Musical Theatre

REBEL - a new musical

Written By Tommy

Ready To Lose

Rebel

Ice Cream (feat. Elyar)

Only In My Dreams is a journey spinning from dark night beats to flamboyant choruses, defining Tenderland as a place to imagine, to experiment and to come back to. 

Grounded during the pandemic, musician, composer and performer Tommy Antonio went hermetic in his Bilbao studio during 2020 to discover an escape portal into stories, and alternate takes on past realities. What is emerging is Tenderland, an escape hatch from the real into dreamworld, psychedelic and spangle bannered. 

As a composer, producer, songwriter and multi instrumentalist, Tommy has toured the globe playing jazz, whilst his music is heard on London’s West End, global ad campaigns, and in collab. with artists as diverse as MIA, Octavian, JuiceWrld and The Kooks.

Only In My Dreams

HARDER BABY - Slipping Through My Fingers

Tenderland is the musical escape portal from London based composer and songwriter Tommy Antonio. Spinning from dark night beats of the first single Only In My Dreams to bombastic highs of the sophomore ‘Magic’, Tenderland is defined as a place to imagine, to experiment and to retreat to, where dreamy high hopes and reality do their dance. Magic draws on the worldbeat of Paul Simon era Graceland and Pet Sounds to tell a story in the giddy heights of first love, knocked out and unabashed:

‘It stopped all the traffic, turned the air electric and the stars were rolling in orbit spinning towards it, romance was minted, tenderly moulded, there where our lips joined, love was god coined in the heart’. 

  As a composer, producer, songwriter and multi instrumentalist, Tommy has toured the globe performing, whilst his music is heard on London’s West End, global ad campaigns, and in colab. with artists as diverse as MIA, Octavian, JuiceWrld and The Kooks.

Magic

Easy Sailing

Minute By Minute

Shaker Neon Forget Ft Camille Ruz

Summer EP

Bound 2 (Kanye West Cover)

Summer

Buried Alive

Come Home To Her

 Composer, producer and multi instrumentalist and producer Tommy Antonio has had one of the most colourful journeys through music of any new artist. From jamming with Mumford and Sons on a barge supporting them on tour, playing keys with the Kooks, touring the world with Golden Silvers to singing BVs for Florence and the Machine.  His first EP-Summer-is no less colourful and eclectic channeling Rufus Wainwright and Animal Collective in a dreamscape that evokes The Beach Boys.  Inspired as much by the minimalist sounds of Steve Reich as jazz greats such as Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock, slam poetry and hip hop, it is a sound world that defies categorisation.  

   “I wanted the Summer EP to sound like a city, a jungle, and a good dream.  The music is an illustration for the poems that lie at the heart of each song.. Bound 2 and Summer are basically stream of consciousness raps about the colour and magic in everyday stuff.  They’re really tributes to Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. They’re about where romance lies, in the small things, in the stuff you overlook, and about falling in love.  The lyric to Buried Alive however was culled from 86 pages of lyrics to try and encapsulate what it feels like to lose love and takes a lot from early Rufus Wainwright.  Come Home To Her is back to desire again, the cycle continues.  I wanted to get a bit of Jeff Buckley live at the Siné and John Martyn here with a live take of scat vocals, on my own, lonely with the reverb.”

  A self taught songwriter, composer and arranger studied jazz and classical double bass at the Guildhall School of Music but it wasn’t until he toured Europe with the New Orleans outfit The Dixie Ticklers in 2015 that he started laying down the rhythm tracks for a new solo EP with guitarist and college mate Nick Costley White, drummer Dave Hamblett and percussionist Zands Duggan (Lady Gaga).  Following live collaborations and a long relationship beginning at music college, progressive classical string group Twelve Ensemble (Max Richter) were the obvious choice for the soaring string arrangements that bring to mind New York composer and Bjork collaborator Nico Muhly.  Mixing and mastering were handled by the sensitive ears of Sam Wheat (Rihanna, Elton John, Lionel Ritchie).  Tommy is currently writing an immersive musical based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, his second EP, a short film soundtrack for Hong Kong based filmmaker Mo Lai, and Creation the Musical due for performance in 2018.

Artwork by Rachel Antonio, Female Vocal on Bound 2 by Fini Bearman, Photograph by Mattias Bjorklund, extra guitars by Rob Lamont.


SUMMER EP

The Refuge

The Refuge EP

Be A Man For Me (KJ Mix)

Right And Wrong (KJ Mix)

Ginger Nando's Killer

Rise Of The Rat SD Master

Me and My Radio

Like You Do

Tommy Antonio is a composer, lyricist, multi instrumentalist and writer whose work spans musical theatre, contemporary pop, indie soundtracks, and visual media.  He is currently under commission by the Roald Dahl Story Company as a composer lyricist one one of their best loved titles. He records as Tenderland, and is known as one half of alt pop duo Shaker Neon.

Tommy Antonio

Pinned to spotlight

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