Friday 20th November
Edge St Live Presents
Thea Gilmore + Nigel Stonier
£20/£22 (+10% Booking fee)
Doors open 8pm
Seated show
Ghosts & Graffiti – The new album….with a difference.
The Waterboys, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, John Cooper Clarke, Joan as Policewoman, King Creosote, I Am Kloot…. Names that seldom appear in the same sentence, let alone on the same album.
But the album is ‘Ghosts & Graffiti’ by Thea Gilmore – and when the artist is Thea Gilmore, normal rules don’t apply.
Indeed throughout Gilmore’s career (17 years and counting) normal rules have never applied. This most gifted and fiercely independent singer / songwriter threw out the career book from day one.
“Ghosts And Graffiti” is a retrospective with a difference, a 20 track double album where Thea Gilmore looks both forward and back. It includes all her best known songs on one record for the first time.
It includes all her best known songs on one record for the first time. It also includes 4 new songs, AND 6 newly recorded versions of songs from her back catalogue.
It features a duet with Joan Baez, and a duet with Billy Bragg. It includes a full collaboration with The Waterboys, produced and co-sung by Mike Scott. John Cooper Clarke appears, reading one of Thea’s poems. Neil Gaiman, the iconic fantasy novelist, contributes the sleeve notes. Joan As Policewoman collaborates on one of Thea’s defining songs. There are also special collaborations with John Bramwell (I Am Kloot) and with King Creosote.
All the above signed up quickly when Thea started planning – testimony to her reputation among her peers, but scarcely surprising as a glance at her career shows….
After all, Bruce Springsteen regularly uses her work as play-on music at shows, she has duetted with Sting, and Martha Wainwright…and the depth and breadth of her fans is extraordinary and includes Richard Thompson, Neil Gaiman, Steve Earle, David Baddiel, Stephen Mangan, William Boyd and David Morrissey.
She was the artist chosen by Sandy Denny’s estate to set some of that late great writers unfinished lyrics to music … and in the process she created a hit album and the song “London” which became the TV theme to the 2012 Olympic Games.
She recorded an entire Bob Dylan album in celebration of the great mans 70th birthday and was promptly invited by Dylan’s management to contribute to a special charity album of Dylan songs they were curating that same year. Since being described in Q magazine in 1999 – whilst still in her teens – as “already in a league of her own among UK female singer/songwriters” Gilmore has released 14 albums. Her honey toned alto sends shivers down the spines of the most hardened cynics, and her beyond-prolific body of work is a rich mosaic with staggering depths and detours. She bleeds stark intimate confessionals with dark poetic twists…
She peppers national radio playlists with literate love songs, and her last album “Regardless” was a top 40 hit in 2013.
Most strikingly, her work includes a series of socially conscious songs that form a narrative thread delineating some of the most resonant, harrowing issues of the last 20 years – the Stephen Lawrence murder, the war on terror, racism and sexism in celebrity culture, the pre Iraq War jingoism, the dumbing down of mainstream TV, and her own generations political apathy.
Now, as admirers line up to celebrate, her gaze hovers between the rear view mirror and the horizon and Thea Gilmore, one of the few contemporary artists with populist appeal and integrity intact, is poised to release a unique collection which represents both an end and a new beginning.
Bookings are not currently available for this event.