist number two, and couldn’t be more different. Christopher writes songs that sound like Ryan Adams, and his LP A Creak in the Cold is one of the most heartfelt things you will hear this year.

Allo Darlin
Elizabeth of Allo Darlin’ was one of the first artists we put on as PYT, and to see her music grow from one girl and her uke to all-conquering indiepop band has been a delight. 2010’s self-titled debut album was definitely our record of the year!

Moustache of Insanity
Another of the bands we hosted early on, Nik and Bill of Moustache of Insanity are – as you may expect – one hell of a lot of fun. Casio keyboards and songs about robots/cheese/imaginary dinner parties. Brilliant.

The Louche FC
This bunch from Salford are making some of the best new music we’ve heard in ages. Back Bedroom Casualty sounds like it could be lifted from early My Bloody Valentine demos.

You can find out more and see past issues of the PYT zine here