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HENRY MARSH - PARS GUNS TWO:

'I’d rather be somebody’s everything
	      than to be something to everybody'

To mark what would have been his thirty-second birthday, this is the second collection of Henry Marsh's remastered songs written between 2003 and 2012. 

'...in the end, there’s only love'


HENRY MARSH - PARIS GUNS:

‘Life adds up to more than years’

This is the first posthumous album from Paris Guns, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Henry Marsh’s last musical project before his suicide aged thirty. In the note he left for his family, Henry said that he hoped they could do something with his music, so twelve songs (of forty recordings) have been selected and remastered. 

Henry described his music as pop – ‘like a bubble’ that you immerse yourself in briefly – and his songs are filled with humour and heartache. Henry was a perfectionist, meticulously layering instruments and vocal harmonies, but the songs are always lyric-driven: ‘re: songs/words. I think that to listen to a song and say you don't notice the words is roughly equivalent to looking at a painting and saying you don't notice the composition: you do, it has a profound and overarching effect upon the viewer/listener’. The power of his lyrics, which became more abstract over time, can be seen in the dark love song My Joanna, through the guitar-led rock of Satan Sent Superted to the Van Morrison-acknowledging folk of Mrs Gilbert’s Nightmare, culminating in the surreal epic Cast Warrior. 

Of the twelve songs, just two were recorded in studios (Satan Sent Superted and Asylum Life): all but one (Waving Balloons) were played and recorded by Henry at home, and range from the one-take guitar and vocal rawness of Carpe Crematoria to the multi-layered richness of Box of Tricks. 

Named after the biggest gun ever made (an inefficient beast with a 30-metre barrel, that shot 84 kg shells to a range of 81 miles and was fired only once in WWII), Henry Marsh – Paris Guns is ‘a weapon of love’ that needs to be fired again and again. 

Driven by what he described as ‘the engine in [his] head’ that he couldn’t shut down, and inspired by his wide-ranging musical influences, Henry created his own uniquely English cross-genre style. Some of his favourite musicians were Syd Barrett and early Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, Belle and Sebastian, Madness, Joanna Newsom, Bob Dylan, The Clash, Robert Wyatt, LCD Soundsystem, The Tiger Lillies, Paul Simon and The Pogues. 

He taught himself to play guitar, bass, harmonica and piano, and began to write and record music in his early teens, finding a way to express his dark, sometimes comic, vision. Fiercely intelligent and with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and new experiences, he was affected by alcohol and drug dependence from his mid teens. After dropping out of his A-levels, he started but didn’t complete a music technology course and then worked in bars and on building sites. In 2003, he recorded with musician and band manager Lee Knott and they produced a six-song EP, My Fondness for Shelled Animals. The next year, Henry moved to Brighton to study songwriting at BIMM (2004–05), collaborating with other musicians then and for the next two years, and playing a handful of gigs. 

In 2007, soon after returning to London, Henry witnessed the death of a close friend in a horrific road accident: the trauma changed his course in life, deepening a dependence on alcohol and drugs that now included heroin. At the end of 2011, he went into rehab and quit all substances. He then threw himself back into his music with Paris Guns. Feeling reborn and that he was going to set the world on fire, Henry was ablaze with productivity in the first half of 2012, writing and recording about a dozen songs as well as re-recording many previously written ones. He had often said that he didn’t think he would make it past thirty, so his family and friends were overjoyed when not only did his birthday come around but he was also happy, clean and sober. However, not long after that, with six months' sobriety, Henry was hit by a deep depression. He was not able to find his way out and tragically committed suicide in July.

‘Paris Guns are a-(weapo)n ov love’ 

Remastered by Micky Portman.

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