It’s starting to look like we’re easing out of lockdown a little lot, too much if you ask me. Whatever happens over the next few weeks, make sure you look after yourselves.
It’s the morning of June 1 as I write this, going on the figures, we’ve still a long way to go. Over 2500 people were diagnosed with Covid over the weekend. Do everything in your power not to add to those numbers.
On the show on Saturday, I had a #FirstPlay from Default Man, aka Darragh Glennon formerly of Mullingar, now living in sunny Spain. I dug into my digital archive and pulled out Boats Away from I Am Not Lefthanded for my #Vault track.
Enjoy!
The London Ear // Show 294 Playlist
Here’s the full menu for this week’s episode of The London Ear.
1. Denise Chaila: Chaila
2. Malaki: Fair Play
3. The Wha: Blue For You
4. Shaefri: 23
5. Havvk Feat Participant: Operate
6. In The Willows: Talking To Myself
7. I Am Not lefthanded: Boats (Swept Away)
8. Maddox Jones: Headspace
9. Default Man: Tiny Whispers
10. Bugeye: When The Lights Go Out
11. No Ex: No Coming With You
12. Paddy Mulcahy: Unti Piano
13. Owen Denvir: This Could Be Love
14. Inhaler: Falling In
15. 1000 Beasts + Lenii: Waistcoat
Listen On Demand to The London Ear
Thanks for listening, The London Ear broadcast on DAB radio, Saorview, nationwide in Ireland and outside Ireland you can listen online. You can listen to the show again on the RTÉ player including all previous episodes. The show is broadcast every Saturday at 1300.
Maddox Jones is no stranger to the UK music scene, he was born to do it. I first got to know him when I moved to London in 2013. He was fronting bands, I was trying to figure out what the London music scene was like.
He’s now front and centre with his own solo project and has just released a banger of a track, ‘Headspace’, 3 minutes and forty four seconds of perfection. It’s also the title track taken from his forthcoming EP. Have you met Mr Jones? Well, here’s a good place to start.
Hello Maddox Jones! Who the hell and where the hell are you?
My name is Maddox Jones and I am currently in Northampton, UK which is about an hour north of London.
This isn’t your first foray into music, you’ve fronted bands before. What makes this project right for you, right now?
This project is literally me authentically writing and releasing music that tells a story about where I am at right now!
Headspace is seriously catchy, it’s a definitely a grower and has a hook that you’ll be singing all day. You produced the track with Dave Crawford. Although you’re a solo artist now, is collaboration still an important thing for you?
Yes, I love the energy that working with other people brings. It adds to the ideas in a track and also makes it more fun to create. I think collaboration makes me more productive.
What’s your songwriting process like?
It starts with me on a piano always, as I like to make sure the melody, chords and lyrics stand up as a song before adding production.
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You’ve managed to get a pretty cool video together for Headspace, while in lockdown. How did you manage that?
Well, my friend Christian Pinchbeck helped out and had fun, fun and some perfect footage already. I recorded a few takes of me singing the song against a white wall and we blended it in and it ended up working perfectly. The universe was with us that day!
I’m been lucky enough to hear your EP and can’t wait to share it with my readers and listeners. Your lyrics seem to be autobiographical about your day / life. Is storytelling an important part of the creative process for you.
Well, this is quite a new thing for me writing about what I know. This year learning to be more honest and open with my lyrics, it’s part of my new journey of self discovery. This EP has helped me make sense of where I’m at the moment and what things I want to change and what I want to celebrate and be proud of.
Your sound is lodged between somewhere between dance/pop/synthwave. Can you recommend three albums that will give us an idea of how you got to here on your musical journey?
You’ve been busy in lockdown doing some covers and making videos to go along with them. How important has this been to you to keep your creative juices flowing?
I’ve found reaching out to other musician friends and making little lockdown covers videos has been really cool. It’s been great to see the amount of content that’s happening in lockdown I think it’s forced people to make the most of technology in a really positive way. And yes, really important to keep the creative juices flowing.
Plans for a lot of things have changed with the pandemic. How have you had to adjust the goalposts for what you want to achieve with your first release?
Actually for the first release, me and my team wanted to introduce Maddox Jones to the world and hopefully get people listening on Spotify and falling in love with the music, which can still very much happen now so it’s cool. Will deffo play some gigs as soon as we are able though.
