Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired anim...
Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.
This is Damon stripped bare, we must believe, as he embarks on a journey through his past on his solo debut, Everyday Robots (what happened to 2003’s Democrazy?). Though many of his songs have been laced with personal experiences, this is the first time Albarn has mined his past so candidly. Appropriately enough, he has chosen to debut Everyday Robots in venues that have significance to his own story. The previous night, Albarn played the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, just over a mile away from Goldsmith’s College where he met the other members of Blur. Tonight’s venue, the Great Hall at Queen Mary University, is not only close to Mile End Stadium, the site of Blur’s triumphant (if wet) gig during Britpop’s high summer, but, Albarn tells us from the stage, he was born in the nearby Royal London Hospital up the road at Whitechapel.
Arguably, such rich personal resonances add an additional level of detail to what is, for a performer as charismatic Albarn, a conspicuously low-key show. Albarn has always been good at songs that privilege a kind of minor chord melancholia, and tonight he weaves together songs from throughout his illustrious catalogue that share that sensibility. In many respects, Everyday Robots feels closest musically to The Good, The Bad And The Queen project: the sound is spacious, dubby and the tone wistful (Blur’s “Death Of A Party” is another reference). By assembling these songs from his different bands together in one set, it’s possible to discern recurring patterns and themes in Albarn’s best music. Many of these songs take place towards the end of the day – “twilight”, “sunset”, “Friday night”. The Everyday Robots themselves are “in the process of going home”, evening beckons. Elsewhere, weather can be a concern – “there’s a low in the high forties” – while often water is involved: “Up the Thames to find a taxi rank” or “A ship across the Estuary”, “Oily Water”, “Hollow Ponds” and “Heavy Seas”. It is appropriate, perhaps, that the actual weather conditions outside Queen Mary University are suitably grey and drizzly.
To help bring all this to life are Albarn’s newest musical cohorts, the Heavy Seas, who comprise four other members, and a string quartet. Albarn is keen to make clear that this is a group effort, rather than Albarn plus a backing band; an endearingly self-effacing sentiment, but it’s still Albarn’s name alone on the ticket rather. That said, while these musicians may not carry the impressive musical weight of Blur, the ex-Clash or Afrobeat legends he worked with in The Good, The Bad And The Queen or many of the storied guests on Gorillaz, they are nonetheless more than capable of carrying the night. As sharply dressed as Albarn, they are relaxed, sympathetic players. It is possible to lose yourself watching bassist Seye, string-bean thin in his faintly oversized suit and hat, as he sways, crouches, or bounces round the stage. But then, you’d miss watching the equally animated drummer Pauli Stanley-McKenzie, who plays much of the set standing up, leaning over his kit, and swaying from side to side in time to the rhythm. Both Stanley-McKenzie and guitarist Jeff Wootton featured in Gorillaz, while keyboard player Mike Smith is a long standing live collaborator of Albarn’s in all his various guises. Albarn presides over the proceedings, alternating between standing at the microphone or sitting at the piano; occasionally, he straps on a guitar.
Although the set is subdued, that’s not to say it’s not without fiery moments. “Kids With Guns” builds into a messy, noisy climax, “Kingdom Of Doom” morphs into what sounds like a ferocious take on “London Calling”, while “Beetlebum” b-side “All Your Life” rekindles the demented hurdy gurdy spirit of Blur at their most forceful and the appearance of Kano for a swaggering version of “Clint Eastwood” raises the temperature considerably. Even “Mr Tembo” – a song I must confess I can’t bear on the album – works well live, augmented by a choir, and successfully recast as a clapalong for the audience.
There are some unscripted digressions, too. Albarn (and Smith) have a recurring conversation with a friend in the audience called Nelson (who might be Nelson de Freitas, who provided the ‘spoken voice’ for 2D). Elsewhere, when Albarn starts talking about the involvement of Brian Eno on Everyday Robots’ track “You And Me”, the audience pick up a football-style chant of “Eno! Eno!” which Albarn ends up joining in. But, perhaps inevitably, the night’s stand out moments are simple, mesmerising versions of “Out Of Time” and “This Is A Low” performed by Albarn at the piano. Having seen Albarn live for well over 20 years now in his various guises, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching him present songs from all aspects of his career together in one set. Let’s hope there’s more to come like this.
We reach back into the Uncut archives to find Rhys and guitarist Huw Bunford taking us through the creation of each of the Super Furry Animals’ excellent albums (from Take 131). “We were bragging about how we were going to make loads of albums in interviews back in 1996,” recalls Gruff… Inte...
We reach back into the Uncut archives to find Rhys and guitarist Huw Bunford taking us through the creation of each of the Super Furry Animals’ excellent albums (from Take 131). “We were bragging about how we were going to make loads of albums in interviews back in 1996,” recalls Gruff… Interview: Piers Martin
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FUZZY LOGIC (Creation, 1996) The band’s Creation debut arrived with Britpop in full swing, to their amusement. Notable, too, for launching its cover star, drug-dealing raconteur Howard Marks, on the student circuit.
Gruff Rhys (guitar, vocals): We’d signed a deal and we were sort of blagging it a bit. We could ask Creation for a tank and they’d say, “Yeah, no problem.” We’d heard about Rockfield Studios and we wanted to record there because they had jacuzzis and you got three meals a day, all the wrong reasons for going to a studio. So we went there for three weeks and had Jacuzzis every day and ate loads of food and we were usually too full to be arsed to record anything. We were reacting to Britpop in a way – we just hated the idea of making parochial music. We felt Britpop represented a conservative, backwards movement in music. But then when we started recording Fuzzy Logic, we were in this old ’70s studio making this ’70s rock album! We got in touch with Howard Marks because we did a song about him. He was back in Wales after being in jail and he came to see us in Pontypridd. He turned up wearing leather trousers and a cloak with a big entourage. We were very ambitious, you know, and we thought we could make a Never Mind The Bollocks and have lots of jacuzzis and hang out with our version of Ronnie Biggs.
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RADIATOR (Creation, 1997) Released just four days after labelmates Oasis’ colossal Be Here Now, the Furries found their feet on their warmer, poppier, sadly overlooked second.
