Thea Gilmore Announces Tour
| 10th February 2016
Having recently released her latest single ‘Coming Back To You’ a Radio 2 ‘A List’, Thea Gilmore is back on the road with her brand new album ‘Ghosts & Graffiti’ out now. Ghosts and Graffiti made the UK Album chart Top 40 and so far has proved to be her biggest selling album of her 15 album long career.
“The most coherent, literate and charged British singer-songwriter of her generation…” so says MOJO magazine about her 2013 album ‘Regardless’, featuring the hit single ‘Love Came Looking for Me’. Theas autumn tour 2015 promotes ‘Ghosts & Graffiti’ and expect to hear old favourites such as ‘London Town’ from her 2012 album ‘Don’t Stop Singing’,and used extensively in the BBC’s coverage of the Olympic Games, as well as Radio 2 favourite ‘You’re the Radio’ and many others from her extensive back catalogue
Video Link for the new album ‘Ghosts & Graffiti’:
Ghosts & Graffiti – The new album….with a difference.
The Waterboys, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, John Cooper Clarke, Joan as Policewoman, King Creosote, I Am Kloot…. Names that seldom appear in the same sentence, let alone on the same album.
But the album is ‘Ghosts & Graffiti’ by Thea Gilmore – and when the artist is Thea Gilmore, normal rules don’t apply.
Indeed throughout Gilmore’s career (17 years and counting) normal rules have never applied. This most gifted and fiercely independent singer / songwriter threw out the career book from day one.
“Ghosts And Graffiti” is a retrospective with a difference, a 20 track double album where Thea Gilmore looks both forward and back. It includes all her best known songs on one record for the first time.
It includes all her best known songs on one record for the first time. It also includes 4 new songs, AND 6 newly recorded versions of songs from her back catalogue.
It features a duet with Joan Baez, and a duet with Billy Bragg. It includes a full collaboration with The Waterboys, produced and co-sung by Mike Scott. John Cooper Clarke appears, reading one of Thea’s poems. Neil Gaiman, the iconic fantasy novelist, contributes the sleeve notes. Joan As Policewoman collaborates on one of Thea’s defining songs. There are also special collaborations with John Bramwell (I Am Kloot) and with King Creosote.
All the above signed up quickly when Thea started planning – testimony to her reputation among her peers, but scarcely surprising as a glance at her career shows….
After all, Bruce Springsteen regularly uses her work as play-on music at shows, she has duetted with Sting, and Martha Wainwright…and the depth and breadth of her fans is extraordinary and includes Richard Thompson, Neil Gaiman, Steve Earle, David Baddiel, Stephen Mangan, William Boyd and David Morrissey.
She was the artist chosen by Sandy Denny’s estate to set some of that late great writers unfinished lyrics to music … and in the process she created a hit album and the song “London” which became the TV theme to the 2012 Olympic Games.
She recorded an entire Bob Dylan album in celebration of the great mans 70th birthday and was promptly invited by Dylan’s management to contribute to a special charity album of Dylan songs they were curating that same year. Since being described in Q magazine in 1999 – whilst still in her teens – as “already in a league of her own among UK female singer/songwriters” Gilmore has released 14 albums. Her honey toned alto sends shivers down the spines of the most hardened cynics, and her beyond-prolific body of work is a rich mosaic with staggering depths and detours. She bleeds stark intimate confessionals with dark poetic twists…
She peppers national radio playlists with literate love songs, and her last album “Regardless” was a top 40 hit in 2013.
Most strikingly, her work includes a series of socially conscious songs that form a narrative thread delineating some of the most resonant, harrowing issues of the last 20 years – the Stephen Lawrence murder, the war on terror, racism and sexism in celebrity culture, the pre Iraq War jingoism, the dumbing down of mainstream TV, and her own generations political apathy.
Now, as admirers line up to celebrate, her gaze hovers between the rear view mirror and the horizon and Thea Gilmore, one of the few contemporary artists with populist appeal and integrity intact, is poised to release a unique collection which represents both an end and a new beginning.
THEA GILMORE – March 2016 UK Tour Dates are:
Fri 4th March MANCHESTER – Alderley Edge – The Yard
Box Office No: 01625 586962 / Website
Sat 5th March LEICESTER – 02 Academy 2
Box Office No: 0844 477 2000 / Website
Sun 6th March LONDON – Islington – Assembly Halls
Box Office No: 0843 515 9400 / Website
Wed 9th March LEEDS – City Varieties
Box Office No: 0113 243 0808 / Website
Thurs 10th March BURNLEY – Mechanics
Box Office No: 01282 664400 / Website
Fri 11th March SOUTHPORT – Atkinson
Box Office No: 01704 533 333 / Website
For further information on THEA GILMORE, check out the following website / social media links: