It’s been six years since Proudfoot released
the BJ Cole-produced Lincolnshire, an album with its boots in Nashville but
its head in the English county of Michael Proudfoot’s birth in the prairies of
the East Midlands.
Since then, Michael
and guitarist/collaborator Duncan Kerr have been meeting in the former’s
basement, recording demos for a new record. Flower
Of London is the result. Duncan Kerr is a veteran guitar wrangler from
Stiff Records recording artists Plummet Airlines and their spin-off The Favourites,
two almost-made-it outfits that morphed out of Nottingham’s pub rock and punk
scene. Michael, then singing in wine bars and restaurants to bolster his
student grant, was a fan of both these bands. “I thought, if ever I have a
band, I want that guitar player in it,” he says of Kerr. A mixture of
happenstance and necessity brought the two together almost ten years ago and
they have been working together in London ever since as Kerr’s other gig in
psych-punk outfit The Brainiac 5 allows.
Both Proudfoot and
Kerr knew that this record would be different from Lincolnshire. “I love country music and early rock n’ roll, but I
am essentially a child of the 60s,” says Proudfoot. “I can still vividly
remember the moment The Beatles came into my world via Thank Your Lucky Stars. We lived, literally, in the middle of
nowhere surrounded by potato and wheat fields, The Beatles sound made it seem
as if anything were possible and I fell for it hook line and sinker. Music has
been in my life ever since”
Flower Of London coalesces Michael Proudfoot’s interests in The
Beatles and the Beat Boom, soul, folk and reggae with Kerr’s virtuoso powerpop/punk/country-rock
guitar chops into something not too far from the mature New Wave pop of
Costello, Parker and Difford & Tilbrook. This time, Michael’s songs are
drawn from a wider, more urban spectrum. Flower
Of London trades in the anomalies of life, love, leaving and those he has
known, good and bad. Album opener ‘Pathfinders’ is about his mother’s first
fiancé, an RAF pilot who perished over the English Channel. “The good thing
about songwriting,” says Proudfoot, “….is that you can make a single statement
about a lot of things or a statement about a single moment. It seems to me the
things that affect us most are like that, they are global and big like politics
and war or tiny moments in the macro when someone says or does something you
love or hate…. That’s what this record is about”.
The album release will
be preceded by the single/video ‘Pathfinders’.
Release date:16 September 2016
