When: 7.30pm on Saturday 10 October 2015
Where: The Eagle Inn, 19 Collier Street, Salford, M3 7DW

PLEASE NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, William D. Drake’s Manchester show 10 October have been cancelled. A new date in the spring may be announced in due course.

We’re excited to be working with William D. Drake for the first time!

Composer and songwriter William D. Drake and his band are a feast of gorgeous instrumentation, masterful piano, grinding hurdy-gurdy, harmonium, woodwind, whirly tube, guitars, glockenspiel, bass, drums… topped with growly vocals and angelic singing. Weaving layers of textured melody with rock undertones, they journey through the surreal and psychedelic, telling curious tales with a sideways humour. The fifth album, Revere Reach, is a hearty, thumping folk-tinged romp.

The title for this album came about some years before recording, recalls William: ‘Revere Reach was a phrase my mother conjured up whilst trying to remember the name of the most peaceful creek tucked away in deepest Devon, where my family spent holidays for some years. I’d never heard those two words glued together like that before and we decided there and then that it’d be the title of the next album.’

Setting poems has long been a feature of William D. Drake’s work. He explains: ‘I enjoy putting words to music. I can spend hours in second-hand bookshops looking for old stuff, the ancienter the better. For this album, I did that with In Converse, Heart Of Oak and The Blind Boy.’

The words to Distant Buzzing, the jaunty opening track of the album, are not ancient but a poem written for William D. Drake by his friend, Jamie Kelsey-Fry. The song was written rather rapidly, as William remembers, ‘It was a hot day, and the coolest place in the house was the music room. I was feeling a bit feverish and was thumping the piano. I thought I’d send Jamie a text asking him to write me some words. He sat down and wrote Distant Buzzing in five minutes – sent it to me – then I sat up, thumped some more, and before I knew what had happened there was a song.’

Written and produced by Chaos Engineers, much has been made of the song’s video’s ‘Cardiacs memory sequences’, as William D. Drake was a defining member of the 80’s/early 90’s line-up of the cult band. William observes, ‘I didn’t know that one can film the past but Ashley Jones appears to have done so.’

To mark the release of Revere Reach this summer, a new music film of one of the most beautiful tracks on the album, Be Here Steryear, was released on Vimeo. The film was made by Andy Joule Films who previously produced a music film for Me Fish Bring from the Rising of the Lights album. William wrote the music for Be Here Steryear when he was the keyboardist in Cardiacs – and the band even rehearsed it.

‘Delicious off radar folk….. this fifth effort is an enthralling exercise in stately prog-folk, drawing on a love of sea shanties, centuries old poetry and chamber music’ – Uncut

‘Drake’s folk-flavoured melodies, creaky shanties and sublime hooks are revealed in all their glory’ – Louder Than War

Support comes from The Gildings. The Gildings is the moniker of Edmund Cottam, and like a gold leaf ornately offsets a frame of antiquity, or the wreath of a mythical immortal, the gentle strum of his guitar indeed gilds the folk genre in an extricating manner. Produced by Martin Colclough (The Answering Machine), and mastered by Ed Woods (Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild, The Futureheads, Tom McRae), debut album The Twisting Vine is a record that lurches between the delicate and the darkness. Mixing classical and folk traditions with contemporary influences and his unique baritone and poetic lyricism, Cottam has made an album of significance. The album is released on Gilded Recordings on 18 September on digital and limited edition vinyl.

The Eagle Inn is an excellent traditional pub from the team behind the Castle Hotel, the Parlour and Gullivers. It’s just off Trinity Way, an eight-minute walk from Manchester Cathedral on Deansgate.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, William D. Drake’s Manchester show 10 October have been cancelled. A new date in the spring may be announced in due course.

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