Rhys: After making a record with jacuzzis, we recorded this in Gorwel [Owen, long-standing SFA producer]’s house near Anglesey, to be able to make contemporary sounds again, and use computers. So we went to his house for three months solid and the Hale-Bopp comet was in flight, I remember. We’d been touring solid for a year and had completely wrecked any personal relationships, in tatters, and his house is quite small. So we were in this bungalow at the end of an RAF runway and the shed had been destroyed a few years earlier when a US jet hadn’t taken off properly. Apparently a ghost of a US airman was in the house. So there was no distractions. We asked if we could go back to Cardiff for the weekend because Beck was playing and Gorwel’s going, “No way! What are you thinking? We’re trying to make an album!” It was so intense. But he had Atari computers, and banks of old vintage synths, so musically it was much more adventurous. And we made much more interesting music.
Huw ‘Bunf’ Bunford (guitar, vocals): Gorwel’s sister cooked for us and she put different styles of carrots out every night. They lived next to the biggest carrot field in Anglesey.
GUERRILLA (Creation, 1999) Blossoming into unusually fine songwriters, they took risks on this satisfying, experimental third.
Rhys: Guerrilla’s one of our most ambitious albums and we hired all sorts of instruments and recorded a lot more electronic stuff.
Bunford: Yeah, I think we worked out how to use the sampler with this album. We’d bought it with the advance and hadn’t had a chance to take it out of its box.
Rhys: We were writing conceptual pop songs like “Wherever I Lay My Phone That’s My Home” around the ringtone of a phone. And the rhythm section, we were sort of jamming in the studio and [bassist] Guto tripped over the lead and landed over a table and Bunf hit a guitar note and that became the rhythm track. I think if any of our records could’ve sold a lot, this is the one. I don’t think any of the others have been proper pop albums, but I think Guerrilla could have been. “Northern Lites” could have been bigger but it didn’t have a video. The guy who was supposed to do it got offered a Red Stripe commercial in Jamaica. We met him later and were like, “We understand, we’d have done the same.” Creation was coming to an end, just as Nostradamus predicted, so they weren’t bothered.
Bunford: They said, “We could make this a huge hit, but I don’t think you really want that to happen.”
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MWNG (Placid Casual, 2000) The Furries’ Welsh language album, released on their own label. Reached No 11 in the charts.
Rhys: We recorded that extremely quickly in a session over a weekend in Cardiff. Then we went to Gorwel’s house for a week to do the other songs and mix it. Probably took a couple of weeks. Radiator and Guerrilla took ages, months to make. The recording process had become a bit frustrating and we thought, ‘Oh let’s make a really immediate record.’ The batch of songs at the time happened to be Welsh language. It was going to come out on Creation, who were putting out their last records at the time, and we bought it back from Creation for six grand or something. In terms of contracts and stuff, we were in limbo and we didn’t want to get some label who didn’t understand us pushing a Welsh language album, and putting flags on it or something, it could’ve been horrific. So we did it ourselves. It was coming off the back of some records that had sold well and Creation had spent a fortune on advertising and Mwng came in that slipstream. We had a tiny marketing budget and we got to do our own adverts. We got all the worst quotes from the reviews – it was quite well received, but we found some negative quotes – and put them on two adverts. The Jewish Chronicle called it “career suicide”. I think it’s a really pure record.
RINGS AROUND THE WORLD (Epic, 2001) Not so much an album as a wildly ambitious, mind-expanding multi-platform investigation into the possibilities of digital entertainment – and the band’s most coherent musical statement to boot.
Rhys: We started recording Rings Around The World without a label because Creation had finished and we’d done Mwng, so we started recording another record. We’d started playing in surround sound and did a concert in Cardiff in 5.1 broadcasting for the BBC. DVD technology was coming on at the time, so we thought we’d make an album on DVD in surround sound with films and remixes. Sony came and said they’d take the project. Now we can make DVDs and surround sound things for nothing, but at the time we had to go to an editing suite to mix the record. We spent seven months in London in the most expensive studios in the world. We went to Woodstock, to Bearsville, where The Band used to record.
Bunford: Sony were just leaking money.
Rhys: But we were actually doing stuff with the money. It was a very ambitious project and we were on the right label to spend those amounts of money. They were taking the risk. We weren’t a secure commercial proposition, so it’s a longshot for them. You get people with nightmare stories with major labels but we got it really easy and they were very understanding. We were trying to make a blockbuster album that was going to be like the Eagles, but we left the tracks that sounded like the Eagles off. We had big debates about the line-up, but it ended up being a 50-minute album; it was going to be an hour-and-a-half. I was into the excess of it, that was the whole point. We had Chris Shaw, who’s produced records for Bob Dylan and makes a huge sound, engineering the record. We were trying to make a kind of utopian pop music that had pretensions of being progressive and exciting. I think Guerrilla maybe represents that kind of idea best because it’s more concise than Rings Around The World, but the process was amazing. The making of it was epic and the music represents that, with really over-the-top arrangements. By that point in Britain people knew about us already and were maybe getting bored. We were releasing a weird plastic soul record at the height of a garage rock revival. And then XL put Rings Around The World out in America and that became our breakthrough album there. We were doing sell-out shows coast to coast. People threw eggs at us in Baltimore because of the contents of the DVD, really crazy. And with Rings… we were reborn in Europe. We toured properly and got on easy listening channels in Sweden. We’d always gone down well in Japan. “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck” was on heavy rotation in Australia – it had loads of swearing.
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PHANTOM POWER (Epic, 2003) After the success of Rings… another multimedia opus. A case, perhaps, of too much information…
Rhys: Gorwel came back. He’s like, “Go on, one last job.” We recorded the warm-sounding live songs like “Hello Sunshine” with Gorwel. We were trying to tone down the big glossy production of the last record. We worked with our dear friend from Scotland, Tony Doogan, who’s done records with Mogwai and Belle And Sebastian, and he bought an element of danger to the recordings. Loads of guns. We were in Mono Valley studio near Monmouth and he arranged for this guy to come down and bring an Uzi and an AK-47 because we were recording a lot of sound effects. We had a kind of mock battle in the garden and I think he got arrested on the last day. We invented a new game called fire golf where we’d hollow out a golf ball and fill it with inflammable material and set it alight and shoot golf balls at each other…
The idea behind the DVDs was they’d be used like platform games where you’d go into the album and with every song there’s different options for the mixes. On Phantom Power there’s two sets of films for every song and everything was in 5.1 cinematic sound which is far superior as an experience to stereo. But no one gave a shit because people just want to rock’n’roll!
