The New Cue #424 October 9: Hayden Thorpe, Efterklang, Forgotten Pharaohs

"I ran a little CD burning business when I was 13..."

Good morning,

Welcome to your Wednesday dose of TNC goodness. Today we’ve got a midweek cracker as Hayden Thorpe answers our Release Valve questions, we get the skinny on their debut from new blues-rock duo Forgotten Pharaohs and Danish dons Efterklang pick a mind-blower.

Let’s get straight to it. You know that today’s edition is for paying subscribers only, don’t you? You do because we’ve told you before. It costs £5 a month to become a fully-fledged subscriber, securing you legendary status for the rest of the your life. Do you want to be the sort of person Ted and Niall talk about in the pub in awed tones? Then click Subscribe Now below. And then proceed, the content is waiting for you.

See you on Friday ledges,

Ted and Niall

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Release Valve: Hayden Thorpe

The London-based singer-songwriter from Cumbria recently released his excellent third solo album Ness, a record that sees the ex-Wild Beasts frontman build minimalist atmospherics and airy electronic-pop out of words from the Robert Macfarlane book of the same name. Here, he tackles our RV queries…

The first record I loved was… Blur’s The Great Escape. My primary school friends had elder brothers and sisters who ingratiated us into good music early on. I remember the Britpop-era as a time when bands were in and on the news all the time. There was a huge amount of attention on the scene. I lapped it up.

The truth is, I was a bit too young for a lot of the nuance and irony of this record. It’s themes around 90’s boomtime free-market London were a bit over my head but the musicality was enthralling, much of which still stands up. For instance, the last track Yuko and Hiro is a very odd song but it’s a beautiful, unlikely piece of music that I’m still moved by.

The last record I loved was… Blake Mills - Look EP. From what I understand Blake Mills made this record after buying a 1970’s guitar synthesiser. It’s an instrument which was futuristic at the time, but the future never quite took to it. Look is an epic and yearning piece of work. Totally self-contained, 4 tracks, 25 minutes. Seriously, symphonically beautiful. I listen to it on the underground as it fills up all the frequencies and helps me zone into a better place.

The musician I grew up most wanting to be is… Leonard Cohen. I think Cohen was the first artist I recognised as being indistinguishable from their songs. All the heightened love, sex, loss, romance, adventure, spiritual healing and so on felt like a life fully lived. It was his way of being in the world that enthralled me.