Ed Harcourt

Ed Harcourt, Cortney Tidwell at Glasgow Classic Grand, Sun 22 Oct

Review by LJ

It is very easy to dismiss Ed Harcourt as Just Another Singer/Songwriter, but walking into the Classic Grand tonight, the sight you are presented with forces that presumption to disappear...»

Classic Grand

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Ed Harcourt

Since being Mercury Prize-nominated for 2001’s Here Be Monsters (preceded by the Maplewood mini-album), then winning innumerable accolades with 2003's From Every Sphere (which included the hit, ‘All Of Your Days Will Be Blessed’), Ed Harcourt has been falling in love, striding through Swedish snow in search of wild boars, recording with crack-addled cultish American rockers, touring U.S. arenas with R.E.M. and Wilco, rapping in karaoke bars, getting beaten up and almost run over by Mexican skinheads for accidentally throwing gravel at their car in Colorado, performing at tributes to Gram Parsons, Jeff Buckley, Randy Newman, Neil Young and The Beatles, and deciding that every moment of every song should be the most important thing you’ve ever done.

With this in mind, he wrote his most honest and exposed album, Strangers. The opus was produced by Jari Haapalainen (The Concretes, etc) at the Aerosol Grey Machine Studio in the middle of woods in Sweden.

“I’m not kidding, there were wild pigs, stray cats – I’ll show you pictures if you don’t believe me. Though you won’t like our moustaches."

Fourth album The Beautiful Lie hits the UK in June 2006.

Biography from Edharcourt.com. Photo courtesy of Emma Porter.»

Cortney Tidwell

MySpace page.

Section of bio taken from Dog Day Press website:

Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up is undeniably a dazzling full length debut album, as tinged with euphoria as it is with melancholy. Where the mini-album was dominated by images of light and darkness, …Stars… is obsessed with the ebb and flow of love and the eternal search for connection, its lyrics full of impressionistic and evocative images that linger in the mind as long as the heartfelt and unashamedly emotional music. Cortney Tidwell found the creative process draining and at times impossibly overwhelming, but listening to the finished article, all that is evoked is a stirring confidence and stylistic breadth.

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