LOVE KRAFT (Epic, 2005) Gorging at Sony’s heaving table, the Furries’ sumptuous seventh found them blissfully adrift from their audience after the greatest hits effort, Songbook: The Singles Vol.1.
Rhys: Love Kraft is the most beautiful record we’ve made. Where some records have had potential to have a cultural impact, like Mwng or Guerrilla, which are of their time in a positive way, I think Love Kraft isn’t. I think it’s a beautiful record, really orchestral and fairly timeless, but it certainly doesn’t fit in any cultural scheme. Sony were dishing out quite a lot of money for us to make really mental records but we were actually spending it on real things; it was amazing in a way. We recorded it in Spain and mixed it in Brazil because our mixer, Mario Caldato Jr [producer for Beastie Boys and Beck, among others], who lives in Brazil, wanted to be close to his family. We had a really good experience with Mario when he mixed Phantom Power and asked him to do the next record and he insisted on doing it in a warm climate because last time he’d come to London in February and the rain. I think we took him to Cardiff for a night out to see Wales play Bosnia in a friendly. He was there in his woolly hat, freezing. Rio was amazing. We were going out to funk bars and really dodgy hip-hop clubs. I bought a hell of a lot of records. Loads of random vinyl. I think they had a big boom in the ’80s of international music in South America where they embraced Phil Collins and The Alarm. There are just mountains of weird ’80s rock records. They stopped making vinyl in 1993.
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HEY VENUS! (Rough Trade, 2007) SFA play it straight on their debut for new label Rough Trade, breezing through 11 soulful pop numbers in 37 minutes. Safe, but utterly sound.
Rhys: Rough Trade sort of poached us. With them it’s the most interactive interest we’ve had from a label since Dick Green at Creation. Bit of a shock having people listen to your demos. We left a song off the album and they said, “Why are you not keeping the single on?” Hey Venus! is a straight-up collection of songs. At the same time we recorded 30 improvised songs, and also a lot of harder, groovier music. We were going for a recording of a band playing live, more or less. I suppose we were trying to make some kind of pop record and kept the other stuff for the next album. We have got another batch of songs and I see Hey Venus! as part of a song cycle. In that context it makes sense. With “The Gift That Keeps Giving” we tried to make an AOR Christmas single. Last December we were in Japan, and they celebrate Christmas as a commerical holiday with all the decorations. Over there it’s a love holiday, like Valentine’s Day. And there in one store they had Santa on a cross hanging from the wall. Perfect. So the Christmas single was just an excuse to have Santa on a cross on the cover.
Roddy Frame talks about his new album, Seven Dials, and why he takes so long to make albums, in the new Uncut, dated June 2014, and out now.
The Aztec Camera man’s forthcoming Seven Dials album is the follow-up to 2006’s Western Skies, and only his fourth album as a solo artist.
“People ar...
Roddy Frame talks about his new album, Seven Dials, and why he takes so long to make albums, in the new Uncut, dated June 2014, and out now.
The Aztec Camera man’s forthcoming Seven Dials album is the follow-up to 2006’s Western Skies, and only his fourth album as a solo artist.
“People are asking why I’ve got gaps in my CV, but I didn’t think making music was ever about working to a schedule,” explain Frame. “Frankly, with some of the people I love, I wish they’d take more time and not make so many records.”
Wilko Johnson is recovering from a nine hour operation on Wednesday, April 30, in which doctors successfully removed a pancreatic tumour.
In a statement Johnson's manager, Lisa Climie, said "The head of the medical team treating Wilko said that they were happy with his condition.
"Wilko will stay ...
Wilko Johnson is recovering from a nine hour operation on Wednesday, April 30, in which doctors successfully removed a pancreatic tumour.
In a statement Johnson’s manager, Lisa Climie, said “The head of the medical team treating Wilko said that they were happy with his condition.
“Wilko will stay under very close observation for the next few days.
“Although cautiously optimistic the team have to stress that it is very early days yet.
“The family thank everyone for their good wishes and ask for some privacy at this time so they can support Wilko with his recovery in peace.”
According to BBC News, Johnson has had the “football-size tumour” removed as well as his pancreas, spleen and part of his stomach.
Speaking to GQ before the operation, Johnson said, “A friend of mine – who is both a photographer and a cancer doctor – became curious as to why I wasn’t dead. And why I wasn’t even sick.”
Johnson’s tumour was found to be a rare type called a neuroendocrine tumour, which tends to grow much more slowly than other types.
Kim Deal appeared at Chicago's Reckless Records on April 19 as part of Record Store Day.
During a brief acoustic set, Deal played an acoustic version of Pixies' song, “Gigantic", which Stereogum claim is her first performance of the song since leaving the band.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSP...
Kim Deal appeared at Chicago’s Reckless Records on April 19 as part of Record Store Day.
During a brief acoustic set, Deal played an acoustic version of Pixies’ song, “Gigantic“, which Stereogum claim is her first performance of the song since leaving the band.
Kim was joined by her sister Kelley on electric guitar for a version of the Breeders’ “Cannonball”.
Bruce Springsteen performed live for the first time a song he first wrote 40 years ago in Florida on Tuesday [April 29].
Springsteen and the E Street Band dusted down "Linda Let Me Be the One", a rarity from the Born To Run sessions, during their show at the BB&T Center, Sunrise, Florida.
The ...
Bruce Springsteen performed live for the first time a song he first wrote 40 years ago in Florida on Tuesday [April 29].
Springsteen and the E Street Band dusted down “Linda Let Me Be the One“, a rarity from the Born To Run sessions, during their show at the BB&T Center, Sunrise, Florida.
The track was originally recorded in June, 1975 at the Record Plant in New York during the Born To Run sessions. It subsequently appeared on Tracks, a four-disc box set released by Springsteen in 1998.
The setlist for the show also included an opening cover of The Clash’s “Clampdown” as well a version of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom”, while “Hearts Of Stone” received only its fourth ever live performance.
