Balloon reinflates. The last few events the two Matts have put on have featured swan dives into cushions, slam poetry, some sweet band performances and some fairly ridiculous alcohol consumption. This gig leans a bit more towards the musical end of things, but the Balloon aim of mixing literature, music and booze sails onward: as you’ll see below, Simone Felice has had an interesting and full life already, in the Felice Brothers and as an author, and will perform songs and readings here, with high quality support bands in tow.
AUGUST 19:
SIMONE FELICE
JEB LOY NICHOLS
DEER PARK (acoustic)
£6 adv http://www.wegottickets.com/event/86900 / £7 doors
DJs:
BALLOON / THE JOY COLLECTIVE until 4am
Simone Felice is a celebrated songwriter, author, and poet.
He was born in 1976 in Palenville, New York, and grew up there along the creek that rushes down from the Kaaterskill Falls. Considered one of America’s natural wonders in the nation’s youth, this hidden Catskill Mountain waterfall attracted early landscape painters, transcendental philosophers, and writers, Thomas Cole, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and Mark Twain among them.
At the age of 12 the young Simone suffered a brain aneurysm and was pronounced clinically dead following brain surgery in a local hospital. After recovering he spent several months in intensive care relearning basic motor skills, including reading and writing.
When he was 15 he started a punk band with friends, making weird noise-rock in his grandpa’s barn. Their emphasis was on head-banging and freaky storytelling, being moved by heros like Black Sabbath, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and Iron Maiden. By the age of 18, he had quit school and was fronting the band (by this time calling themselves: Eight Body Trunk, in homage to the 1950’s Lincoln Continental an aging mafioso drove up and down the streets of their nowhere town) playing barns, bars, and low down clubs, including New York City’s fabled CBGB’s.
Eventually the young rockers went their separate ways and Felice began writing poetry and vignettes, leading to the publication of his first collection of poems, The Picture Show, when he was 20 years old. He began performing these bizarre monologues regularly at the historic Nuyorican Poets Café in New York, garnering the young poet invitations to come read in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, London and Berlin.
In 2004 and then 2005, underground New York publishers printed Simone’s first short works of fiction, Goodbye Amelia, a coming of age story about a small-town girl with secrets to keep and a hunger to see the world, and Hail Mary Full of Holes, about a prostitute struggling to survive during the dawn of the Reagan era.
In the Fall of 2001, just after the attacks on New York City, Simone began writing songs with his brother Ian. Together they retreated to the woods they grew up in, where jobless with a cheap guitar they wrote and made recordings (two recently unearthed archive collections know as The Big Empty and Mexico) with their friend Doc Brown. In this manner the two brothers clocked four years in complete obscurity, sewing the seeds of what would become (with the edition of younger brother James in the Winter of 2006) The Felice Brothers, whose subsequent albums Tonight at the Arizona, The Felice Brothers, and Yonder is the Clock, have gone on to achieve international renown, earning these upstate New York natives an inarguable place in the Great American Songbook. Over the group’s history Simone has remained one of it’s chief lyricists, co-writing and writing some their most beloved songs, including Frankie’s Gun, Run Chicken Run, Ruby Mae, Whiskey in My Whiskey, Love Me Tenderly, Hey Hey Revolver, Mercy, Your Belly In My Arms, The Devil Is Real, Radio Song and Don’t Wake The Scarecrow to name just a few.
At the surprise request of iconic record producer Rick Rubin, Simone flew to California in the late summer of 2008 to play drums on the Columbia release I and Love and You by The Avett Brothers. Lending his signature dirty Catskill Mountain soul to the Avett’s riveting songwriting and Rubin’s flawless production, Felice appears on some of the albums stand-out numbers, including the title-track and popular single I and Love and You.
In the winter of 2008/2009 personal tragedy reared its head when Simone and his long-time love lost their first child in a late-term still-birth. It was then that he retreated to a cabin in his beloved Catskill’s with his old friend Bobbie Bird and began writing and recording the songs that would (unknown to them at the time) become The Duke & The King’s debut album. Taking their name from the itinerant Shakespeare theatre grifters in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the duo released the gripping Nothing Gold Can Stay in the Summer of 2009 to immediate international critical acclaim, being hailed as one of the most haunting and honest albums of the year.
Felice has just completed his first novel, Black Jesus, the story of a young American war veteran returned to his hometown, the fictional Galilee, New York, after being blinded in Iraq by a homemade bomb, and the unexpected love he finds with a mysterious dancer who arrives in the town, fleeing darkness and violence of a different kind.
Simone lives less than a mile from the creek-house he was born in, and travels his own country and abroad performing his songs and stories.
Simone is performing a solo show incorporating his music and readings and will be supported by Jeb Loy Nichols.
Jeb Loy Nichols is an artist, writer and musician living a sustainable life in Wales. ‘Strange Faith And Practice’ is his new album.
Since moving to the UK from his native America and finding himself living in an East End squat with Neneh Cherry, Adrian Sherwood and Ari Up from the Slits, Jeb has variously been art director for Pressure Sound records, performed guest vocals for Groove Armada, designed prints and fabric for Paul Smith and compiled the celebrated review of blue eyed southern soul, ‘Country Got Soul’. Throughout this time he has also had a successful career as a musician, both with his band Fellow Travellers and as a solo artist; his previous albums have received glowing reviews in publications from the Independent to Mojo.
Described by many as a modern day Renaissance Man, Jeb has led a creative life spanning countless records, exhibitions and more recently books. Artist, writer, musician; for Jeb it’s all part of the same journey. And quite a journey it’s been: from Middle America and its soundtrack of country music and southern soul; through ‘70s New York, the loft scene and a sound clash of free jazz and rap; via London, reggae and the creative resistance to Thatcher’s Britain; and finally to Wales, a place to build a home, print, write and record, at least for a while.
‘Strange Faith And Practice’ is a relaxed and candid album of songs. Set against the shifting seasons of his remote Welsh retreat, they reflect back on Jeb’s search for place, a personal voice and the different musical scenes he’s passed through.
