I’m a garage-rocker, an acoustic singer-songwriter, a composer of West End tunes and a former stand-up comedian, and I’m inspired by classics like the Kinks and garage-punk legends The Saints (my all-time favourite band) and Chris Bailey solo, all the way through The Icicle Works to Teenage Fanclub, and on to extraordinary music like Armenian duduk-player Arsen Petrosyan. (Check him out!)
Nights Under the Moon is to be played loud. It mixes waspish garage rock (“Queen of Her Head”, “Next Door”, “Southern Girl”) with ear-worm belters like “It Wasn’t Love” and the electro-poppy “Baby Baby”, as well as the depression epic “Painkiller”, and the sultry, film-noir-inspired “Farewell My Lovely”.
This album is all me, with the exception of my friend Elisa Bray’s excellent backing vocals on “Next Door”. Elisa was also the person who convinced me to release “Painkiller” which, among many things, is where I get a bit Neil Young like-a-hurricane-y on the electric guitar.
People ask me about the cover. It’s a photo I took of an abandoned doll on the path through London Fields, and seemed to fit perfectly when I was looking for a cover image.
Heart Attack – Live at Oslo (Mercury Heart)
Heart Attack is my last band Mercury Heart’s 100mph live set at London’s Oslo. It’s punchy, original, un-overdubbed three-piece (guitar, bass, drums) garage rock in a tradition that goes back through Jack White and The Black Keys via Roky Ericsson to early Kinks, Who, and Rolling Stones.
We hadn’t intended to make a live album but, in the early hours after the gig, we played the raw recording and we realised we’d nailed the songs with an energy we could never recreate in a studio. And played them faster than we had ever played them before and probably would ever again.
(That set, by the way, was watched by legendary Saints founder and frontman Chris Bailey. “You know what?” he said to me afterwards, “you’re NOT BAD!” Anyone who knew the incomparable Chris knows this was some serious praise.)
This is my first solo album. It began rockily and became more melancholic in the writing and recording. It features one of the best songs I’ve ever written, “If You Ever Change” (“I love songs about parallel universes,” an audience member said to me once after a gig) as well as a bunch of lovely tunes. It also features the original, very quiet and minimal version of “Comes a Time”, a song that resurfaces in a very different form on Nights Under the Moon.
It was well received. “Cracking songs” about love, loss, religion, memory, and suicide (“things that matter to ordinary people”, according to Robert Moss of The Independent). They range from the garage-y “Lowland Vampire” through the heartbreaking “To Leave Me” to the anthemic “If You Ever Change”. Arts & Books feature: “Songs about the kind of things that affect real people, things such as how difficult it is to accept the everyday person you’ve become”
This four-track EP captured the powerful, original rock of my previous band, the Sky Pirates, not long after we had a blast at London’s 100 Club supporting legends The Animals. 1234 features the live opener and New-Wave-y favourite, “Raincheck”, the slashing funk of “I Like Girls”, the slow-building epic “If You Ever Change” and the glammy rocker “A Little Too Easy”. “Original, intelligent music… [a mix of] quiet, late-1970s punk, and modern indie-rock”, said The Independent recommended download. “If You Ever Change” resurfaced, still featuring bassist Simon Littlefield and some of Nigel Summerley’s drums, on Tell the Truth
Simon Hardeman [music] 