Greetings from Bergen County, New Jersey… A ravishing third album from jangling romantics...
Back in the 1980s, there were plenty of attempts, not all of them complimentary, to name the indie-pop scene that emerged out of post-punk. One tag that stuck around for a while was “shambling”, crystallising the assumption that this was music made by wimps, for wimps; privileging a kind of low-fidelity incompetence to define itself against mainstream slickness. Real Estate, a Brooklyn quintet whose roots lie in the suburban sprawl of New Jersey, have spent the past few years making records that explicitly recall this era.
As their third album begins with a typically insouciant jangle, though, Martin Courtney’s band put the music they evidently love in a different context. Like The Feelies, there’s a rhythmic thrust that underpins even the most languorous passages. And like Felt, the serpentine paths taken by Courtney and fellow guitarist Matt Mondanile are rich, musicianly and far from amateurish.
The musical brilliance of Felt is often overlooked in favour of the aesthetic vision and marked eccentricities of their singer, Lawrence. Courtney, though, recalls one of Felt’s terrific guitarists, Maurice Deebank, in the way he adds filigree detailing to songs, while still sounding more nonchalant than florid. On “Primitive”, for instance, he anchors the song with something that’s closer to a melodic guitar solo than a riff, recalling Deebank’s mazy work on “The Day The Rain Came Down”.
Atlas is dominated by a saturated prettiness that seems at once virtuoso and effortless. The bright immediacy of “It’s Real”, from 2011’s Days, has been toned down, giving more room to Real Estate’s autumnal shades. If Days and 2009’s eponymous debut described a perpetual smalltown summer evening, plucked from memories of late adolescence, Atlas is fractionally more wistful. The cover art references a mural by the Polish artist Stefan Knapp, that adorned the side of Alexander’s department store in Paramus, New Jersey, near the childhood homes of Courtney, Mondanile and bassist Alex Bleeker.
Knapp’s mural – 200 feet long, 50 feet deep, once presumed to be the world’s biggest – is now in storage, the department store long demolished. The ten songs, correspondingly, are peppered with images of change, distance, separation and attendant anxieties. “Past Lives”, hitching Real Estate’s beatific melancholy to the faintest echo of bossa nova, is the key text here, beginning as it does, “I cannot come back to this neighbourhood/Without feeling my own age.” If it was once a place where the urban and rural merged into one another, now his old town has changed so that Courtney “can’t see the sky” any more.
The tune, though, is one of the band’s loveliest and most subtle, and it expedites this suburban romantic’s gently profound conclusion; that even in unpromising landscapes, beauty can still be located. “This is not the same place I used to know,” he notes, in a beguiling, fey tone that recalls Ian Brown at his most satisfyingly undemonstrative, “But it still has that same old sound/And even the lights on this yellow row/Are the same as when this was our town.”
Similarly, Real Estate’s music seems to be incrementally refined, never radically overhauled. A well-equipped studio – Wilco’s loft, in Chicago – doesn’t overwhelm their artisanal charm. A new keyboardist (Matt Kallman, formerly of Girls) provides a little extra depth, and comes to the fore on the instrumental “April’s Song” (a bobbling cousin of The New Seekers’ “I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing”, weirdly). In NME recently, Courtney described the discreetly swinging “The Bend” as having “this big bombastic classic rock outro that makes us feel like Black Sabbath.” Listeners, one suspects, are unlikely to interpret the mellow drop in pace as anything quite so disruptive (ten seconds of mildly distorted guitar at the end of “Crime” come as a bigger surprise).
Real Estate might have moved to the city and left New Jersey behind, but they remain reassuringly embedded in their old aesthetic realm. For all the talk of change, Atlas mostly feels as if time and life have been suspended, as the ten songs elide into a gorgeous 38-minute blur. What’s happened? Nothing much, ultimately, but it’s the exquisite attention lavished on the little things that matter. And so, at the very end, Atlas reveals its essence: “I have no idea,” Courtney observes, calmly, “where the day's been.”
John Mulvey
Q&A
Martin Courtney
The lyrics of “Past Lives” in general seem especially significant.
That song sticks out as being the most backward-looking song on the album, but it's written from a perspective rooted in the present. I wrote the music for that song in my parents' attic, where I had a little studio set up for a while in the fall of 2012, before we got our own practice space in Brooklyn. The lyrics are inspired by sitting in the attic of the house I grew up in, recording demos in the middle of the afternoon, a month after I got married. Just feeling weird and old, I guess.
Can you tell us about the Stefan Knapp mural featured on the cover?
I used to see it all the time from the back seat of my parents’ car. The store itself was closed down and vacant for the entire time its existence overlapped with my own. The landscaping surrounding the building was all overgrown, and the parking lot crumbling, but this massive, colourful abstract painting remained.
Greetings from Bergen County, New Jersey… A ravishing third album from jangling romantics…
Back in the 1980s, there were plenty of attempts, not all of them complimentary, to name the indie-pop scene that emerged out of post-punk. One tag that stuck around for a while was “shambling”, crystallising the assumption that this was music made by wimps, for wimps; privileging a kind of low-fidelity incompetence to define itself against mainstream slickness. Real Estate, a Brooklyn quintet whose roots lie in the suburban sprawl of New Jersey, have spent the past few years making records that explicitly recall this era.
As their third album begins with a typically insouciant jangle, though, Martin Courtney’s band put the music they evidently love in a different context. Like The Feelies, there’s a rhythmic thrust that underpins even the most languorous passages. And like Felt, the serpentine paths taken by Courtney and fellow guitarist Matt Mondanile are rich, musicianly and far from amateurish.
The musical brilliance of Felt is often overlooked in favour of the aesthetic vision and marked eccentricities of their singer, Lawrence. Courtney, though, recalls one of Felt’s terrific guitarists, Maurice Deebank, in the way he adds filigree detailing to songs, while still sounding more nonchalant than florid. On “Primitive”, for instance, he anchors the song with something that’s closer to a melodic guitar solo than a riff, recalling Deebank’s mazy work on “The Day The Rain Came Down”.
