An EP of five songs for free for Christmas. A preview of an album ‘You Will Not Die’ to be released in 2021.
Download here.
Actually I Still Really Really Miss You
Author: darren
xx!! – a tribute to the James Bond themes of Dame Shirley Bassey – Featuring Darren
double coloured vinyl 7″, with inner sleeves includes download
Darren covers Goldfinger with backing singers and everything.
Full track listiing…
Sleeper featuring David Gedge – Mr Kisss Kiss Bang Bang
The Left Outsides – Diamonds are Forever
Darren Hayman – Goldfinger
DJ Downfall featuring Theoretical Girl – Moonraker
SOLD OUT! SORRY!
The Doll’s House Room
Recorded in the last two weeks of May 2020 during lockdown.
My intention was to make something in lockdown that didn’t sound as though it was recorded in lockdown. Something that was open, loud and free sounding.
Recorded in the Doll’s House room at Darren’s parents house. Misha and Jon’s parts recorded at Misha’s flat and Jon’s studio, One Cat Studio.
Darren Hayman – Voice, Rickenbacker 620, Jen SX 1000, Fender Bass
Jonathan Clayton – Drums
Misha Chylkova – Voice on “Better Off Dead”
Available on download through Bandcamp.
01 Men Die First
02 Better Off Dead
03 Make a Home
04 Me and You
05 My Hand, My Heart
06 Dead Summer
I Was Thinking About You – Darren Hayman
The third video from Darren Hayman’s Home Time album.
I Was Thinking About You
The third video for Darren Hayman’s Home Time album.
Joint Account – Video
A video from Darren’s album Hometime
I Can Travel Through Time – Darren Hayman – 10 track 33 rpm 7 inch
This is an album, but it is not an album. Released on a 33rpm seven inch, this record features ten songs, some less then a minute long. It is released on Formosa Punk Records on 24th April 2020.
The record acts as an epilogue or side bar to Darren’s new full-length record later this year, Home Time on Fika Records. Both records are concerned with break ups but more importantly the emotional retreat we need to recover from these things.
‘When I’m hurt I want to be small. I want to be unnoticed. During the making of Home Time I was imposing restrictions on myself to make the music smaller, limiting to 8 track, acoustic instruments,’ says Darren.
After making the album Darren though further about these ideas of retreat and going into hiding. ‘I thought another way to make the songs even smaller is to make them literally small. I wrote 13 tiny pieces, barely a verse and a chorus, but every one of them said what I needed it to. I chose the best ten for the record.’
The record was made in one day at East London’s Soup Studios with a band consisting of Emma Kupa (bass – Standard Fair, Mammoth Penguins), Patrick Ralla (Rocking Birds, Hanging Stars) and Johnny Helm (The Wave Pictures).
The seven inch is limited to 300 copies, 100 for Japan and 300 for the UK. It is available through Hayman’s own website hefnet.com and a very few select shops.
The digital release will include 23 tracks including demos of every song and three extra songs. It will be available through all usual digital outlets. The physical copy comes with a download link to this version.
Side A: 1. Blue Suitcase 2. You Are Still My Password 3. I Want to be a Dot 4. Want Doesn’t Get 5. Gold in a Box
Side B: 1. Do You Think I Would Again 2. Brown Paper 3. Make It Disapear 4. A Family 5. On the Edge of Things
Physical copies sold out. Sorry.
Or you can buy the 23 download version here from Bandcamp.
Home Time – Darren Hayman
AVAILABLE NOW!
Darren Hayman returns with the new album Home Time, due out on 22nd May via Fika Recordings. An autobiographical album about break ups, the record is tender, honest and frequently funny. Darren set an 8 track, acoustic rule for the record. Everything sounds warm, close and intimate. Darren’s own love-worn, London voice is joined on every song by the sweet antipodean tones of Hannah Winter and Laura K, recording artists and songwriters themselves with Common or Garden and Fortitude Valley.
When Darren Hayman made his debut in 1997 with the acclaimed indie band Hefner his lyrical remit was the broken hearted. His early songs told the story of the lonesome and lost, and broken dreams of love on the back streets of London. After Hefner, Hayman’s palette grew to include a unique take on place and memory. In the early 2000s he wrote a trilogy of albums around the history of Essex. In 2012 he made an instrumental album describing the tranquillity of Lidos. In 2016 Darren was awarded ‘Hardest Working Musician’ by the Association of Independent Music for his epic project on Thankful Villages, the 55 villages that survived the Great War with no casualties. His most recent record, 12 Astronauts, tells the personal story of the only men to have walked on the Moon.
Darren is continually obsessed with the idea of what songs can be, and the stories they can tell. As he explains, “With projects like Thankful Villages, I became interested in what a record could be, using field recordings, interviews and songs to make sound collages. I wanted to return to the stricter art of song writing and try and make the twelve best compositions I could. I wanted to make useful songs, words that could be comfort, not just thoughts that would depress.”
The songs for Home Time were written over a three-year period but recorded quickly, and with love, in Darren’s home. Home Time is a fragile, subtle slice of prettiness. Wrap it around you.
Three digital singles will be released; ‘I Tried and I Tried and I Failed’, a song about the endless, circular nature of being human, ‘I Was Thinking About You’, a song about the uncontrollable nature of memory and how it continues to haunt us even when we consider the long buried, and ‘The Joint Account’, about how when trying to negotiate matters of the heart and mind, it is sometimes the physical objects that anchor us down in the mire.
A baby sister album I Can Travel Through Time with ten one-minute songs squeezed on a seven inch is coming out alongside it on the Formosa Punk label.
Please take care to choose correct worldwide location.
Vinyl (including download)
CD
You can also buy the download from Bandcamp here…
Stars – Various Artists (including Darren Hayman)
An album including Darren with an exclusive song ‘Blue Tinsel, Red Tinsel’. As well as 7 other artists: Whoa Melodic, Scrabbel, White Town, Spaceship, Bill Botting, Catenary Wires, and Jeff Mellin.
Pre-order now, prices include P and P.
I can get it to you for xmas.
Please take care to choose correct worldwide location.
Songs of High Altitude – Album (download only)
In the two decades since he fronted indie heroes Hefner, Darren Hayman has established himself as a prolific and acclaimed solo artist, with many of his projects having a powerful, often literal focus on location, history and community.
After a recent release focused around the Apollo astronauts and his previous mammoth Thankful Villages project, Hayman is releasing a delightful travelogue album written and recorded during and after a visit to India in early summer 2019.
The collection of instrumentals (apart from one track with lyrics) is called Songs of High Altitude, and comes complete with a digital booklet of notes and paintings from the trip.
A few words on the format of this release from Darren…
“I do understand that a lot of my audience would prefer a physical record or CD. I just get so behind with things. I know it’s a brag but I really do write a lot of songs. Writing songs is like a cure to my procrastination, or perhaps more accurately, writing songs IS my procrastination. I tend to to do that instead of doing the long winded business of releasing them. I have a hard drive here with at least 5 unreleased albums going back over the past ten years. The fact that they are unreleased is no reflection on their quality. It’s luck and circumstance as to what comes out.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun for a change for people to hear the most recent thing I’d done. I made this earlier this year. Try not to think less of it because it’s a download. I just wanted to do it as an experiment. No press, no reviews, no manufacturing, boom, here it is.
Hope you like.’