Have you acquired any new skills during the lockdown? I managed to plumb in a washing machine!
I’ve learnt how to do a bit of video editing and also how to make a quiche, which are amazing… very (a bit too) moreish.
Any secrets you would like to share with us?
I used to have a stutter at primary school and the teacher used to think I was being sarcastic during registration when I stuttered my name. Thankfully I grew out of it!
Northern Irish multi-instrumentalist, Owen Denvir is about to release his new EP, ‘Stones’. The lead single from the EP, ‘This Could Be Love’, has been playlisted by radio stations across the UK and Ireland. And, it’s easy to see why, memorable catchy hooks, a velvet voice and slick production make for some serious ear candy.
I caught up with Owen to chat about his new EP. ‘Stones’, working in isolation and what made him make the jump from backing musician and vocalist to centre stage. He also reveals himself to be the cutest uncle ever!
Hello Owen! How are you and where are you right now?
Hi Nessy! I’m in Belfast and I’m well! I’m isolated with all my studio stuff so I’m trying to stay positive and productive. I only have occasional episodes of Netflix binge days.
You’re about to release a new EP, ‘Stones’ on May 29th, ‘This Could Be Love’ is the lead track from that. When you listen to it, it feels like you’ve become a more confident artist since ‘Human Touch’ or ‘Crush’, your early releases? How do you feel about it?
I’m really proud of This Could Be Love. I actually wrote about 70% of it around 2 years ago, but it hit a few hurdles and kept getting shelved. Originally I thought I’d have to give the song away to another songwriter because I didn’t think I had the vocal range to perform it. I’ve been performing a lot in the last 2 years though, and I surprised myself recently by just giving it a bash at home. The same thing happened with ‘I Want You So Bad’ on the EP too. After I recorded those vocals I got really motivated and finished the tracks within a few days.
I hear you’ve recorded all the samples on the ‘This Could Be Love’ during lockdown. This means the EP is shiny new. Did you intend you release the EP now, or did lockdown help it along the way?
I actually intended on releasing ‘Stones’ EP a few months ago, but I had a change of heart with 2 of the songs (which is 50% of the EP). It can be really deflating spending so much time on songs that you end up falling out of love with, but ultimately if you don’t have faith in them then why should anyone else? To me, it felt like a miracle that ‘This Could Be Love’ came together so last minute. I’d also completely forgotten I’d recorded a drum session for ‘Stones From Paris’ with Peter J McCauley, so it came together really quickly too (we’d only planned on recording ‘I Want You So Bad’ so we just mucked around with ‘Stones From Paris’ while we were setup for it). I suppose the benefit of lockdown was that suddenly I’ve endless time to spend in my home studio to finish these projects.
Stones is the second of three EPs to make an album. They are based on Freud’s idea of the personality is made of 3 parts, ID, Ego and SuperEgo. It’s also a great way to introduce an album’s worth of material. It seems people need to get shorter bites of new material now. Are you into reading about psychology?
If by “reading about psychology”, you mean “watching youtube videos about psychology”, then yes! I’d heard about Freud’s theory recently through a friend. And since I was working on an EP trilogy project at the time, I figured the timing was apt to swipe the concept for myself. When I was at uni, my brother got me into Malcolm Gladwell’s books. I really enjoyed ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Outliers’. I feel like any time you write lyrics you’re trying to dig deeper than the surface level, so Freud and Gladwell can help us out there.
You recently recorded a song, ‘Hold Her Hand’, for a project with the Ulster Orchestra, will this make the next EP?
‘Hold Her Hand’ was a bit of a one-off for me. Usually I’ll mull over a song for weeks and tweak bits as I go, never calling it finished until at least a month or 2 later. But the Ulster Orchestra sent out a request for songs from local songwriters, so I figured I’d take the opportunity to write something new within a couple of days. Their brief was “something about the current times”. Personally, I find it hard to write about real world events in a literal sense, but I caught a new song on Jade Bird’s Instagram that she’d recorded in her garden, which sparked ideas for me. Everything in lockdown has centred around when I’m going to be able to hang out with my 1 year old niece again, so the song spun out from there. I’m really happy with how it turned out, but it won’t be on the EP. I kind of saw it as something more personal I could share with my family and people who follow me on socials. Happy songs go a long way at the moment so I didn’t want to wait or cause too much of a fuss over it – I just wanted to put something positive out there and then.
