AAC summer 2013

Dick Gaughan - Jock o hazeldean

I Drink

The Seed Feat. Jake Reid

Davina and the Vagabonds perform live at 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis.  Recorded February 24, 2012.  Recorded by Jon Valley.  Discover more great music at http://kdhx.org.

Davina and the Vagabonds "Lipstick n Chrome" Live at KDHX 2/24/12

Free download from Richard Walters debut album "The Animal" out now on Kartel.

UK PRESS QUOTES

‘Exquisite and perfectly observed’ **** Uncut
'Pure iceberg beauty...a spectral talent' **** The Fly
‘Something extravagantly special’ Mojo

FORTHCOMING US SHOWS:

20 JULY - GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY, BROOKLYN
21 JULY - ROCKWOOD MUSIC HALL, NYC
27 JULY - PIANOS, LA
29 July - R Bar, LA

BIOGRAPHY - RICHARD WALTERS

Richard Walters sings in such a beautifully gentle falsetto, without theatrics or histrionics, like a choirboy, when he really hits the high notes, that the subjects of his songs might come as a surprise. This is someone who sings about “losing the plot” or having a seizure, about the anxiety you feel at the start of a new affair, or about domestic abuse from the point of view of the abuser. He even covers a song by notorious manic depressive American musician Daniel Johnston, while one of his songs, a fragile confessional called ‘All At Sea’, was recently picked for the soundtrack of hit US forensic crime drama CSI: Miami. On the sleeve of his debut album of exquisitely minimal, hushed and haunting piano and guitar ballads adorned with the merest hint of strings, he is shown wearing headphones and tucking into a delicious plate of black cable as if the style of this record was zany electronica. It catches you off guard, because in its quiet majesty, the sound he makes is far removed from that world. The title of his debut LP, The Animal, is no less jarring because this music is more ethereal than bestial.

Richard Walters, at 26 years old, has been performing solo for eleven years, and has been a voice-for-hire for many prominent musical projects. He has also appeared in several bands such as Polysoul, Missing Pieces and Theremin, with members of various successful indie rock bands, although you might be a bit taken aback to discover that he once toured France with a Bob Dylan tribute act called The Zimmer Men. Whilst Guy Sigsworth (Madonna, Bjork) produced one of his early EPs, David Kosten (Bat For Lashes, Faultline) came onboard as one of the producers of The Animal.

Unsurprisingly then, people are reacting very favourably to his extremely pretty songs about pretty extreme things, saying of The Animal that “It is awash with a yearning, a dreamlike sadness, so ephemeral that you worry that if you press eject on the stereo, the CD will simply dissipate to dust. Richard’s slight, limpid voice is a genuine wonder, a voice with the ability to make your heart stop...”

The Animal, an album of solemn sorrow and serious sadness, was written in a three-year period during which Richard experienced the ecstatic highs and numbing lows that come with being single. He felt galvanised to write and record it only after he had fallen in love again with an American girl and had moved with her from his home town of Oxford to Paris.

“Moving from Oxford made me get my act together instead of wasting my time getting pissed,” he says. “That’s when music became more than just a hobby. Paris was the catalyst.”
The sleeve of The Animal was, he explains, the result of a chance meeting with a photographer from New Zealand living two streets away from him in the French capital who was busy putting together an art exhibition of “people eating stuff”. As for the name of the LP, it was originally going to be ‘Red Brick’, another track on the album, but he wanted a more stark contrast between title and content. “I decided that because it’s such a gentle album it needed a more upfront title. And the title track is the key song on the album; it packs an emotional punch.”

But it does so in a velvet glove: ‘The Animal’ sounds like a regular love song, a waltz-time paean to a paramour, although it’s actually about the sordid pleasure which a sadistic husband derives from beating his wife. “I'm alive when I hit you now,” sings the protagonist of the song, “the crack of your bones, stage blood that you throw... Relax your back,” he advises, “close your eyes...” It took some doing for Richard to assume the role of the titular monster. “It needed to be graphically descriptive and as nasty as possible,” he insists. “Obviously it’s not autobiographical: it’s about a friend from school who experienced domestic abuse and how it really affected him. I put myself in the mindset of the person; I had to be the complete opposite of the calm singer-songwriter. I had to be ... a cunt. People said they were surprised to hear me singing about hitting someone. But I was playing a part; I wasn’t empathising with that person, just trying to understand the resentment of someone who does that kind of thing.”