Atlas is dominated by a saturated prettiness that seems at once virtuoso and effortless. The bright immediacy of “It’s Real”, from 2011’s Days, has been toned down, giving more room to Real Estate’s autumnal shades. If Days and 2009’s eponymous debut described a perpetual smalltown summer evening, plucked from memories of late adolescence, Atlas is fractionally more wistful. The cover art references a mural by the Polish artist Stefan Knapp, that adorned the side of Alexander’s department store in Paramus, New Jersey, near the childhood homes of Courtney, Mondanile and bassist Alex Bleeker.
Knapp’s mural – 200 feet long, 50 feet deep, once presumed to be the world’s biggest – is now in storage, the department store long demolished. The ten songs, correspondingly, are peppered with images of change, distance, separation and attendant anxieties. “Past Lives”, hitching Real Estate’s beatific melancholy to the faintest echo of bossa nova, is the key text here, beginning as it does, “I cannot come back to this neighbourhood/Without feeling my own age.” If it was once a place where the urban and rural merged into one another, now his old town has changed so that Courtney “can’t see the sky” any more.
The tune, though, is one of the band’s loveliest and most subtle, and it expedites this suburban romantic’s gently profound conclusion; that even in unpromising landscapes, beauty can still be located. “This is not the same place I used to know,” he notes, in a beguiling, fey tone that recalls Ian Brown at his most satisfyingly undemonstrative, “But it still has that same old sound/And even the lights on this yellow row/Are the same as when this was our town.”
Similarly, Real Estate’s music seems to be incrementally refined, never radically overhauled. A well-equipped studio – Wilco’s loft, in Chicago – doesn’t overwhelm their artisanal charm. A new keyboardist (Matt Kallman, formerly of Girls) provides a little extra depth, and comes to the fore on the instrumental “April’s Song” (a bobbling cousin of The New Seekers’ “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing”, weirdly). In NME recently, Courtney described the discreetly swinging “The Bend” as having “this big bombastic classic rock outro that makes us feel like Black Sabbath.” Listeners, one suspects, are unlikely to interpret the mellow drop in pace as anything quite so disruptive (ten seconds of mildly distorted guitar at the end of “Crime” come as a bigger surprise).
Real Estate might have moved to the city and left New Jersey behind, but they remain reassuringly embedded in their old aesthetic realm. For all the talk of change, Atlas mostly feels as if time and life have been suspended, as the ten songs elide into a gorgeous 38-minute blur. What’s happened? Nothing much, ultimately, but it’s the exquisite attention lavished on the little things that matter. And so, at the very end, Atlas reveals its essence: “I have no idea,” Courtney observes, calmly, “where the day’s been.”
John Mulvey
Q&A
Martin Courtney
The lyrics of “Past Lives” in general seem especially significant.
That song sticks out as being the most backward-looking song on the album, but it’s written from a perspective rooted in the present. I wrote the music for that song in my parents’ attic, where I had a little studio set up for a while in the fall of 2012, before we got our own practice space in Brooklyn. The lyrics are inspired by sitting in the attic of the house I grew up in, recording demos in the middle of the afternoon, a month after I got married. Just feeling weird and old, I guess.
Can you tell us about the Stefan Knapp mural featured on the cover?
I used to see it all the time from the back seat of my parents’ car. The store itself was closed down and vacant for the entire time its existence overlapped with my own. The landscaping surrounding the building was all overgrown, and the parking lot crumbling, but this massive, colourful abstract painting remained.
The handwritten lyrics to Bob Dylan's song "Like A Rolling Stone" are to to be sold at auction in New York in June.
BBC News cite a representative of Sotheby's, who describes the manuscript as "the most significant piece of rock material to appear at auction."
Sotheby’s is planning to offer six pages of working manuscripts of “Like A Rolling Stone” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” as part of its 'History of Rock and Roll From Presley to Punk' auction on June 24.
Dylan wrote "Like A Rolling Stone" in pencil on four small sheets of hotel stationery in 1965. The manuscript features corrections, revisions and additions, as well as notes relating to the Dylan's life at the time.
The handwritten lyrics also reveal Dylan experimented with alternative rhyming schemes for the "How does it feel ..." chorus.
Alongside, Sotheby's will be auctioning the lyrics to “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, which are written on pages ripped from a spiral notebook, and is in virtually completed form.
Sotheby's say bids could reach £1m.
The handwritten lyrics to Bob Dylan‘s song “Like A Rolling Stone” are to to be sold at auction in New York in June.
BBC News cite a representative of Sotheby’s, who describes the manuscript as “the most significant piece of rock material to appear at auction.”
Sotheby’s is planning to offer six pages of working manuscripts of “Like A Rolling Stone” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” as part of its ‘History of Rock and Roll From Presley to Punk’ auction on June 24.
Dylan wrote “Like A Rolling Stone” in pencil on four small sheets of hotel stationery in 1965. The manuscript features corrections, revisions and additions, as well as notes relating to the Dylan’s life at the time.
The handwritten lyrics also reveal Dylan experimented with alternative rhyming schemes for the “How does it feel …” chorus.
Alongside, Sotheby’s will be auctioning the lyrics to “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, which are written on pages ripped from a spiral notebook, and is in virtually completed form.
Eric Clapton has announced the release of a tribute album to mark the first anniversary of the death of JJ Cale.
The album, called Eric Clapton & Friends: The Breeze, An Appreciation Of JJ Cale, will be released on July 29 and will feature reinterpretations of 16 Cale tracks, performed by Clapt...
Eric Clapton has announced the release of a tribute album to mark the first anniversary of the death of JJ Cale.
The album, called Eric Clapton & Friends: The Breeze, An Appreciation Of JJ Cale, will be released on July 29 and will feature reinterpretations of 16 Cale tracks, performed by Clapton and Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, Mark Knopfler and more.
Cale died of a heart attack in San Diego last July, at the age of 74.
The tracklisting for Eric Clapton & Friends: The Breeze, An Appreciation of JJ Cale is:
Call Me The Breeze (Eric Clapton)
Rock And Roll Records (Eric Clapton & Tom Petty)
Someday (Mark Knopfler)
Lies (John Mayer & Eric Clapton)
Sensitive Kind (Don White)
Cajun Moon (Eric Clapton)
Magnolia (John Mayer)
I Got The Same Old Blues (Tom Petty & Eric Clapton)
Songbird (Willie Nelson & Eric Clapton)
Since You Said Goodbye (Eric Clapton)
I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me) (Don White & Eric Clapton)
The Old Man And Me (Tom Petty)
Train To Nowhere (Mark Knopfler, Don White & Eric Clapton)
Wilko Johnson has cancelled all of his future live shows and public engagements to undergo a medical procedure.
