“Savages sees The Webb Sisters weld together a delightful mixture of folk and pop to create a bewitching album full of pretty harmonies, infectious melodies and evocative vocal hooks. Right from the opening Baroque Thoughts, Charley and Hattie weave a magical spell, their voices blend effortlessly over a backing of plucked acoustic guitar and harp. From there we’re taken on a glorious journey of contagious pop tinged folky numbers and the occasional upbeat rocker.” – Rhythm & Booze

Born into a family of musicians in Kent, England, Charley and Hattie are The Webb Sisters…..

Their singing and playing (harp, guitar, mandolin and more) draw from the folk and pop traditions of Britain and the United States. The Webb Sisters have recorded two albums, building a following in the UK and achieving album and record of the week on iTunes and BBC Radio Two.

The Webb Sisters were chosen to join Leonard Cohen’s live band on his first tour in fifteen years. 247 shows were played around the world between 2008 and 2010. Two DVD and audio albums have been released documenting the musical performances of the tour, ‘Live in London’ and ‘Songs from the Road’. On the DVD ‘Live In London’, Charley and Hattie are featured on the song ‘If It Be Your Will’.

“No review of Savages would be complete without a mention of jaw dropping live version of Leonard Cohen’s If It Be Your Will, that opens with the great man himself providing a spoken word introduction before the Webb Sisters take over with a simply beautiful and serene vocal performance that just has to be heard to be believed. An already gorgeous song enhanced by a spine tingling vocal performance that almost brought this reviewer to his knees.” – Rhythm & Booze

Baroque Thoughts – The first idea for this song came backstage at the Poetry Olympics at a Victorian theatre in London. We recorded this live with Jen Condos on bass and Jay Bellerose on drums at Conway studios in Los Angeles. The acoustics of Jay’s eclectic drum set up reverberated around the high ceilings. Peter (Asher) stood in the middle of the room with earphones on and conducted with vigor. (H) I particularly love Jay’s muffled drum. It sounds medieval to me. (C)

Calling This A Life – We wanted it to be about our lives, normal lives, normal things that feel enormous sometimes. (C) We are not too keen on loud electric guitars on our recordings, but felt CTAL needed an electric. Something spacious, dreamlike and of the night. Dean Parks came over and played the electric for this song. (H)

Words That Mobilise – Written in Belfast, recorded in Burbank. Charley and I would jam in our hotel rooms while on tour with Leonard Cohen and this song came out of one of those afternoons disturbing the neighbours. . . . The strings were added subsequently and Stevie Blacke wrote the arrangement. Stevie plays all the parts himself instrument by instrument. Peter and Jeff Ross added syncopated flutes on the choruses and a flock of flutes on the middle eight. (H) The song is about the power of one’s own voice, how a single word can mean a thousand voices if only you can speak it. It’s about persecution, being taken advantage of; letting it happen or saying no. It’s about courage. (C)

Savages – We had just learned how to use a tiny digital keyboard that morning. We found a distorted harpsichord-esque sound on it and the song was born from that. (C) I hope this song reflects what happens when one is injured by an outside force. The rebound reaction can be just as violent. That battle just ricochets back and forth until someone lets it be. (H)

Dark Sky – This song came from a dark place. A horrible time that just wouldn’t shift. It felt like occurrences had left an indelible imprint. Waiting inline at security at the airport the melody started coming and the lyrics almost simultaneously. (C) Charley had recorded the sketches for this song on garage band. We wrote the middle eight lyrics as we were recording it. Both of us felt we wanted it to stay a cappela. (H)

Burn – We both love playing this kind of music and had written the song as a tongue-in-cheek fuck you before there was even a realisation of a relationship falling apart. (C) This song had it’s first outing on a gig we played at the Borderline in London. Melvin Duffy played a mean pedal steel on this tune that night and one afternoon in north London he put those parts down for the studio recording. (H)

Amelie’s Smile – At this time, I was living in a top flat in a house in Greenwich and Charley lived around the corner. One day when Charley was round at mine, we had sketched down the beginnings of this song. When I was eleven or so I went on a French exchange with a girl name Amelie. There was something that had resonated within me at that time that was in my mind when we were writing this. There is an Amelie significant in Charley’s life, so we both had our inner voyages with this song. (H)

If It Be Your Will – Recorded at the O2 in London in July 2008. This was two months into the tour with LC, so for me it represents an early chapter of my relationship with this beautiful song and Leonard’s momentous lyric. It has been a joy to play this song with Neil Larsen – he plays the Hammond B3 organ with us here. (H)

In Your Father’s Eyes – We wrote this song whilst living on 4th and Rose in Venice Beach, LA. It was coming to the end of our time working with Universal and there was a feeling of change around us. (H) It’s Leland Sklar on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums, a Peter Asher classic. (C)

Blue and You – This was a hinge in my life because I was on tour and heartbroken. We wrote this at The Driskill Hotel in Austin Texas, it came in an hour. (H) This was another song that came to the table later when we were fitting time in the studio between live gigs with Leonard. We found a studio in the valley not far from the rehearsal studios and worked with a great engineer called Preston who helped us do whatever we were feeling musically at any time of day or night. This harp is a Dusty strings harp and that’s a grand piano that was in a kit cupboard at the back of the live room. We fit the piano part like a reverse jigsaw around the harp which is the center point of the song. (C)

