I feel like I discovered America or something like that. The HOLLOWMOON come from England, Brighton specifically and personally they stole my heart. Their debut EP titled 'Lovers Don't Mind' is the best I've heard for months, not to say for years ...
This band has a soul, heart and songs that bent bones. Reading (exclusive of course) Jake Fern's article for my column here, I understood why the fire that burns this amazing band is so spontaneous and genuine. The best kept secret of 2011 will not be secret much longer.
The EP is officially released TODAY. Truly, I look forward to their album as few times before. Sometimes music is a blessing even in the gray times we spend our time among the ruins of a world that is changing violently and underground as ever ...
This Saturday 8-10 at Channel 1, I will have a 'Rockzone session' which recorded EXCLUSIVELY for the show.
HOLLOWMOON – ‘NOTHING IN THIS WORLD IS STILL, EVEN THAT GIFT YOU DIDN'T GIVE HER...'
We
started making music together over a decade ago, and pretty much
against the odds we kept going. I joined an organisation that some
ex-members now call a 'cult' (although I tend to disagree) and was asked
to leave England and work overseas, firstly in Nepal and then Sudan. I
still don't know what to make of those years, living as the only
Westerner for hundreds of miles in a mud hut, celibate and with only a
long wave radio and cassette player for entertainment. But we kept
writing sporadically and would get together in between trips, creating
hundreds of demos but nothing we wanted to release.
Steve wrote
music that appeared on the BBC's Ideal with Johnny Vegas and on the
later trips I took tapes of Steve's music and wrote lyrics to it
dripping with sweat in the night under my mosquito net.
Many of
the songs that will appear on Closer Than The Blood, such as 'Voices
From Another Sphere' and 'Jennifer Howe' were written that way. The
words to 'Nothing Between You And The World' were written whilst
building a thorn bush perimeter to a small wood we were trying to
replenish.
Steve and I wrote to each other about what was
happening politically. I was in Sudan when the planes hit the towers and
at that time, despite having read books years before that laid bare the
Agenda, wasn't thinking in terms of conspiracy. Steve was more on the
ball and it's a perspective that in different ways is always there in
the music we write. The songs are essentially all about love but
significantly also about what prevents us from really loving... the
conditioning, the propaganda, the manipulation. And hopefully they are a
celebration of the whole experience.
The title of the album
refers to a quote attributed to Christ in one of the 'outlawed' gospels
where in response to the question, 'Where is Heaven?' he responds, 'It
is closer to you than the blood than runs through your own veins'. That
is essentially the only thing we need to know, i.e., that all the
answers are here, with us. It's just a question of uncovering what is
already there.
Sometimes all the questions and possibilities can
seem overwhelming, which is why it's so important to keep centered and
focus on the heart as much as the mind. We reckon these next few years
really could see huge changes. Never before have the channels of
communication been so open, the opportunities so great. And yet
conversely, never before have the means of control been so integrated
into our daily lives. These are definitely interesting times.
Gar,
Ben and Iain have all got involved since I returned to England from the
final field trip and all of us share similarities of perspective on
life perhaps more than we share musical tastes. I think that's more
productive than the other way around. Ben's basically a metaller, Gar
plays a lot of folk and Iain's a big fan of Peter Green. Steve and I met
through a shared love of bands like The Velvet Underground, The Stooges
and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Whatever the influences, musically
it's important to me to be genuinely English, to be authentic and true
to ourselves. If you can do that then at some point people will respond.
