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MEILYR JONES shares “Featured Artist” video and announces more UK live dates

January 31, 2016

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MEILYR JONES

Shares ‘Featured Artist‘ Video

Debut album, 2013 due 18th March via Moshi Moshi

With his much-anticipated solo debut album 2013 due for release 18th March on Moshi Moshi, one of this year’s brightest prospects, the incomparable MEILYR JONES, releases one of the album’s countless stand-out tracks, “Featured Artist”, as a single.

The track is a gentle dig at Sunday supplement culture, in which there is always another ageing star to be reclaimed. “It’s told from the perspective of an old man, kind of like Jacques Brel or Orson Welles,” Jones explains. “And you can imagine someone like that falling out of favour, then being rediscovered towards the end of their life, and people saying ‘We’re going to get you a new audience, and we’re going to get a stylist in and make you wear a cravat.” Watch the video below…

Following his sold-out Electrowerkz show last week Meilyr has also announced news of more UK live performances, including a headline show at London’s Moth Club in April. Upcoming UK dates below:

Friday 12th February – Cardiff  – From Now On Festival

Monday 25th April – Ramsgate – Music Hall

Tuesday 26th April  – London – Moth Club
Wednesday 27th April  – Birmingham – Sunflower Lounge 
Friday 29th April  – Liverpool – Studio 2
Monday 2nd May – Newcastle – Cluny 
Tuesday 3rd May  – Glasgow – King Tuts 
Friday 13th May  – Cardiff – Clwb Ifor Bach
Saturday 14th May  – Wrexham – Focus Wales 
Saturday 11th June  – London – Field Day 
Saturday 23rd July  – North Yorkshire – Deershed Festival
18-21 August – Green Man Festival 

‘Featured Artist’ is the third track to be revealed from 2013, and follows the earlier success of “Refugees” and ‘How To Recognise a Work of Art.’

“I conceived of the record as a compilation of myself, over the period of a year,” says Meilyr Jones. “As an anthology, a collection of my songs and of what happened to me in that year.”

The year in question was 2013, a curious time in Jones’s life, when the weeks were scored by loss and pleasure and revelation, and when, after the end of both his band, Race Horses, and his relationship, he made a short but transformative trip to Rome, drawn by a fascination with sculpture and Byron and Berlioz, and by a desire “to see something new and different.”

The songs that emerged from that time proved quite different to anything he had written before, and form one of the most beautiful and sincere albums of this year; 13 songs in which joy and rapture are tempered by wit and humour, by jubilant pop melody and rock and roll muscularity.

To spend any time with Jones is to be struck by his particularity. He is a rare figure: distinct, uncontrived, erudite. In person he has a gentleness and an unashamed intellect; on stage he reveals an exuberance and a ready showmanship.

He presents his potted biography in modest fashion: “I’m 28,” he begins. “From Aberystwyth, by the sea. My Mum’s a nurse and my Dad’s a children’s books author. And I guess I was always into music, at school I joined a band that became Race Horses, and I really enjoyed being that band. And I went to music college, studied the tuba, dropped out after three years.”

A less humble account might note that the college in question was the Royal Academy of Music, and might also mention Jones’s stint playing bass on tour for Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip’s Neon Neon, as well as his work with Stealing Sheep and for the Cousins project with Euros Childs.

2013 did not begin the way that most albums do. The desire to visit Rome stemmed from a book about sculpture, in which he read about the “resurgence in interest in classical sculpture, beauty and simplicity” in the 18th century, and was struck, in particular, by the story of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German art historian “who moved to Rome to see all the sculptures.”

Around the same time he began to read Byron’s Don Juan, and found it “a complete revelation, because to me it was like early hip hop, in that it was really fun and irreverent but so heroic, and gentle and crude. I got really taken over by the feeling of adventure and passion in Byron, and some of Shelley’s poetry and Keats as well. And they were all people who went to Rome.”

In Italy he lived differently. “I’d go out every day, walking for six hours, go to churches, just to see paintings,” he says. He spoke no Italian but lived with Romans, joining them for late night dinners and early morning drinking.

Returning to London, he decided to set about recording. Five of the songs he had conceived as orchestral pieces, and so he assembled a 30-strong orchestra “out of friends, and friends of friends of friends,” he explains. “In the same way that if you were to start a pop band.” There was a saxophonist, a bassoonist, a clarinetist, some classical players, jazz players, brass players from his tuba days and a French harpist. There was Lucy Mercer from Stealing Sheep on drums, Ros Stephen (Robert Wyatt) on violin, multi-instrumentalist Emma Smith (James Yorkston), and Jones’s brother on timpani. For a single day they all gathered at a recording studio in South London, with the producer Iwan Morgan and the engineer Jimmy Robertson.

“I wanted to record it completely live,” Jones explains. “The idea was doing it like a Frank Sinatra session.” Over the course of that day they recorded the main body of the tracks Olivia, Return to Life, Passionate Friend, Rome and Be Soft, the songs later embellished with further additions – a community choir in Glasgow, field recordings of birds, three trombonists recorded in a cemetery, among them.

What that means for 2013 is a staggeringly rich array of influences and musical textures. There are flushes of baroque, of recorder and harpsichord, there is a recording of a Japanese accordion player he met in Rome, snatches of karaoke on a mobile phone, lush walls of sound followed by a wisp of David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel or an organ recording made in a church in Bristol.

“I wanted to make something that felt right to me and expressed my interests, which are classical music and rock ‘n’ roll music, and films, and nature and karaoke, and tacky stuff,” Jones says. “And I wanted to capture that feeling in Rome of high culture and low-brow stuff all mixed together.”

2013 was borne out of a time when Jones was no longer quite certain of who he was. But this is not, he says, a record that came from pain. “I guess some bits are about loss, and a lot about fear, because I think I’d lost my reason to do things. But I’d gained an openness. I started to listen and appreciate quieter things. The things in between. Not just the strong colours.”

What Italy gave him was the notion of a “rich internal life” to be explored: the quiet contemplation of a church at midday, the wonder of sculptural form, a desire for grace, epic poetry and baroque violin. The collection of songs that it led to are as various, unusual, and contrary as all of the pieces that make up a person. It is the sound of a young man discovering who he is.

2013 will be released 18th March on Moshi Moshi.
2013 tracklisting:
3. Passionate Friend
5. Rome
6. Rain In Rome
7. Strange Emotional
8. Return To Life
9. Love
10. Olivia

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