Hefner’s third long player, We Love The City was initially released on 16th October 2000 and will be getting a vinyl re-issue (on cult indie label wiaiwya) on 18 Feb 2022. Available on black.
On 26th August 2000 Good Fruit, the first single to be taken from the album, peaked at number 50 in the ACTUAL charts
28th October 2000 the album peaked at number 92 in the album charts
And four tracks from We Love The City made it to Peel’s Festive 50 at the end of the year:
The Greedy Ugly People #7
The Day That Thatcher Dies #12
Good Fruit #15
Painting And Kissing #44
“We Love the City was Hefner’s commercial and creative peak.
Having cleared a large backlog of songs on the band’s first two albums and various B-sides, for their third Darren Hayman wrote a new set of songs, loosely themed around love in the capital city. We Love The City eschews the band’s former broken indie-folk sound in favour of a bouncy, urban, blue-eyed soul, and an expanded line up including Hammond organs, Wurlitzer pianos and brass sections.
Songs like ‘Greedy Ugly People’, ‘Good Fruit’, ‘Painting and Kissing’ and ‘The Day that Thatcher Dies’ are typical examples of the direct, infectious, intelligent style that endeared Hefner to so many. The album’s narrative is conceptual and played out by a retinue of vividly drawn characters, but at heart this is Hayman’s most personal and focussed work.
Always championed by John Peel, promotion for this album culminated in a full, real time performance show session, broadcast live from BBC Maida Vale (now available elsewhere as the album Maida Vale).”
Simon Tyers – The Line Of Best Fit
Make no mistake, this band is adored – maybe some people like nothing better than listening to ditties about characters whose personal life is far worse than their own.
I like music that has a purpose. These instrumentals were composed with a guitar in my hand whilst watching the news. I wanted to not engage fully. The purpose of the music is to distract. You can watch the news with the sound down anyway. There’s one tune for every day of the week. I hope this is useful to you in some way.
All instruments by Darren Hayman, except Saturday, which features viola by James Topham.
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
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.
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.
Available now
Always perfectly capturing the zeitgeist, Darren Hayman releases his 18th solo album, 12 Astronauts, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing
12 men have walked on the moon, and 12 Astronauts includes a song for each of them – from Neil Armstrong to Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan (the Apollo 17 astronauts who quibble about who was the last man on the moon – was it the last person to set foot on the moon (Schmitt) or the last person to take his foot off the moon (Cernan))
Darren has always had an interest in space travel;
o In 1977 he saw Star Wars
o Back in 2001 Hefner (Darren Hayman’s previous band) released a single called Alan Bean about the 4th man on the moon (an all new version is included on 12 Astronauts).
o In 2011 he contributed songs and pictures to Vostok 5, a London exhibition (and compilation album) about people and animals in space (he has also illustrated the cover of 12 Astronauts).
o In March 2014, as part of a year-long residency at Dalston’s Vortex, he played a set of his space-related songs supported by Robin Ince (this included the live debut of a number of tracks from 12 Astronauts).
o His record label, ‘Belka’, is named for one of the first two dogs to go into earth orbit and return alive, so it should come as no surprise that the 12 Astronauts were in the back of his mind while he researched, wrote and recorded his classics about Thankful Villages, the Essex Witch Trials, Lidos, William Morris and British seaside resorts
The songs are works of historical fiction. Although Darren researched heavily he is essentially imagining himself as each astronaut and singing in the first person. The songs are not all set during the Apollo missions. Buzz Aldrin battles with his demons and fights for his marriage. Pete Conrad sympathises with his partner’s fear of an accident in flight. David Scott wonders what happened to his bodyguard on his press tour. Gene Cernan lists every object he can think of that was left on the moon.
Although the subject is big Darren has always written songs about small things and this album is no different. Darren collects together tiny moments from magnificent lives.’
The album itself is curious in its genesis as Darren conceived and started the album back in 2008 and only recently came back to complete it. Some of the vocals are recorded 10 years apart.
The album is released on space coloured vinyl (in spot-gloss sleeve), CD (with fully illustrated booklet), download and as a set of 12 collectors cards.
Order 12 Astronauts on CD INCLUDING POSTAGE AND PACKAGING
Order 12 Astronauts on 12 Collectors Cards plus downloads INCLUDING POSTAGE AND PACKAGING
Released on 9 November, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, Thankful Villages Volume 3 is the final instalment of Darren Hayman’s epic study of rural British life.
A ‘Thankful Village’ is one where every soldier returned alive from the Great War. Darren has visited all 54 of these villages and made a sound recording, painting and film in each one.
Thankful Villages doesn’t concern itself exclusively with the War, however. It is an exploration of rural communities, including collected stories, interviews, folk songs, soundscapes, field recordings and new original songs.
The record takes the form of a fantastical radio show as Darren unearths lost human stories from hidden rural idylls.
