Ivor Novello nominees and all-round nice chaps The Leisure Society have signed to Full Time Hobby.
The record label announced this week that they’ll be rereleasing TLS’s lovely album The Sleeper as a double CD pack on 5th October. The second disc will be an eight track EP consisting of B-sides and demos including the band’s cover of Cars by Gary Numan, which they played at the Wilkommen Collective’s Union Chapel show.
The Union Chapel was bedecked with mildly disturbing papier mache animals, swirling waves, giant trees and sugar paper bunting in the shapes of autumn leaves for Willkommen’s coming out gig at the Union Chapel, where we were treated to the full range of the collective’s talents.
The Brighton-based Willkommen collective – which includes The Leisure Society, The Miserable Rich, Sons of Noel and Adrien and more – have moved their mini festival from one stately home to another and tickets are now available.
Communion has announced a corker of a line-up for its first festival. The London – and now Brighton – night organised by Kev Jones of Cherbourg and Ben Lovett of Mumford and Sons, has curated a folk stage at Bloom in Bristol.
The Willkommen Collective, which counts Sons of Noel and Adrian and The Leisure Society amongst its number, plan an exciting gig in a very special location.
It’s a hugely exciting time for the new-folk crowd. In the past week it has been announced that London-based Wilkommen Collective act The Leisure Society has been nominated for an Ivor Novello award for their song The Last of the Melting Snow, released last Christmas.
It’s about the journey. Travel, of course, has long been the subject of folk songs, with their widescreen tales of the open road and longing for places miles distant. But, as much as the lyrics are about movement, so is the music itself, changing and shifting from place to place and time to time. The widescreen scope of Americana may be an ocean apart from the wilds of Brighton, then, but its wistful heart can still be felt on Sleeper, The Leisure Society’s debut album. The relocation has added something, too: there’s a peculiarly British undertow at work, beneath the pedal steel and pastoral orchestration.