NOAH AND THE WHALE TOUR COMES TO SOUTH WEST
Anti-folk heroes Noah and The Whale return to the South West in October after a fabulous performance at the Port Eliot Festival in July as their tour bus rolls around the UK once more. This time, the indie folk foursome are promoting their second album, ‘The First Days Of Spring’, and they’ll play Exeter Phoenix on 10 October, Komedia in Bath on 11 October, and the Princess Pavilion in Falmouth on 12 October.
Their debut album, ‘Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down’, reached the top ten with single ‘5 Years Time’ reaching number 7 in the singles chart last year. With a distinct “home made” ethic evident in the band’s output (they have shot some of their videos themselves and often get involved in concepts), the band have also branched out into making films.
“I do see the film and the album as being together, as a unified thing,” says Noah and the Whale’s chief songwriter and singer Charlie Fink about the band’s new record and accompanying film, The First Days of Spring. “But the album very much came first – it has its own internal narrative.”
As with their debut, last year’s Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, the Londoners’ second release follows a structure. There are songs here – Blue Skies, Our Window, I Have Nothing, Slow Glass – that cry out for special attention, for love. But the journey the album takes you on, from the ominous drum tattoo and string swell on the opening title track right through to the strummed acoustic guitar, pedal-steel keening and massed voices that bring My Door is Always Open to its devastating close, is an experience quite unlike that offered by most music being made today.
Charlie began thinking of making an album that was also a film (and, as he sees it, vice versa) last year. The film, shot on a miniscule budget in a tight time-frame – a process one of the producers describes “as making a near feature-length film, for the budget of a short, in eight days” – and directed by Charlie himself, can be seen as a companion piece to the album, as a visual version of it, or as a piece of work in its own right. That decision is very much up to us, as the listener and viewer, says Charlie. With the album lyrics as the film’s backbone, we watch a succession of actors (including model Daisy Lowe) playing characters who struggle with intimacy, isolation, death and renewal in relationships.
Tickets for the gigs are £12 and are available from seetickets.com
Also, you can catch Noah and The Whale performing a special live set at a screening of their film ‘The First Days Of Spring’ at the Watershed in Bristol on 30 August. Tickets are £6.50, more details here.
