Tag: discography

The Ship’s Piano

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Super low price, just a tenner for the vinyl! (with a little postage)

See Darren perform The Ship’s Piano live on October 21st 2025 at Theatre Ship London

http://www.wegottickets.com/fikarecordings

Released 17th October 2011 

In November 2009 I had this thing happen to me, where I ended up in hospital with a fractured skull. For a few months I felt constantly dizzy and was diagnosed with some deafness in one ear. Sharp loud noises bothered me greatly. I was told to rest and do nothing, but who knows how to do that?

Music always helps when I’m ill, so I started to make the simplest, quitest music to help me recuperate. I tried to make the music that I wanted to hear, which is perhaps what we should always be doing, but in this case there was a direct therapeutic need.

I avoided any jagged edges. I kept imagining the sounds I wanted as round and smooth, like well-worn pebbles.

Lyrically I also found myself eschewing conceptual and metaphoric character led songs. I started to write the simplest and most direct words in the first person, something I have avoided for a few years.

If you are a songwriter and something bad happens to you, people say, “You can write a song about it at least.” They mean well, but the big events in life have to seep out gradually with me and not in urgent, confessional bursts. The songs on this record are pleas for calm. As I get older I find I prefer small, quiet things.

All the songs were written on my ship’s piano. ‘Ship’s Piano’ is a colloquial term given to small-scale pianos that were used on boats. Mine was built in France in 1933 and folds away to resemble a sideboard. I wrote a song where I imagine its history. It’s called ‘The Ship’s Piano’.

Buy Ship’s Piano on CD


Buy Ship’s Piano on vinyl with download code


Or download from Bandcamp for £6.50 here:

The Ship’s Piano – Related records

I Taught You How To Dance

Originally released 21st November 2011 on Fortuna Pop.

‘I Taught You How To Dance’ is the sole single from The Ship’s Piano. Sweet, gentle, and with just a hint of sexual tension, it offers an ideal sampler of the warmth and complexity of Darren’s solo piano album. ‘I Taught You How To Dance’ is available on 10-inch 4-track single only, and also features three covers of other songs with ‘Dance’ in the title: ‘Dance Away’ by Roxy Music, ‘I Don’t Want To Dance’ by Eddy Grant and ‘Come Dancing’ by the Kinks.

 

Buy I Taught You How To Dance on 10-inch vinyl


 

 

Essex Arms SALE PRICE

Posted on by darren

FPOP95 Format: CD / Vinyl / Download Released: 04 October 2010

The new album from ex-Hefner man Darren Hayman and his band of folk-rock renegades is their finest work to date

Essex Arms is the third album by Darren Hayman And The Secondary Modern. Darren, of course, is best known as the singer-songwriter of the phenomenally successful and much-loved Hefner, although it’s worth noting that he has now made six albums to Hefner’s four. In the latest incarnation of the constantly morphing Secondary Modern he has gathered together a set of musicians with the chops to do justice to his increasingly complex and mature songs; a tight, tough, but soulful folk-rock orchestra reminiscent of a more urban Incredible String Band or an Anglicized Lambchop.

The second in a proposed trilogy of albums about Hayman’s home county of Essex, Essex Arms is a conceptual piece about the East Anglian rural underbelly. Whereas Pram Town (2009) dealt with the displacement and ennui of living in a new town (Harlow) – and received the best reviews of Hayman’s post-Hefner career – Essex Arms takes the narrative to the countryside.

Buy Essex Arms on CD


Buy Essex Arms on vinyl (with download code)


 

Or buy the download from Bandcamp for £7

Florence – Darren Hayman

Posted on by darren

6th November 2015

12” vinyl LP / digital – Fika Recordings

Darren Hayman returns with a beautifully delicate and touchingly honest album simply titled Florence after the city in which it was created. This is his very first purely solo album, featuring no other musicians. It was written and recorded between Christmas and New Year at the end of 2014 in the Firenze flat belonging to Elizabeth Morris (Allo Darlin’) and Ola Innset (Making Marks). Continuing his habit of making incisive, observational and beautiful albums, with Florence Hayman has taken a back-to-basics approach, eschewing his recent collaborative, conceptual approaches for a humble and modest solo effort, entirely recorded and performed in the Italian apparetemento of his hosts.

est known as the singer-songwriter of the phenomenally successful and much-loved Hefner, Darren Hayman is now 15 years, and over 14 albums, into an increasingly idiosyncratic career path, where he has taken a singular and erratic route through England’s tired and heartbroken underbelly. Darren is also writing the best tunes of his career; increasingly complex and mature songs, he is a thoughtful, concise and detailed songwriter.

Hayman’s first two solo albums, Table For One (2006) and The Secondary Modern (2007), charmed the critics – with The Guardian opining that Hayman’s profoundly English songwriting was “the match of Ray Davies”. Mostly joined by his band The Secondary Modern – a loose, urban folk collective, underpinning Hayman’s concrete sorrow with rural violins and tired pianos – he has released a series of albums,

largely focused on place. This allowed for the exploration of nuanced subjects in detail, with a trio of albums based in Essex (2009’s Pram Town and 2010’s Essex Arms) and culminating in 2012’s The Violence, a 20-song account of the 17th century Essex witch trials. From this he developed an album of English Civil War folk songs of the time (2013’s Bugbears) and stayed with the historical theme for this year’s Chants For Socialists, which saw him set William Morris’ words to music, creating an album of kindness and hope that brought Hayman’s most critical acclaim yet.