1000 Stars – The first sketches for 1000 Stars were originally quite piano led. We wrote this song with Chris Braide in Wandsworth, London. When recording this, Jay Bellerose shaped the percussive live feel and Jen brought a ‘McCartney bounce’ to the bass part. (H) We wrote this soon after our last album, Daylight Crossing, was first released in the UK. When we were recording it live with Jen and Jay they both kicked so much of their energy into it. (C)

The Goodnight Song – We wrote this on a dark night in LA for another album and it came from a different head space. We wrote it entirely together and spontaneously in about two hours. At the time it had no guitar just keys. Jay rigged up all sorts of percussion and became a one man multi instrument when he played rhythm with us. It was in no way a traditional drum kit. (C)

Yours Truly – We were both going through dealing with the disintegration of independently important relationships at the time we wrote this and came running at the song raw. When we recorded it the wounds hadn’t healed (for me at least). That’s Roscoe Beck on stunning delicately detailed fiery upright bass. (C) This was the final track to be recorded for the album. We recorded our vocals through a pair of tights because at that time we didn’t have what we call a ‘spital guard’! Roscoe played upright bass on this track, recorded at Nathaniel Kunkel’s studio in the heat of the Valley during the LA rehearsals for the final LC tour. Peter, Charley and I particularly love the walk down part Roscoe plays that we call his ‘Bach’ moment. (H)

The 4th and last instalment of The Nomad Series is titled ‘The Wilderness’ 18 months ago when the project began, Michael Timmins said:

“This will be an album of new songs. Some of these songs (Angel In The Wilderness, Fairytale, The Confession of Georgie E, etc) we have been playing live for the past year or so and they are bound to find their way on to this volume. There is also a whole set of new songs (and more that are yet to be written) that we will be unveiling on stage over the coming year. We’re not quite sure how these will form themselves into a cohesive album, but these things always work themselves out.”

More recently he’s commented that the quasi-title track, ‘Angels In The Wilderness’ owes a huge debt to the Marilynne Robinson novel “Gilead” (as do many of the songs on “The Wilderness”).

“I have a habit of copying inspiring passages or lines in my notebook when I am reading. I often refer to these notes when I’m doing my own writing or when I’m stuck and looking for a direction. I think I could have copied half of this novel into my notebook. The novel takes the form of a letter written by an elderly, dying pastor to his seven year old son. It is a dense read and the type of book that you only want to undertake when you know you have a good stretch of time to devote to sitting, reading and thinking (such a luxury these days, eh?). Here is a sampling from the book…mull on these thoughts as you stand in line at Target, waiting to return Uncle Ernie’s holiday offerings…”A father must finally give his child up to the wilderness – trust that there will be angels in that wilderness.” …and as you inch closer to the cashier…”We fly forgotten as a dream, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.”

There’ll be more news very shortly on the Danny & The Champions Of The World release plus a little launch party down in London and more details about the long overdue vinyl release of Richmond Fontaine’s ‘Post To Wire’.

In the meantime though, have a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Richmond Fontaine’s Post To Wire finally gets the vinyl treatment. What’s more, it has a bonus 7″ with two previously unreleased songs from the album’s recording sessions.

Post To Wire was released through El Cortez/Décor Records on the 12th of April 2004 and caught the attention of UNCUT’s editor Allan Jones who gave the album a 5 star lead review as “Album of the Month” as well as placing it number 4 in albums of 2004 year end polls. “Uncut’s discovery of the year….Fans of a certain kind of orphaned Americana are likely to fall on Post To Wire like apostles on The Grail. A dark and mesmerising masterpiece, brilliant” Allan Jones UNCUT went on to give the band a 5 page feature and numerous glowing live reviews that year. But it was not just UNCUT championing the band.

All this helped the band from being an un-discovered US band on their 5th album who previously sold 200 copies in Europe to going on to sell over 10,000 copies of what has been oft described as their masterpiece.

Richmond Fontaine formed in 1994 at the Portland Meadows horse track by Vlautin and Dave, when the two took their mutual love of Hüsker Du, Willie Nelson, X, The Blasters, and The Replacements and began playing music together. The band was named after a down and out American expatriate Harding had met while hitchhiking through Mexico.

The bands strength are the story-based songs of singer Willy Vlautin, which were often compared to the stark short stories of writers such as Raymond Carver, Bukowski and Larry Brown. Post To Wire landed the band with their first UK release via Décor/El Cortez. 4 more have followed, the last two, ‘We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River’ and ‘The High Country’ have been released on vinyl by Diverse Records.

We’re thrilled to be able to delve into the band’s back catalogue and give this alt.country masterpiece the vinyl treatment it deserves. The band played the album in its entirety (along with The High Country) at their London gig in September.