As with most of the album, opening track ‘Brittle Bones’ sees Richard playing all the instrumentation himself, apart from the strings (which were provided by Izzi Dunn who plays cello for Kanye West) – including piano, guitar, bass and keyboards. It’s a quiet, restrained start to an album which, throughout, resolutely refuses to “rock out”. It sets the tone; the mood is of quiet despair and unfulfilled desire, of anxiety and dismay, of meditative melancholy, of lovelessness and longing.

“They’re all love – or rather, lack-of-love songs,” he reveals of the 10 tracks on The Animal, “and they were written when I was single. It was a cathartic experience, writing them. ‘Brittle Bones’ is about meeting a girl who already has a boyfriend, although it’s meant to be a positive song. ‘Weather Song’ is about that great initial feeling you get when you meet someone new, before you discover what a horrible person they are! ‘All At Sea’ is about the time Oxford got flooded and I split up with my long-term girlfriend: it felt as though the whole town was going underwater. ‘We Have Your Head’ is about losing the plot a bit. I made an error in my early 20s, when I got into hallucinogenics, acid, mushrooms and weed... It was a period of being zonked out and paranoid. I came out the other end and realised I’d been asleep for two years. I was so worried about the world I couldn’t consider what I was saying. I wasn’t a drug addict, but I dropped out of university, much to my parents’ disgust. It’s a song about feeling the pressure and everyone else being grown up.”

Red Brick, the original title of the LP, documents a time, a couple of years back, when Richard was travelling to the States a lot, where he was having meetings with record labels and would have to play his songs to teams of music business executives. “It was the most terrifying thing in the world,” he admits. It was on one such visit to the US that he had his first epileptic episode: “I had a seizure back at my hotel and was diagnosed with epilepsy at a hospital in Santa Monica. I hadn’t slept on the plane, I’d been up for 48 hours, it was a very stressful situation – it was all too much, basically. They gave me Valium, which is absolutely the worst thing they could have done because I was already depressed, and it put me in a trance for a week. ‘Red Brick’ is about the feeling I had in the back of my head. But I’ve got the epilepsy under control now.”

Richard now has a lot of things under control: his epilepsy, his love life and his career as one of the most promising singer-songwriters in the country. His voice, reminiscent of early-period Judee Sill and late-period Billy Mackenzie, in the way that it transmutes feelings of dread into a sort of ecclesiastical awe, could so easily have lost control but it hasn’t: it intimates, teases and hints as often as it swoops and soars.

More than anything, Richard Walters has total control of his pen, writing tunes which manage to sound moreish and accessible while having an indefinable experimental, even avant-garde quality, with the odd texture and stray curlicue of synth noise upsetting the order of the melody, and adding to the sense of these songs as (ok) computer reveries. It’s as though Radiohead had suddenly decided to cover the aching, easy-listening melodies of ‘70s soft-rock superstars Bread.

You’re moved, but quietly disturbed, by the music of Richard Walters, and openly wish him a great deal of success while secretly hoping that he keeps in touch with at least some of the torment that brought these gently powerful, powerfully gentle songs into being.

Paul Lester - May 2009
Released by: Kartel

Release/catalogue number: KCDL026
Release date: Jul 20, 2010 

Richard Walters Brittle bones

(FOR FULL QUALITY SOUND PLEASE DOWNLOAD)

Recorded on 4-track cassette in a barn in rebel country, the Pay De La Loire, France.

Taken from the album 'La Ferme De Fontenaille'
Released 5th November 2012 by The Anglophone Recording Company.

Available to buy now
www.aprcstore.bigcartel.com

for more info visit
www.trevormossandhannahlou.com 

'A PROUD SURRENDER' by Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou

For A Minute There

Live in studio performance at WYCE www.wyce.org

Davina and the Vagabonds - St Michael vs the Devil

Taken from the forthcoming album 'If Not Now Then When?'
First-edition gatefold vinyl 12" available at ethanjohns.com.



Hello Sunshine

Taken from the forthcoming album 'If Not Now Then When?'
First-edition gatefold vinyl 12" available at ethanjohns.com.


Red Rooster Blue

A set of clips featuring the inductees of the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame

AAC summer 2013

Tony Trigwell-Jones