You’re an accomplished musician, if you’re writing, which instrument do you pick up first?
It’s different for every song! Sometimes I’ll “finish” a song in my head without having ever picked up an instrument at all. I wrote a full song in a lecture at uni because it was the only alternative to falling asleep (the lecture was about binary code…). Lately though most of my songs have originated from “nice chords” on the piano. I absolutely love the piano, partly because I’ve only been exploring it for myself. So my performance skills have grown very slowly, but it feels really worthwhile to have even reached this mediocre stage with it. I’ve just learned the stuff I’ve enjoyed from other songwriters like Neil Hannon and Peter J McCauley.
Besides making music, how have you been coping with lockdown?
I’ve taken my football keepy-up game to the next level. Pre-lockdown I could barely break 50, but currently my best is 166. I’ve also been pulling a lot weeds, and painting my fence and other dodgy spots around the house. The family Zoom quiz has transitioned into just a weekly family chat because I think everyone in the whole world is so sick of quizzes. And I’ve been doing lots of catching up with Netflix.
You’ve had over 200k views of your live mashup of ‘Somebody You Loved but it’s numa numa’ on YouTube. How helpful has the cover been to opening up your music to a new audience?
It’s been great! It took a surreal jump in views around Christmas time at the end of last year, after it was featured in a Youtube video about musical theft and copyright. For the record: I don’t think Lewis Capaldi heard the numa numa song and thought “You know what? This would make a brilliant heartbreak ballad” – I think it’s just a very funny coincidence. I’ve got a few videos on my channel that are basically just musical memes, like my ‘Dinosaurs In Love’ cover, or ‘Thank You Baked Potato’. Some people just enjoy the joke and move on. But I’ve had a lot more activity on my socials from people around the world, who tell me they’ve stumbled across my own music through it.
You started as a violist for Ciaran Lavery and Ram’s Pocket Radio, what was it that prompted you to take centre stage? Were you writing your own music at that stage?
I’ve been writing music ever since I first picked up a guitar at around 11 or 12. It seemed easier to write my own songs, rather than learn someone else’s with chords I didn’t know yet. It’s a very personal thing to obsess over though, because as soon as you go public with your music you’re open to being judged or criticised. Playing Glasgowbury Festival with Rams’ Pocket Radio was a big motivator for me. I’d only really played orchestral concerts before that, but performing original music with those guys to a crowd who were so into it just seemed so much intense and exciting. It was while I was living in Edinburgh that my friends organised loads of shows for me at the Fringe Festival, which was a real wakeup call that I should stop talking about starting gigging and just do it.
What three albums by other artists should we listen to, to get an idea where you’ve come from on your musical journey?
It’s a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK. I will admit, I’m glad I have an extra day off from work.
So this week I started digitizing all my CDs and found a CD from 1994. I’m going to write a blog post about the whole process, which is turning into a bit of hassle.
Anyway, I found a CD by Swampshack, a band from my hometown, Kells in County Meath. Two of the band, Ollie Cole and Ian Melady, went on to form Turn. So I thought I’d play the title track from the Screamer EP.
I might turn that into a regular feature.
I also had a #FirstPlay of the new single ‘Headspace’ from Maddox Jones. Keep an eye out on the blog for a Q&A with Mr Jones in the next few days. You can find out more about him on Facebook and Twitter.
I think I will make this a regular feature also.
Hope you enjoy this week’s show. Stay safe!
The London Ear // Show 293 Playlist
1. The Academic: Anything Could Happen
2. Fontaines DC: A Hero’s Death
3. 1000 Beasts & Lenii: Waistcoat
4. Future West: Emergency
5. Shaefri: 23
6. Swampshack: Screamer
7. Skanger: Condolences
8. CheryM: Weird Ones
9. Swimmers Jackson: Lose Myself
10. Maddox Jones: Headspace
11. Fears: two_
12. Malaki: Fair play
13. Uppbeat: Seasick
14. Time: One Morning in August
15. Sick Love: I’m So ( Fucked Without You)
Listen On Demand to The London Ear
Thanks for listening, The London Ear broadcast on DAB radio, Saorview, nationwide in Ireland and outside Ireland you can listen online. You can listen to the show again on the RTÉ player including all previous episodes. The show is broadcast every Saturday at 1300.
