Category: Album

We Love The City – Hefner – Vinyl Re-issue

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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.

Alan Woodhouse, NME

Order We Love the City on black vinyl here!

SOLD OUT! Sorry

Music To Watch News By – Darren Hayman – Download only

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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.

There is also a video for every tune.



















xx​!​! – a tribute to the James Bond themes of Dame Shirley Bassey – Featuring Darren

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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

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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 Can Travel Through Time – Darren Hayman – 10 track 33 rpm 7 inch

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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

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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)

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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)

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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.’

12 Astronauts by Darren Hayman – Vinyl, CD, Ltd Download Cards and Download

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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


Or pre-order from Bandcamp for £7