The guitarist, who has terminal cancer, has, according to a spokesperson been forced to pull all future appearances "reluctantly" to go into hospital. He was scheduled to make several fe...
Wilko Johnson has cancelled all of his future live shows and public engagements to undergo a medical procedure.
The guitarist, who has terminal cancer, has, according to a spokesperson been forced to pull all future appearances “reluctantly” to go into hospital. He was scheduled to make several festival appearances this summer, including Glastonbury.
A statement from his spokesman said that the guitarist has “sought further advice about his pancreatic cancer and as a result has undergone a medical procedure that will see him out of action for the foreseeable future”.
He added: “Doctors are hopeful that following the surgery the prognosis for Wilko will be positive.”
Last January, Johnson announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas and was not seeking any treatment. He subsequently undertook a farewell tour of the UK, saying that since his diagnosis he felt “vividly alive”.
Most recently, he recorded an album with Roger Daltrey titled Going Back Home.
Prince has announced details of a regional UK arena tour.
Prince staged a number of impromptu live appearances in the UK throughout February 2014, appearing at venues across London and performing two dates in Manchester.
He has now announced four additional UK dates, called "Hit And Run Pt II", wh...
Prince has announced details of a regional UK arena tour.
Prince staged a number of impromptu live appearances in the UK throughout February 2014, appearing at venues across London and performing two dates in Manchester.
He has now announced four additional UK dates, called “Hit And Run Pt II”, which will take place at arenas around the UK.
Prince and his 3RDEYEGIRL band will play:
Thursday 15th May 2014: Birmingham LG Arena
Friday 16th May 2014: Manchester Phones 4u Arena
Thursday 22nd May 2014: Glasgow The SSE Hydro
Friday 23rd May 2014: Leeds First Direct Arena
Tickets go on sale Friday 2nd May at Midday and are priced from £65 plus booking fees.
Tickets will be available from www.gigsandtours.com & www.ticketmaster.co.uk. The numbers for a 24 hour credit card hotlines are: 0844 811 0051 and 0844 826 2826.
Sharon Van Etten is currently streaming new song "Every Time The Sun Comes Up".
Click below to listen to the track, which features on Van Etten's new album, Are We There, set for release on May 26.
She will support the release of the follow-up to 2012's Tramp with a one-off UK show at London's KOK...
Sharon Van Etten is currently streaming new song “Every Time The Sun Comes Up”.
Click below to listen to the track, which features on Van Etten’s new album, Are We There, set for release on May 26.
She will support the release of the follow-up to 2012’s Tramp with a one-off UK show at London’s KOKO on June 5, and will play Green Man Festival in August. Scroll down for the Are We There tracklisting.
Michael Eavis has dropped some hints about the mysterious third Glastonbury headliner.
Arcade Fire and Kasabian have been confirmed for the Friday and Sunday at the festival respectively but the Saturday night headliner has not yet been revealed. The announcement is expected to arrive imminently, w...
Michael Eavis has dropped some hints about the mysterious third Glastonbury headliner.
Arcade Fire and Kasabian have been confirmed for the Friday and Sunday at the festival respectively but the Saturday night headliner has not yet been revealed. The announcement is expected to arrive imminently, with Eavis saying the full line-up will be issued at the beginning of May.
Speaking to Bristol Post, Michael Eavis revealed that it will be “one of the biggest-selling bands in the world at the moment” and reflected daughter Emily Eavis’ comments in confirming that the mystery act will be making its first appearance at Worthy Farm.
Eavis said: “We are expecting to announce the full line-up at the beginning of May and everything is now in place. We are more than happy with the calibre of the acts and the headliner on Saturday will be one of the biggest-selling bands in the world at the moment.”
On the subject of Oasis playing, which became a snowballing rumour after Liam Gallagher tweeted the letters O A S I S and a further tweet which read “OASIS LG” last Thursday night (April 24), Eavis said: “The Oasis thing had nothing to do with us, we hadn’t even considered asking them. They’ve played at the festival three or four times and they’re a great band. They were not that well known the first time they played here but they were a great band even then. I’m not sure that Noel is ready to go back on the road with Oasis because he has his own band at the moment. I think if it were to happen and they did come back to Glastonbury it would probably be in four or five years time – I can’t see it happening before then.”
The last 10,000 tickets for Glastonbury 2014 were sold in 12 minutes in the resale on Sunday (April 27)
Musicians including David Gilmour, Radiohead's Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway, Elbow's Guy Garvey, Johnny Marr and Billy Bragg have thrown their weight behind a campaign to overturn the ban on steel-strung guitars in British prisons.
In a letter published in The Guardian, the 12 musicians, whose number also include Richard Hawley, Speech Debelle and Sam Duckworth, argue that "music has an important role to play in engaging prisoners in the process of rehabilitation" and that this is being undermined if inmates are not allowed to practice.
They also suggest that recent changes in the treatment of prisoners, which came into force in November and also includes restrictions on prisoners receiving books as well as steel-strung musical instruments, could be behind a recent increase in prisoners taking their own lives.
Alhough nylon-strung guitars are still available to prisoners who earn the privilege, Billy Bragg, who runs the Jail Guitar Doors initiative – which provides instruments to prisoners to help rehabilitation – says that as most guitars in prisons are steel-strung, the instrument is effectively being removed entirely from British institutions.
"There's never been, to my knowledge, an incident in a British prison where someone has been attacked with a steel string guitar," he says. "It makes no sense – where's the logic behind this? Where's the thinking behind this?
"Almost all the guitars currently in British prisons tend to be steel strung, so this effectively means they've all been removed as it's just not possible to re-string them all with nylon. They aren't designed for that."
Bragg added: "These guitars allows the prisoners to develop their skills and do peer to peer work which has been shown as really important as the basis for rehabilitation. A number of prison staff have told me that that aspect of them sitting down together, playing music and learning, has had a noticeable impact on individual prisoners and the atmosphere as a whole."
