JONT + Elaine Palmer + Peggy Sue & the Pirates

Wed 21st Jun 2006

The Luminaire presents
JONT
+ Elaine Palmer
+ Peggy Sue & the Pirates

Doors 8.00 £5 via WeGotTickets

“Stellar” (Observer Music Monthly)
“So irresistibly lovely it makes you want to hug strangers on the street.” (Q)
“Wracked like early Lennon, resigned and confessional like Springsteen, Jont will be huge.” (Sunday Times Culture)
And by way of further explanation, we'll let the man do the talking himself...
“I left London for New York in April 2003 after being in various bands, having had different managers and deals fall through. I was going to go to L.A. but I'd fallen in love with a girl who worked behind the bar at a pub in Archway who'd just moved to New York. So, telling myself and my friends that I was going to find a new manager and to set up my night UNLIT in Brooklyn, I went to try to track her down.
“‘One Long Song’, my debut mini-album, is a taster, an introduction to a larger collection of songs, sparked by that decision to leave. In these six tracks there is birth (of my niece, in ‘You Can Be The Stars’), death (of my manager and friend Tony Meilandt in ‘Can't Turn The Sea Off’), a break up, loneliness and epiphany.
“Now further into this adventure, I have a flat in L.A. (you see I got there eventually) and UNLIT has become a hybrid of a house-party and a gig, featuring various different invited performers in changing locations around the city most Friday nights. Also I met up with some guys who saw the world the same way and were able to make my music sound like it should, called Keefus, Sam and John, or - Green, Music and Gold.”
The touching sentiment of, ‘Sweetheart’, featured on the Original Soundtrack to the ‘The Wedding Crashers’ and a huge underground following of movie ushers developed in America. Sitting solitary and entranced as the credits rolled, the ushers would invite their friends along for closed doors listens to the song and collectively exchanged messages and stories on Jont’s packed Myspace page detailing their experiences. It is this inadvertent Midas touch that continually endears and enriches, touching strangers stranded in the mundane and bringing them into the warm, into the special.
With UNLIT continuingly evolving from Los Angeles to London via Luton (his parties garner serious rumbles in the tuned-in underground), Jont refuses to settle for the conventional or clichéd. Aided by an extraordinary band; a veritable trove of exceptional musicians, his live experience has become a wholly fresh and exciting new proposition.
In conclusion (yet this, the very start) Jont encapsulates the very essence of a true artist; his life; a fascinating, bewitching story involving curious events crossed with times of great pain. His uncompromising attitude is testament to the beautiful songs that feature on ‘One Long Song’. He is never earnest, forever humorous, and if he wasn’t a musician he would now be playing professional cricket for Middlesex.

RSS