Florence is sparse and poignant. Tinged with melancholy and etched with heartache, revealing the very best of Hayman’s considerable songwriting verve, this collection of songs shows what you can achieve whilst on holiday at a friend’s house, taking refuge in the winter quiet during the festive season.


DOWNLOAD DIGITAL VERSION FROM BANDCAMP FOR JUST £7

 

(rediscovered stock) The Bands That Don’t Reform – Darren and Antony

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A split single from the two ex-Hefner members.

 
 

BUY THE SEVEN INCH HERE…


Or buy the downloads from Bandcamp

Buy the downloads for just a couple of quid here…

Nutlets 1967 – 80 by Papernut Cambridge

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‘As I’ve said previously on here, the most fun I have onstage and in the studio at the moment is with Papernut Cambridge. On this record I’m playing keyboards, bass, percussion and saxophone. Songwriter and head ‘nut’ has gone back to his childhood and recorded the pop classics that shaped his Papernut masterplan.’

Vinyl and CD set:

Transparent orange 140g vinyl LP in a white/orange/silver sleeve + CD version in a white/orange/silver wallet. Mixes/edits on the CD are slightly different from the vinyl versions. This set does not include a download of the album. Price includes postage and packing.

Tracklist:

‘Broken Hearted Blues’ ‘(T.Rex)
‘I Believe In Love’ (Hot Chocolate)
‘What Ruthy Said’ (Cockney Rebel)
‘Jesamine’ (The Bystanders/The Casuals)
‘Sugar Me’ (Lynsey De Paul)
‘I’ve Been A Bad Bad Boy’ (Paul Jones)
‘Jealous Mind’ (Alvin Stardust)
‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’ (Edison Lighthouse)
‘White Horses’ (Jacky)
‘Rockers Delight’ (Mikey Dread)

Nutlets 1967 – 80 by Papernut Cambridge from Darren (inc P+P)


Digital version here.

Folk Lullabies for Children and the Childless – Limited Cassette Release

Posted on by darren

14 Lullabies from around the world, released on a beautiful limited cream cassette complete with download code.

All prices include Postage and Packing.

Buy the cassette with download.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or buy just the download for £7.

brute love 03 by brute love

Posted on by darren

we can just see the sun though the fog on a good day. spaceship mark says that when the land is fertile then the woman shall be soon.

these are brighter sounds for tomorrow. your animals will rest when they hear them.

we have not heard the voice from the dome for two moons.

we dare to dream of future.

ep costs just 99p.

brute love 02 by brute love

Posted on by darren

darren and emma seek sunlight. they hate rules. they make rules. they need money to nurse their baby rats. nothing will be good again. it can never be like before. but sister lives. where is spaceship mark.

brute love 01 by brute love

Posted on by darren

brute love 01 is an 3 track download ep by brute love

brute love are darren hayman and emma winston and the music is completely improvised, analogue and synthetic.

two analogue synthesizers are cross patched together via control voltage technology so that one player constantly disrupts the other players intentions.

the music was recorded live, with no prior writing or arrangement and with no subsequent editing or fixing.
credits
released 27 February 2015

darren – minibrute, emma – microbrute

the ep costs 99p.

The Great Electric – EP1

Posted on by darren

Artist: The Great Electric
Title: EP1
Cat No. : Van 276
Release date: October 27th

The Great Electric was formed in the winter of 2012 by Malcolm Doherty (Guitars, FX), Rob Hyde (Drums), Darren Hayman (Synth), Duncan Hemphill (Tones, Drones and FX) and Pete Gofton (Bass/Production).

Alumni of bands as diverse as Hefner, Kenickie, GoKart Mozart & Mum and Dad, the band was united by a love of the classic German electronic and progressive acts of the 1970s coupled with the pop music sensibilities, hooks and production of 90s bands such as Stereolab, Quickspace and Electric Sound of Joy.

EP1, self-recorded and released on Static Caravan is the Great Electric’s first release and showcases the band’s love of combining a hypnotic heaviness with accessibility – thickly layering melody onto bedrock of driving bass and drums, often lending the songs an almost pop patina.

Opener ‘Matter of Time’ sets off at a breakneck motorik pace, introducing layered analogue melodies and a metronomic bassline before giving way to a chorus that sits somewhere in the middle ground between Focus and Fantomas. The track fades into a fug of Gilmour-inspired guitars, analogue electronics and found sounds.

Jump Over The House is a triumphant, energised hybrid of 60’s Detroit soul and a locked, motorik pulse, overlaid with a subtle vocodered line straight out of millennium-era Trans Am. If you booked The Great Electric for your birthday party, they’d open with this song.

The EP’s lead track, Music and Colour establishes a rigid bass motif from the off and builds into the embodiment of perfect space age pop – constructed from layer upon layer of repetition, hypnotic drones and heavy washes of analogue melodies and counter-melodies.

The EP closes with M.O.P.E.. Building over 9 minutes, the track is a dichotomy of ‘Animals’-era Pink Floyd atmospherics and Sir Lord Baltimore barbarian rock. The song gathers pace before the wheels come off entirely and it rattles into Blue Cheer covering Yes’ ‘Heart of the Sunrise’.

2014 will see the band finish a debut LP ahead of organising a small number of live dates later in the year.

300 edition 12” vinyl Red Vinyl pressing

Buy The Great Electric – EP1 from Darren (inc P+P)