This has almost sold out! Don’t dally if you’re up for some rather lovely, slightly unnerving folk music. The End Of History, Regan’s first album from a couple of years back, was by turns creepy, gothic, brainy and purely beautiful. His hair is also a little special. See his face here:
FIONN REGAN + DANNY AND THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD
Thursday 12th November 7.30pm-10.00pm *early curfew*
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
Ages: 14+
£6 adv from TicketWeb /Spillers/ Diverse Newport/£7 doors
Irish singer songwriter influenced by Bob Dylan and Neil Young returns to Cardiff with a full band prior to the release of new album ‘Shadow of an Empire’, which is due at the end of the year.
“Soft-spoken FIONN REGAN coaxes an intoxicating array of emotion and detail into his fragile-yet-gripping songs – a body of work that’s already elicited comparisons to forebears as varied as Nick Drake for his guitar playing, and to Woody Guthrie for his wordplay”.
Fionn will be playing favourites from his Mercury Prize nominated debut album, The End Of History, as well as a selection of new songs from his forthcoming album The Shadow Of An Empire which is due for release on Heavenly recordings in early 2010.
“A bitter story leaps from the archives quagmires / Lamented in lectures like battery acid naked / Now the arm rests turn to axes slamming on hinges / The front row is reserved for the lunatic fringes / Down at the genocide matinee”
(Genocide Matinee)
If Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan’s The End of History was the sound of the countryside and woodland lanes, this record is the sound of towns and dimly lit streets; heartfelt and with a ragged edge. He has ploughed himself a new furrow.
It was during a period of great global upheaval, whilst touring his debut album for two years worldwide, and in particular across America, as Fionn puts it “seeing the world, the bone structure, the pulp” that he began work on its follow up. It seems natural that his response was to become more outward looking “as a writer you hold up a mirror, its reflections become the work” and in The Shadow of an Empire this manifests itself in a collection of songs that are peopled with characters and conversational dialogue. The often witty vignettes are used to facilitate more complex soul-searching.
On the subject of influence, Fionn describes it as “hard to quantify, I wrote these songs from the page up, on an Olympia portable, the idea being that the words would stand up on their own. I think the percussive nature of typing informed the phrasing. I was reading a lot of Welsh, French and American poets, I started to explore Brecht, Mahagonny in particular, I have always loved Kerouac…, then I admire visual artists like Joseph Beuys, Basquiat and Francis Bacon equally. All these people switch the light bulb on, make me connect back to my work”
The album was self-produced (as was the case with The End of History) and recorded in a small, disused factory space in Fionn’s hometown in Co. Wicklow, Ireland “There were no airs or graces about it, we cut live in the room, live vocals… the piano had come off a cruise ship and we wheeled it down the road…the guy who sold it to us threw a couple of cheap Silvertone guitars and a circus drum into the bargain. As far a production goes…I’m very much into keeping mistakes, a crack in the voice, the natural ebb and flow of live drums, so that there’s a sort of evidence of the process… I think it’s that atmosphere which makes me want to revisit my favourite albums again and again”
“The newborn in the hammock rocks / Below a bolted sky that unlocks / For the departing of the flocks / Far from the shadow of an empire”
“Protection Racket” the first single from the album will be available to download and on 7″ November 2009
