Good day friends of this Facebook page. Although I do not see many of you in the flesh (the many years in my laboratory hideout seem to have taken their toll) I believe I may be rolling out the barrel once more and delivering random acts of wanton tunesmithery to all of you fine people. First I would like to start with my new single In My Time Of Dust, which came out on Monday (available worldwide via iTunes) coupled with Sweet Malaise featuring the transcendent voice of Ren Harvieu. Ive been working with Ren for about a year, on and off, writing her next record and the results are so exciting. Shes an unbelievable singer and writer & I think youll all going to be blown away by what you hear. I wrote Sweet Malaise with her voice in mind, she literally sang it in 5 minutes and that was that. Ive been all over the place this year, I may have seen you when I was on tour with Sophie Ellis-Bextor in the UK, its been such a nice surprise with the success of this record (which I produced) and were still gearing up for multitude of festivals too. When we we played Brighton we were told that the record went silver which was nice....thats 60,000 sales and counting! After the tour with Sophie, I flew to Shanghai and performed for Burberry which was a whirlwind pit-stop of rehearsals, dress rehearsals, camera rehearsals, dancer rehearsals, all in a huge set depicting London in a shipyard in the Pudong district. Having seen the old town of Shanghai and drunk tea, espied the pearls and silk, post-performance myself and pretty much everyone involved descended on a bar called Arcade and I drank Absinthe that had wormwood and a dead stag beetle in it. Not recommended. It was seriously disgusting. What was also quite strange for me was going to the Fairmont Peace Hotel which is still very 1930s and art deco in its design and imagining my grandfather (on my fathers side who I never really knew) who lived in Shanghai in the 30s, walking around the lobby with a martini in his hand and regaling some tall tale. What else? I played a bit of piano on the new Lana Del Rey album (I think its only a bonus track though called Black Beauty) played on a Luke Sital Singh song, am in talks with the brilliant Kathryn Williams about making a record with her, have had my two remixes of The Anchoress & Fiona Bevan played on the radio. Next week Im playing a private show in London for the opening a new Ralph Steadman exhibition at White Space, then on the Sunday 1st performing with the Strypes, Sophie, Kathryn, Gregory Porter, Maverick Sabre and Chris Difford amongst others for the Elton John Aids Foundation, itll be at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Ive got a few festivals coming up, one at the Curious Arts Festival in Hampshire on the 19th July and on August 7th Ill be at Haldern Pop in Germany. Also Im playing with Suede on the 13th June, thatll be just me. I really want to get my band back together and start playing you the new songs! After all of this, Im going to start pre-production on my next record with the lupine Overlord that is the producer Flood. Im about 20 songs in now. I feel good about it but its a pretty dark one this one. Its pretty epic in places and theres quite a few rock moments. Theres also some seriously swampy, sweaty tracks and some sadcore mumblecore normcore tracks. Then again Flood may put all of this into his demonic blender and itll come out completely different. All I know is Im really excited that it might actually get made after working on it for about 4 years, amidst other welcome distractions ducking and diving in and out of my life. Right Im leaving for Ibiza in about 4 hours for the betrothal of my brother in arms Dimitri, my compatriot in the unholy land that is Wild Boar. Good day and thanks for reading. EH
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 08:04:01 +0000