A Prison Service spokesperson told The Guardian: "As a result of this government's reforms, prisoners who do not engage with their own rehabilitation now have far fewer privileges."
Musicians including David Gilmour, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Johnny Marr and Billy Bragg have thrown their weight behind a campaign to overturn the ban on steel-strung guitars in British prisons.
In a letter published in The Guardian, the 12 musicians, whose number also include Richard Hawley, Speech Debelle and Sam Duckworth, argue that “music has an important role to play in engaging prisoners in the process of rehabilitation” and that this is being undermined if inmates are not allowed to practice.
They also suggest that recent changes in the treatment of prisoners, which came into force in November and also includes restrictions on prisoners receiving books as well as steel-strung musical instruments, could be behind a recent increase in prisoners taking their own lives.
Alhough nylon-strung guitars are still available to prisoners who earn the privilege, Billy Bragg, who runs the Jail Guitar Doors initiative – which provides instruments to prisoners to help rehabilitation – says that as most guitars in prisons are steel-strung, the instrument is effectively being removed entirely from British institutions.
“There’s never been, to my knowledge, an incident in a British prison where someone has been attacked with a steel string guitar,” he says. “It makes no sense – where’s the logic behind this? Where’s the thinking behind this?
“Almost all the guitars currently in British prisons tend to be steel strung, so this effectively means they’ve all been removed as it’s just not possible to re-string them all with nylon. They aren’t designed for that.”
Bragg added: “These guitars allows the prisoners to develop their skills and do peer to peer work which has been shown as really important as the basis for rehabilitation. A number of prison staff have told me that that aspect of them sitting down together, playing music and learning, has had a noticeable impact on individual prisoners and the atmosphere as a whole.”
A Prison Service spokesperson told The Guardian: “As a result of this government’s reforms, prisoners who do not engage with their own rehabilitation now have far fewer privileges.”
An unreleased song recorded by Arcade Fire has made its way on line. Scroll down to listen now.
The song, reportedly titled "Get Right", is believed to have been recorded by the band during the sessions for their recent Reflektor album.
An excerpt of the song first appeared on a TV commercial advertising Reflektor.
The band then played the song during their "secret" shows as "The Reflektors" and debuted "Get Right" live at Montreal's Salsathèque on September 9.
"We were cutting songs off the record, like there is a song 'Get Right' we cut for sequencing reasons," Win Butler told Australian website FasterLouder in November last year. "But it was as good as anything else on the record."
Unreleased Arcade Fire song from 'Reflektor' sessions revealed –
An unreleased song recorded by Arcade Fire has made its way on line. Scroll down to listen now.
The song, reportedly titled “Get Right“, is believed to have been recorded by the band during the sessions for their recent Reflektor album.
An excerpt of the song first appeared on a TV commercial advertising Reflektor.
The band then played the song during their “secret” shows as “The Reflektors” and debuted “Get Right” live at Montreal’s Salsathèque on September 9.
“We were cutting songs off the record, like there is a song ‘Get Right’ we cut for sequencing reasons,” Win Butler told Australian website FasterLouder in November last year. “But it was as good as anything else on the record.”
Unreleased Arcade Fire song from ‘Reflektor’ sessions revealed –
Keith Richards has covered Bob Marley's "Get Up Stand Up" – watch a video of it below.
The guitarist performed his track "Words Of Wonder" as well as the cover in a video to promote his musical collective and charity, the Playing For Change foundation, which features musicians including Keb' Mo'...
Keith Richards has covered Bob Marley‘s “Get Up Stand Up” – watch a video of it below.
The guitarist performed his track “Words Of Wonder” as well as the cover in a video to promote his musical collective and charity, the Playing For Change foundation, which features musicians including Keb’ Mo’, Mermans Mosengo and Sherieta Lewis.
Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are due to resume their 14 On Fire tour in May, when they will play 14 European festival dates.
Cliff Richard has spoken to Uncut about his forthcoming date supporting Morrissey in America.
Richard is billed as “special guest” at Morrissey’s show on June 21 at New York’s Barclays Center. Meanwhile, Tom Jones is scheduled to perform with Morrissey on May 10 at Los Angeles’ Sports Are...
Cliff Richard has spoken to Uncut about his forthcoming date supporting Morrissey in America.
Richard is billed as “special guest” at Morrissey’s show on June 21 at New York’s Barclays Center. Meanwhile, Tom Jones is scheduled to perform with Morrissey on May 10 at Los Angeles’ Sports Arena.
“I’m really excited,” Richard told Uncut. “Because even though I’ve had seven Top 30 successes in America, only three of them are in the Top 10, so I’m kind of unknown there, and have no identity there. So for me it’s fantastic. I shall always be grateful to him [Morrissey] for getting me a chance in New York, of all places, to be able to sing to 12,000 or more people.”
Richard revealed that he has not yet met Morrissey. “It’ll be nice to meet [him], he seems like a really controversial character, in another sphere to me. But I always find that sometimes when you meet people and you have completely different ideas of life, it’s far more interesting to be with that kind of person. So I’m really looking forward to it.”
Asked whether Morrissey had been in touch personally, Richard said, “No. I tried to originally to make sure this wasn’t a bad joke. It would have been very upsetting to me to have found out it was a joke. So I said, ‘If necessary, if you can find a number, I’ll happily call him.’ But I got a message from my manager, and he said, ‘No, I’ve talked to his management, and he wants you to be there.’ And it’s interesting to hear he wants Tom Jones with him in LA. I think he should have stuck with me [laughs]!”
“My manager said that his manager said that, ‘He’s a fan of yours,'” continued Richard. “”I hear that a lot – I think, ‘Come on, they can’t all be fans.’ I think people forget that we’re a fraternity of singers. We don’t see each other enough, or even know each other sometimes. But we respect what we do.”
