First new music since 2019 as Jim Moray heads out on tour - Brighton date

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Jim Moray heads out on tour in January and February offering his first new music since 2019 as he moves towards a new album release possibly in the autumn.

On January 22 he plays Brighton Komedia; on January 25 he plays The Arc, Winchester – all this on the back of a retrospective album which he was thrilled to record partially in Abbey Road – Beflean: An Alternative History 2002-2023.

“The word means to flay, to separate the skin from the bones and it wasn't really a best-of but it was songs from the previous 21 years that I had re-recorded. It was a present to myself of booking a session in Abbey Road and I was so excited thinking what it was going to be like. It was nerve-racking. Only part of the album was recorded there. My budget didn't stretch to doing the whole album there! But it was very much about taking the magic from Abbey Road back with me and putting it into the rest of the album. You feel like you are stepping up to the occasion. It's a big deal for anybody to go to Abbey Road. I have worked in other big studios that are comparable but the thing about Abbey Road is that it is also so very modern. The engineers and the whole set-up. And there is a canteen in the middle which you recognise from footage of The Beatles there and also from Pink Floyd there when they were doing The Dark Side Of The Moon.”

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Jim has lived in Liverpool for the past eight years: “And I still find it exciting. All the tours come past our house four times a day and it's always exciting to think back to that formative music for me. But I'm also a huge Radiohead fan and also the music that was around when I was a teenager, that Britpop era. I'm also fan of that. I think I'm a fan of music that has a British sensibility and that has an edge to it but is recorded with high fidelity so Abbey Raod was really just like stepping up and you hope that you rise to the occasion. The album was mostly acoustic guitar versions of my solo stuff. I mostly tour solo but I'd never really made an album that sounded like my live performances. I wanted to do something that sounded hi-fi but with smooth-sounding acoustic guitar.”

On the horizon now is the next album: “I think the music that I'm associated with is music that's more expansive, music where you throw the kitchen sink at it, and I thought that this would the another those kinds of albums.”

Jim admits he's still thinking his way through it: “But I work at Leeds Conservatoire which has a folk degree course that I partially devised, and what I was picking up was that a lot of the students are concerned about gender representation in folk music. I had a conversation with a student who was saying that there are no good men in folk music and I started thinking whether that was true. So I started to try and collect things that talked about men’s stories. I wanted to get maybe a balanced collection. I was wanting something that was positive men’s stories but it was also about ageing and finding your place when you are not an elder statesman but the fact is there are artists that have been born since you first started releasing music.”

It's a question of finding music that is appropriate to your time in life, for instance the first single from the album which was Spencer the Rover: “It is a song that I had been singing for about 20 years but I've come back now because it felt like I was the right age to be singing it. It is a song about pressure from all sides and about mental health... and about looking after your mental health.”

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