Codeine Velvet Club appear at Newcastle's O2 Academy 2
Friday December 4th.
Codeine Velvet Club
is a new musical collaboration featuring Jon Lawler –
lead singer and chief songwriter of The Fratellis – and
singer-songwriter Lou Hickey, that celebrates their
shared love of ’60s girl-boy duets, dramatic orchestral
pop, and dark post-war Hollywood and Las Vegas
romanticism.
For
Lawler Codeine Velvet Club offers a respite from
the whirlwind of touring, recording and non-stop promo
that enveloped The Fratellis after their debut album,
‘Costello Music’, exploded in 2006, buoyed by a string
of anthemic singles including ‘Chelsea Dagger’ and
‘Henrietta’. When the promotional commitments for the
group’s second album, ‘Here We Stand’, ended in March
this year, it was agreed that the Glasgow three-piece
should take a well-earned breather.
Never
one for resting on his laurels Jon offered to help write
a track for family friend Lou Hickey. ‘Vanity Kills’,
as it came to be titled, emerged as a swaying, jazzy,
big-band duet, tinged with noir-ish menace and shades of
Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s waspish 1960s guy-gal
duelling. The quality of the track inspired the pair to
embark on their own album, a record which Jon wanted to
sound like “John Barry playing with a rock’n’roll
band”. 'Vanity Kills' was released as a single on
November 23rd and the album 'Codeine Velvet Club' will
be released on December 28th
The
album began to fall into place early this year, with the
taut, shimmering album opener ‘Hollywood’, the
Mariachi-inflected ‘Time’, and the widescreen, cinematic
sweep of ‘Nevada’, whose elegant orchestral score was
written by Belle & Sebastian’s Mick Cooke. There was
room for some rockers too: the carousing ‘Little
Sister’, and ‘I Would Send You Roses’.
Jon
luxuriated in his newfound musical freedom, drafting in
the Gospel Truth Choir for some backing vocals, and even
managing to squeeze an electric sitar onto the eerie,
Pulp Fiction flavoured ballad ‘The Black Roses’.
Meanwhile the strings and brass parts were recorded by
an orchestra of top flight classical musicians,
including legendary trumpeter Derek Watkins, who has the
remarkable claim of playing on all the Bond themes since
the first in 1962.
The
album comes to a close with the gorgeous ‘Reste Avec Moi’,
the moody and beautiful ‘Like A Full Moon’ and the
elegiac ‘Begging Bowl Blues’. Casting round for a name
that summed up the mood and noir-ish glamour of the
record, Lawler and Hickey settled on Codeine Velvet
Club.
