EVENTS CALENDAR

Roll over dates on the calendar above to show event details.

HOT GIG TICKETS

WILLY VLAUTIN of RICHMOND FONTAINE + Bob Frank & John Murry + DBC Pierre

Tue 22nd May 2007

The Luminaire presents
WILLY VLAUTIN of RICHMOND FONTAINE
+ Bob Frank & John Murry
+ DBC Pierre

Doors 7.30
£11 via WeGotTickets
£12 door

Richmond Fontaine is a four-piece alt country band based in Portland, Oregon. The band was formed in 1994 by guitarist / lead vocalist Willy Vlautin and bass player Dave Harding at the Portland Meadows horse race track. Many of the band's songs relate to horse racing.

Richmond Fontaine first started out working the Northwest live circut on the back of their first two albums released on Cavity Search and down into Texas with friends Grand Champeen. The band self released their fourth album 'Winnemucca' which started to get them noticed outside of the US. They have worked with a variety of musicians and a few labels over their career. Their big break happened in Europe during 2003 with signing to Decor Records and receiving two Albums of the Month in UNCUT Magazine which declared both 'Post to Wire' (2004) and 'The Fitzgerald' (2005) as masterpieces, unheard of at this time for an unknown band.

Their songs consistently evoke lyrical imagery of Reno, Nevada, Portland, the Western United States and Mexico while telling stories in a style that has been compared to Raymond Carver. Musically the group has cited influences such as Gram Parsons, X (U.S. band), Green on Red and Dave Alvin.

Lead Singer and songwriter Willy Vlautin has recently published his first novel 'The Motel Life' and the band's new album 'Thirteen Cities' is getting even more rave reviews across Europe.

Supporting Willy this evening are Bob Frank & John Murry whose Decor Records [Richmond Fontaine, Mark Eitzel] released album 'World Without End' is "a dazzling collection of blasted country folk and grimly haunting murder ballads, shot through with harrowing images of death, damnation and eternal suffering. Legendary producer Jim Dickinson describes the record as “timeless as death” and Frank as “the greatest songwriter you never heard”. On the evidence of this, Jim’s right on both counts." [Uncut]

As Frank notes, “We were going to do an album of old murder ballads, songs that already existed. Like 'Omie Wise' and 'The Banks Of The Ohio' but when we started to record them we realized it didn’t work. They had been done too many times. So John says, we’ll have to write all new songs and make ‘em sound old.”

'World Without End' is a terrifyingly unique collection of ten original murder ballads by Frank and Murry recalling true-but-forgotten tales of murder, death and suicide from the annals of a dark American past, and has drawn comparisons to The Gun Club, Handsome Family, Willard Grant Conspiracy and the darker macabre dwellings of gothic noir.

Bob Frank is a forgotten folk legend that has toured the US throughout the 60s and early 70s sharing the stage with Tim Buckley and Townes Van Zandt. Bob released his first self titled album for the Vanguard label but was quickly dropped after he cursed the company boss from stage on his New York press gig! Bob quit the record business soon after and disappeared from sight until old songwriting pal and legendary producer, Jim Dickinson (Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Big Star) convinced him to make a second record over thirty years later. His cohort, John Murry, is none other than the great nephew of William Faulkner and has played with the Dillingers and Lucero. This will be there first London performance ever.

Adding a little literary excellene to proceedings will be DBC Pierre, who won the MAN Booker Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for Comic Writing in 2003 with his debut novel, 'Vernon God Little'. His second novel, Ludmila's Broken English, described in the Independent as "thrilling, electric, visionary, vicious and brilliantly amusing." was published in 2006.

RSS