The first volume of Thankful Villages revolved around a theme of churches, while the second volume focused on rivers. This third chapter concerns itself with the younger generation. In Hunstanworth, County Durham, Darren records a young girl called Ruby reading a poem written by her grandmother in 1974, on the day of that village’s school closing. The school itself is still signposted by the Giant’s Stride, a Victorian playground apparatus that towers above the village and features on the cover of Thankful Villages Volume 3.
CD artwork differs from vinyl
In Wysall in Nottinghamshire, Darren finds lost cine film of the village shot by two sisters, locally known as ‘the Miss Evans’ and unseen for decades. Julia relates a poignant memory of the closing the village school she went to as a pupil, and how in winter the children warmed themselves around the single stove in the middle of the sole classroom.
In the village of Teigh in the county of Rutland, we hear Sally Beers tell us about her grandfather, the Rev Henry Tibbs, who was arrested and jailed for being a Nazi sympathiser during the Second World war; we learn about mysterious lights in the church and swastikas painted on the door of the vicarage. The soundtrack to this story is in collaboration with the esteemed film composer Simon Fisher Turner.
Since the dissolution of his first band, Hefner, Darren Hayman’s work has increasingly explored location and history. Thankful Villages Volume 3 is the beautiful and poignant culmination of this process; tiny, human vignettes plucked from Britain’s blanket of green.
Thankful Villages Volume 3 was completed with generous funding from the Arts Council of England. Darren was awarded with the ‘Hardest Working Artist’ gong by the Association of Independent Music for his work on Thankful Villages Volume 1.
Previous volumes of Thankful Villages have been extensively covered in features in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The i and the New York Times. Darren has appeared as a guest discussing the Thankful Villages project on BBC Radio 4’s PM and Loose Ends, and The Verb on Radio 3.
He has filmed a segment about Thankful Villages for a documentary to be shown on ITV on 11 November. He is available to write and talk as a musical guest and also as a historical expert on the subject of Thankful Villages and British rural life.
Praise for Thankful Villages:
“Enchanting and oh so English in execution and eccentricity.” fRoots
“An intoxicating collection of folk songs, dreamy instrumentals and poignant interviews set to music, layered with sounds harvested from his visits.” The Financial Times
“Listening to Thankful Villages is to hear a range of stories stretching across history.” The Independent i
“The project resembles a fascinating, occult history of the British countryside, filled with largely forgotten rural stories.” The Guardian
Order Thankful Villages Volume 3 on CD INCLUDING POSTAGE AND PACKING
(record will be sent out for you to receive before November 9th)
Order Thankful Villages Volume 3 on vinyl with download code INCLUDING POSTAGE AND PACKAGING (record will be sent out for you to receive before November 9th)
You can also pre-order the digital version of this album for just £7
This 77 minute piece of music was written for an exhibition by artist and sculptor Finn Thomson. Thomson was artist in residence in Harlow, new town, the subject of Darren’s album ‘Pram Town’.
Thomson’s work deals with people’s reading of public sculpture and he commissioned Darren to provide some music for the installation.
Darren constructed this music out of found sounds in Harlow. The centre of which is a beep emanating from a closed BHS. The piece stand as some kind of updating or sister piece to Pram Town.
We really only have about ten of these and aren’t sure if we can get more. Order quick!
Order ‘Get Out of the Way’ on CD INCLUDING POSTAGE AND PACKING
(Papernut Cambridge is a band in which Darren plays drums, bass, keyboards and saxophone in).
Here Ian Button returns with a core of Papernut regulars plus additional friends and collaborators, and perhaps the most introspective and direct Papernut Cambridge album so far. There’s both flippancy and openness here in a set of songs that mix topics such as self doubt in love, agoraphobia, stealing a dog from Battersea Dogs’ Home, St Peter’s admin troubles in Heaven, father-to-son advice and more. There’s fun, hooks and tunes…but also mortality……stoicism….a kind of spirituality…….all set against music and arrangements that span sunshine guitar pop, Hunky Dory-esque piano flourishes, tearful pub ballads, baggy country glam, even psych boogie woogie.
Outstairs Instairs takes its title from inventor/architect Richard Buckminster Fuller’s idea for a more astronomically accurate way of describing going up or down stairs i.e. outwards from the centre of the earth, or inwards towards it. On the vinyl version, side one plays from the centre outwards, side two from the outside in.
12″ vinyl LP pressed on 140g black vinyl. Side A is an INSIDE OUT cut (plays from the centre label outwards), and side B is cut normally. The LP comes in a brown paper inner sleeve and reverse board outer sleeve (green artwork) with an A4 card lyrics insert.
Includes a CD version of the album.
Order Outstairs Instairs on vinyl with bonus CD INCLUDING POSTAGE AND PACKAGING
