Panchiko was a British alternative rock band formed in 1997 in Nottingham and was active until 2001. The band comprised Owain ( vocals, guitar), Andy ( engineering, guitar), Shaun ( bass programming) and John ( drums). (Last names omitted due to members wishing to remain anonymous.) According to guitarist and engineer Andy, the name Panchiko came from an attempt at naming the band after the Japanese slot machines but they misspelled it and “it just stuck”.

History

Active Years (1997-2001)

Panchiko was formed in 1997, at the start the band mostly played covers.(finish this later)

Lost media (2016-2020)

The bands first EP “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L” first gained public notoriety when an anonymous user on 4chan purchased a heavily rotted and damaged copy of the album from a local charity shop and uploaded it to the website’s music board in 2016. The EP was mostly unknown until 2017 when a YouTube user uploaded it to the platform under a now deleted channel named “whimee” with 10,000 subscribers. After this upload the EP started to gain some following online. At that point in time the rotted CD was the only copy of the EP known to exist. The clean version of the album was considered to be lost media. Many fans of the album wished to hear the album without the disc rot present on the existing release, as such some of these fans created Discord server dedicated to searching for a clean copy of the album in 2019.

Remaster Release (2020)

In early 2020 a member of the now official Discord server discovered a postal code on the price tag for the original disc, and on January 21, 2020 another member of the server successfully made contact with Owain by locating people named Owain who lived near the postal code on Facebook. Andy and Shaun were contacted shortly after. None of the members contacted still owned a copy of D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L and began searching for any copies that friends or family may still own. On February 3rd, 2020 a friend of Andy was confirmed to own a copy of D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L, in addition Shaun, the bassist of Panchiko had a copy of another EP produced by the band titled “Kicking Cars. On February 16, 2020 D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L (Remastered) was released, which is a compilation of two of the bands EP’s “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L” and “Kicking Cars remastered by Andy.

Discography

EPs

D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L (2000)

Kicking Cars (2001)

Albums

D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L (Remastered) (2020)