|
|
|
|
|
|
| ALAN POWNALL (SUPPORTED MUMFORD & SONS) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| We are sorry but ALAN POWNALL
is not due to perform for a while. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
True Love Stories ... debut album
Alan recently supported Angus & Julia Stone at The Glee Club and previously supported his friends ... Mumford & Sons
Alan Pownall is not one of those singer-songwriters who regales you with tales of first picking up an acoustic guitar, aged 3, and paying his dues at open-mic folk nights. He makes no bones about the fact that he first tackled the instrument in 2004, and that his path has been somewhat charmed ever since: after playing only a handful of gigs, he was asked to support Adele on tour.
Alan honed his skills while sharing a flat with Jay Jay Pistolet, and Mumford & Sons and by sharing stages with Florence & The Machine, Jack Penate, Noah & The Whale, and Laura Marling. After signing with Mercury Records, he embarked on a second supporting tour with Mr Hudson, and he's now about to release his debut record.
Fleshed out by a small, unfussy rhythm combo - there isn’t a single track aboard that isn’t 100% irresistible, touched by magic. The album tells the story of a quick-flowering natural talent, from the folky beginnings of ‘Colourful Day’, right up to the fully orchestrated present.
"Sure to be every bit as huge as both Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling" Rough Trade Album Club
www.myspace.com/alanpownall
www.twitter.com/alanpownall
www.last.fm/music/Alan+Pownall
www.facebook.com/pages/Alan-Pownall
www.mercuryrecords.co.uk
MORE ON ALAN
Alan Pownall thinks back to the night when, after only having played four or five shambolic gigs and written about as many songs, he bumped into Adele at a club, just as her star was ascending. “I sheepishly said to her, you can check out a couple of my songs on MySpace. Within a couple of weeks, I was in her Top Friends. Two weeks after that, I was on holiday, and I got a message from her saying, Do you want to support me on my first UK tour?”
Within two years he’d bagged a publishing deal, played gigs with all the right acts (Florence & The Machine, Jack Penate, Noah & The Whale) and was sharing a flat with Mumford & Sons. Now, aged 25, he’s about to release an album on one of the world’s biggest record labels. All within six years of first picking up a guitar.
Pownall is clearly destined to be one of 2010s brightest new stars.
You can hear it in his music too. His debut album ‘True Love Stories’ is a beautifully breezy yet understated batch of loping pop tunes imbued with the languid charm of the best US alt.folk but also a canny way with a jaunty melody. His song-craft feels so effortless – tracks like ‘Clara,' a Kinksy, easy-strumming message to a tantalizing would-be girlfriend (“you build me up to just let me fall”) breeze past so sublimely tunefully — that one might almost imagine its creator never breaks sweat.
That impression, however, is deceptive: these past five years, Alan has taken musicianship and songwriting to the point of obsession, trying on styles for size, changing direction, re-writing lyrics, tweaking melodies, adding and subtracting various instruments from his arrangements, reaching for perfection.
Having been brought up on 90s R&B and classic acts like Chet Baker and Roy Orbison, at 17 the young South West Londoner was recommended by the fashion designer he was interning for (“I came out of an all-boy’s school and to go into an industry like fashion PR, full of beautiful girls, you’re like ‘this is a great place to be working’”) to study at art school in Milan. It was here that music-making first became a possibility for him. “I lived quite a reclusive existence there,” he says, chuckling as he remembers how inadvertently he discovered his own talent.
“My father came over to visit and brought me a guitar. For about six months, I never even picked it up, it just sat there as a perfect accessory to an art student’s flat. It was only when a friend of mine came over and started playing around with it that I thought i'd give it a try. It was just one of those things: the more I did it, the more I liked it.”
Circa 2006, Alan quit his course and came home to pursue music. He’d written a handful of songs in a folky idiom, but was vaguely looking to get a band together to perform them with, when he was offered a gig at Nambucca on Holloway Road. The only condition was that he had to play solo, on acoustic guitar. In the intervening three months, he brushed up his mini-repertoire, but his debut was a disaster. “At one point, I stopped to apologise for my guitar-playing – that’s how bad it was”.
Alan had only made a couple more live outings, when he met Adele at the Troubadour: within weeks he was invited to open for her on her first tour. “I was excited at the prospect – and I had to do it, I wasn’t going to get the opportunity again – but at the back of my mind, I knew I wasn’t ready. I only really had four songs to my name, which included ‘Colourful Day,' and three others which I don’t really do anymore. I was writing songs on the road. There were some gigs, where I was reading the lyrics off a piece of paper. It was so unprofessional.” He shudders. “I definitely remember coming off that tour feeling a little bit broken, but it was all part of getting there.”