‘Those of you alienated by the roisterous flash of Ryan Adams should hitch your horses to Richmond Fontaine’s post right now.”
TIME OUT March 17th-24th Sharon O’Connell

Heroic pedal-steel Springsteen pop from the Pacific Northwest.
Stranded in Portland, Oregon, but seemingly bound for somewhere better, Richmond Fontaine’s second album is already one of this season’s must have Americana purchases. A little dictionary of dashed hopes, Post To Wire is bathed in the half-dead ennui of the latter period Replacements, but Richmond Fontaine singer Willy Vlautin has inherited Paul Westerberg’s nose for Big Star power-pop choruses as well as his half-empty glass eye for a novelistic lyric. Jim Wirth
Mojo April 2004

What Songs, what fucking great songs. This is one of those times. Without a doubt, the best album of the decade so far” Comes With A Smile
Spring 2004

“Burnished Americana; ringing Fender guitars, lachrymose pedal steel, dark balladry – imagines a less feral Uncle Tupelo, but winningly so.”
Q
May 2004

“Post To Wire emerges somewhere between Gram Parsons’ slide guitar majesty and Lou Reed’s narrated New York. The Characters become your neighbours and the tunes as familiar as friends, making Post To Wire a faboulous addition to the all-too-slim canon of passionate, literary rock’n’roll”
4/5 Stars – Guardian

A dynmamic study of the American underbelly, it puts Vlautin’s songwriting on a par with that of his heroes Jay Farrar and Paul Westerberg”
5/5 Stars – Independent
May 2004

Danny & The Champions Of The World released their new album ‘Hearts & Arrows’ on CD through SO Recordings on 18th July 2010. The follow-up to 2009’s acclaimed ‘Streets Of Our Time’, the album was produced by Tony Poole and mixed by Ted Hutt (Gaslight Anthem, Lucero). The album features an entirely new Champs line-up. It will be released on 180g vinyl on 14th February 2012.

“On the back sleeve of the new record, I’m holding a Stratocaster,” grins Danny Wilson. “A friend saw it and said, ‘Woah, a Strat… Controversial!’ Yeah, too fuckin’ right! I wanna play a Strat, and I wanna plug it into a valve amp, and I wanna play music with my friends, and we’ve got a sax in the band, so let’s have a party. We can play all night, if you want. That’s what I love.”

The choice of this particular guitar is by no means random, and signals a number of profound changes for Danny and his Champions Of The World with their third album. First off, the current line-up of the Champs is very different from the line-up that recorded their 2008 eponymous debut album and its 2010 follow-up, ‘Streets Of Our Time’. Whereas the Champions Of The World were originally a loose and chaotic collective of like-minded souls – so loose and so chaotic that, at any given gig or session, you couldn’t accurately predict who exactly would be performing alongside Wilson – this new incarnation of the group is a proper rock’n’roll band, wholly and entirely committed to being the Champs.

“I love folk music, I always have,” Wilson says. “But I’m so fucking bored of ‘new folk’, and the trendiness that surrounds it, everyone pretending that it’s 1971 again. I wanted to make a totally un-bearded record. My reference points were Black Flag and Bad Brains, Tom Petty and Thin Lizzy, not Nick Drake and Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. Forget 1971, this is 1976: Dr Feelgood, Nick Lowe, just great rock’n’roll.”

Be assured, Hearts & Arrows sounds much more alike Tom Petty than Black Flag (who are name-checked on ‘Can’t Hold Back’), but it is also the rockingest waxing the Champs have thus far delivered: you can hear it in the hopeful pulse of opener ‘Ghosts In The Wire’ and the purposeful, melodic hurtle of its chorus, the chiming riffs of the title track and its infectious call to freedom, the urgent gospel-y overtones of ‘You Don’t Know (My Heart Is In the Right Place)’. The album also harbours some of Wilson’s trademark heartbreakers, ballads and laments… Some of his best, in fact, as the potent mourn of ‘Too Tough To Cry’, and his fair-minded, Guralnick-inspired meditation upon Elvis – ‘Colonel & The King’ – prove.

To best capture both sides of the Champs’ temperament, Wilson worked with two particularly adept studio magicians, men who know the ground upon which the Champs tread. The album was produced with Tony Poole, once guitarist with Starry Eyed And Laughing, mid-70s rockers of a kin with Nick Lowe and Brinsley Schwartz, and a man Wilson describes as “a genius guitarist, who comes from a time when the Hippy-ness of music was coming to an end and pub- and punk-rock was rising up. I went back to the source of the sound I was after with Tony.”

The album was mixed, meanwhile, by Ted Hutt, former member of Flogging Molly now better known as one of LA’s most in-demand producers, his CV including key releases by Lucero and Gaslight Anthem. “Ted’s a punk-rock guy who’s well into his Springsteen and his Tom Petty,” grins Danny. “He brought an edge, and an urgency, to the record.”

The lion’s share of the credit for Hearts & Arrows, however, belongs to Danny Wilson and his Champions Of The World, for their songs that wear your heart on their sleeves, for the timeless melodies played with a glorious desperation, like we’re only moments from the curfew, like this were the sweetest encore ever given. Cos Danny’s got a Strat, and he’s gonna plug it into a valve amp, and he’s got a sax in the band, so let’s have a party. They can play all night, if you want. That’s what they love.