Richard had also revealed what Morrissey fans can expect from his support slot. “The Morrissey group have given me an hour on-stage,” he explained. “I thought they might give me 30 minutes. I’m going to cut my two hour 20 minute show down to the absolute best bits of it. So I can’t wait. And you never know what’s going to happen. At this stage of my life I have no expectations. I certainly didn’t expect to get invited by Morrissey to sing in front of one of his crowds. I know it’s difficult to sing in front of someone else’s audience, but I think if you do your best at what you’re good at, they may not love you, they may not think you’re fantastic – but you might surprise them. So I’m hoping to surprise them a little, because I’m sure 90% of that audience won’t know who I am. It’s costing me a fortune – I’m taking my whole band, and my crew. I’ve yet to find out what we do about lighting, because I usually like to do a little light-show. But with computers, my guy could just plug into their lights and do something different…”
Blanket coverage - the Native American influence on this guitar raga sage...
While he was one of the first “American Primitive” guitar players – his music was released by John Fahey on Takoma; he was a University of Maryland contemporary of Max Ochs – the work of Robbie Basho (1940-1986) was never primitive, and seldom exclusively American. A singer and 12-string player, his work spanned east and west, from folk in the 1960s to new age in the 1980s, ultimately as much of the air as the soil. “I have a love for China, Japan,” he told one radio interviewer, “the Islamic thing, the American Indian …”
To confine himself was just not Basho’s way. His voice (which Fahey called “strange and compelling”) was an operatic bass rising to a high yodel. This, together with his tremulous whistling, and his guitar playing (filled with fluid gestures and entrancing repetitions) enact in his songs the free-roaming journey across musical cultures made by his records. “If you can crack one bag,” he said, “you can crack them all.”
True enough, 1972’s Voice Of The Eagle, (recorded for Vanguard and now reissued by ACE) is steeped in the sacred chants and anthropomorphic tales of the Native American, but refuses to remain there, aiming always for transcendence. There are many birds in these songs, and they are all flying towards the sun.
The title track establishes Basho’s panorama. In his original sleevenotes, he called it a “Hopi raga”- though it includes more even than that. Beginning with his striking chanted vocal, the piece goes on to broach the traditional ballad “Man Of Constant Sorrow”, and explore his own harmonic-laced guitar playing, all accompanied by the mdrangam drums of Ramnad V Raghavan.
Both chanting and Raghavan appear again on “Omaha Tribal Prayer”, while the guitar playing runs from concise and understated (“Roses And Gold”; “Joseph”) all the way to wildly discursive (the ten minute “Blue Corn Serenade”).
It’s all great stuff, but it’s the singing that captures the truly unique aim of Voice Of The Eagle. As Basho sings on “Joseph”, that aim is to: “keep on climbing towards the dove, with soft unbroken wings…”
John Robinson
Blanket coverage – the Native American influence on this guitar raga sage…
While he was one of the first “American Primitive” guitar players – his music was released by John Fahey on Takoma; he was a University of Maryland contemporary of Max Ochs – the work of Robbie Basho (1940-1986) was never primitive, and seldom exclusively American. A singer and 12-string player, his work spanned east and west, from folk in the 1960s to new age in the 1980s, ultimately as much of the air as the soil. “I have a love for China, Japan,” he told one radio interviewer, “the Islamic thing, the American Indian …”
To confine himself was just not Basho’s way. His voice (which Fahey called “strange and compelling”) was an operatic bass rising to a high yodel. This, together with his tremulous whistling, and his guitar playing (filled with fluid gestures and entrancing repetitions) enact in his songs the free-roaming journey across musical cultures made by his records. “If you can crack one bag,” he said, “you can crack them all.”
True enough, 1972’s Voice Of The Eagle, (recorded for Vanguard and now reissued by ACE) is steeped in the sacred chants and anthropomorphic tales of the Native American, but refuses to remain there, aiming always for transcendence. There are many birds in these songs, and they are all flying towards the sun.
The title track establishes Basho’s panorama. In his original sleevenotes, he called it a “Hopi raga”- though it includes more even than that. Beginning with his striking chanted vocal, the piece goes on to broach the traditional ballad “Man Of Constant Sorrow”, and explore his own harmonic-laced guitar playing, all accompanied by the mdrangam drums of Ramnad V Raghavan.
Both chanting and Raghavan appear again on “Omaha Tribal Prayer”, while the guitar playing runs from concise and understated (“Roses And Gold”; “Joseph”) all the way to wildly discursive (the ten minute “Blue Corn Serenade”).
It’s all great stuff, but it’s the singing that captures the truly unique aim of Voice Of The Eagle. As Basho sings on “Joseph”, that aim is to: “keep on climbing towards the dove, with soft unbroken wings…”
Johnny Greenwood is to perform at Camden's Roundhouse in London later this year.
The guitarist will re-create the orchestral soundtrack he created for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood live for the first time as part of the Roundhouse Summer Sessions on August 6 and 7.
Greenwood will perf...
Johnny Greenwood is to perform at Camden’s Roundhouse in London later this year.
The guitarist will re-create the orchestral soundtrack he created for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood live for the first time as part of the Roundhouse Summer Sessions on August 6 and 7.
Greenwood will perform with a 50 piece orchestra and will be playing the electrical instrument Ondes Martenot. The performances will also include a screening of the film and the orchestra will be conducted by Hugh Brunt.
The Roundhouse Summer Sessions take place in July and August. The series will include Reverb, a weekend of music curated by Imogen Heap plus performances by Sinead O’Connor, Chilly Gonzales, Ólafur Arnalds, Kid Koala, and others.
Greenwood will again work with Paul Thomas Anderson when he scores the director’s next film, Inherent Vice. Greenwood worked on the music for the director’s last film – The Master – and signed up to write the score for upcoming crime movie earlier this year. He will compose the score with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Roddy Frame has announced details of a UK shows in December.
These are in addition to his forthcoming gig at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on May 22, 2014.
The shows will feature Frame performing songs from his forthcoming new album, Seven Dials, which is due for release on AED on Monday May...
Roddy Frame has announced details of a UK shows in December.
These are in addition to his forthcoming gig at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on May 22, 2014.
The shows will feature Frame performing songs from his forthcoming new album, Seven Dials, which is due for release on AED on Monday May 5th.
The dates are:
MAY 22: Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
DECEMBER 1: Music Hall, Aberdeen
DECEMBER 2: Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
DECEMBER 3: The Lowry, Manchester
DECEMBER 7: Town Hall, Birmingham
Tickets for the London, Manchester & Birmingham shows are available via www.gigsandtours.com and the Aberdeen & Glasgow shows via www.pclpresents.com priced at £25.