Undaunted, Alan used his trial-by-fire as a motivation to reappraise what he was doing with his music. In the meantime, he landed a publishing deal, and moved out of his family home to share a flat with Jay Jay Pistolet, and Mumford & Sons. He played gigs with numerous rising young acts, including Florence & The Machine, Jack Penate, Noah & The Whale, Laura Marling and Kid Harpoon.
Then, he feels, his luck ran out.
“When I came back from Italy everything just seemed to happen,” he says. “I ended up having two or three songs and a friend of mine gave me a gig at Nambucca and it just spiralled from there to the point where I had a publishing deal and I was on tour with Adele and I didn’t even have a manager. So it was all peaches and cream at that stage. Then there was a hiatus for a year between the Adele tour and a year ago where I was very much lacking in direction. It was almost like I’d landed on my feet but then the lights had been turned out so I didn’t know where to run. There were little things like I got offered a record deal by Atlantic and it went through the motions and ended up falling through, and I almost felt like my luck had run out. Then I started working with Elliot James and everything seemed to click all of a sudden.”
In his year’s hiatus, Alan penned over 150 songs and isolated himself in order to perfect them. “I moved out of that flat and into a place in Old Street on my own, and I basically spent three months there taking all of the ideas I’d worked through over that whole year, a vast amount of songs which were on Dictaphones and scraps of paper piled together. I don’t think I’d even finished a song for a few months, it was getting a bit silly. But it was a good time to focus and everything came together.”
His new songs took a more direct and personal approach to relationships than his more over-thought early tunes. “I sometimes felt right at the beginning that the music was suffering as a result of me spending way too much time writing about the words and what it means. I wanted this first album to be simple romance. There’s a reason why I called the album ‘True Love Stories’ – it’s supposed to be about either being in love with someone who doesn’t love you or being loved by someone who you don’t really love. So it’s make-believe in many ways. I long for the day that I can love someone and they can love me back. I’m just too complex! As soon as they show an interest I’m like ‘oh no, forget it’.”
Plus, Alan began feeling increasingly limited by the acoustic format - his latest batch of songs were crying out for further arrangements, with a full band. “I’d been living in a very folky environment, and I wanted to do something else. I didn't want to be another ‘one man and his guitar’: I found it uninspiring. The same chords, the same formula, and the pursuit is really just the lyrics. I like folk music, I just don't feel there's much more to offer it”
After signing up with Mercury Records, he went out on his second tour, supporting Mr Hudson, and was soon ready to start work on his album. “There was definitely a feeling of wanting a vintage sound to it,” he says. “It’s obviously been influenced by the music of the 40s or 50s. I always loved people like Eddie Cochrane or Elvis, even people like Billie Holliday are definitely intrinsic in my upbringing without even realising it. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents.”
Alan’s voice dominates the record, at once antique, ageless and immediate, as he croons about the romantic entanglements in his lyrics. He says that, with his later batch of songs, he sought to write more openly, amalgamating experiences in the service of a compelling song. “I’ve never met a girl called Clara,” he says, “she’s made up of a number of people I’ve met”.
On top of Alan’s easy-rolling guitar style, his songs are fleshed out by a small, unfussy rhythm combo, plus occasional embellishments, such as violin (from Noah & The Whale’s Tom Hobden), brass or twinkly percussive instruments. “I wanted the album to be like a jazz festival in the 1940s in the south of France, but set in some dingy bar on a rainy day – like, it would have all those picturesque elements, but slightly twisted as well. It was a very cathartic and a real learning experience for me, both technically and emotionally. To be honest it’s the first thing I’ve ever finished in my life.”
There isn’t a single track aboard, which isn’t 100% irresistible, touched by magic. The whole thing tells the story of a quick-flowering natural talent, from the mournful folky beginnings of ‘Colourful Day’ (“My two main characteristics are overconfidence and insecurity and I like to think that the vulnerability and over-confidence meet a little bit in that song”), right up to the fully orchestrated present. Mr Pownall himself is still busy, meanwhile, writing a song per day, hoping to squeeze a couple more brand new tunes on there, and setting his sights on Album No. 2.
More imminently, he’s to top the bill at Music Week’s Unearthed concert in the Elgar Room at the Royal Albert Hall, and continues a residency at Puregroove Record Shop in Spitalfields. Puregroove’s in-house label. And with ‘Chasing Time’ named Record Of The Week by Fearne Cotton, it looks like Alan’s back in the right place at the right time again.
“Yeah definitely,” he grins. “I’ve always held things back, if things are going in this or that direction I’ve always put the brakes on. But this year I listen to that album back and I’m really proud of it. If someone had said to me two years ago ‘this will be your debut album’ I’d have bitten their hand off. I feel I’ve really got to grab the bull by the horns, it’s an amazing opportunity, I feel like there’s real direction. It’s being led by something bigger than me.”
That’s the beckoning finger of fame, and it’s not going to stop pointing Alan Pownall’s way.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
