Rob Sharples
Rob Sharples is 23, was born in Bristol, is based in Bath, and has a loyal fan-base in the West Country and beyond. His recent festival appearances include Glastonbury 05, Green Man and Ashton Court..
Latest News:
Debut EP ‘So The Story Goes’ out Nov 13th (Marrakesh Records) . . . full press release >>>
Releases 2006:
13th November: EP - 'So The Story Goes'
Upcoming Gigs:
Oct 23 - ULU, London
Oct 26 - THE FACTORY, Ilkeston
Oct 27 - THE GLEE CLUB, Birmingham
Oct 28 - THE BOAT HOUSE, Cambridge
Oct 29 - THE FAVERSHAM, Leeds
Oct 31 - THE CELLARS, Portsmouth
Nov 02 - MONKEY CHEWS, London
Nov 06 - THE LOUISIANA, Bristol
Nov 07 - THE INVENTION ARTS, Bath
Nov 09 - THE VICTORIA, Swindon
Nov 10 - THE JERICHO, Oxford
Nov 19 - BCSU, High Wycombe
Nov 21 - THE BEDFORD, London
Nov 23 - MR WOLFS, Bristol
Photo Gallery:
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Biography:
“I don’t want eternity, the way it’s been described to me” (‘So The Story Goes’)
It’s not an unfamiliar story. Boy gets his hands on piano, shows promise, gets a guitar and finds the music flows from his hands and mouth… ends up studying art while still playing in a band, as something keeps nagging – music, music, music.. So the boy gives up art for the timeless role of the troubadour, travelling from pillar to post to relay his version of this often shitty, loveless, insecure but extraordinary, engaging world we find ourselves in, and where we can find peace, love and security? So the story goes…
After many years of bedroom recordings, Bath-based singer-songwriter Rob Sharples made his public debut in a quiet come-and-find-me manner, with a video posted on YouTube. Visually, ‘Urgency’ was an early collaboration with art college chum Alex Parker, who filmed Rob singing the song then interspersed the footage with some of Rob’s earliest efforts at animation – sun gobbles man, man’s mouth gobbles the sun, while Rob’s bleak, suitably urgent outlook is intensified by passages from Orwell’s 1984.
It’s an auspicious start, with something of Nick Drake’s acoustic fluidity and Thom Yorke’s wrenched tension, but ‘Urgency’ was a relatively old song, and when the chance came to make a CD, Rob picked four newer songs – ‘So The Story Goes’. ‘No Grand Gestures’, ‘The Detail Between Us’ and ‘Scratching Out the Absolute’. It’s a remarkably assured debut EP – stark but mellow, articulate but emotional, a bit despairing but ultimately hopeful.
Born in Bristol, Rob was the beneficiary, aged nine, of a dilapidated old piano his parents were gifted - “all gothic etching and candle holders,” he recalls. “A nine-year-old me used to bang out simple chords and write simple songs. I still have some recordings of my shrill voice and that slightly-out-of-tune piano.” A year later, he was given a second-hand, small-bodied gut-string guitar and with Sergeant Pepper and The Sound of Silence stimulating his young musical mind he would bang out more chords and write less simple songs. His first ever lyric, he reckons, “was about the four seasons, and all the changes. Very adolescent.” But very world-aware to boot.
Stockpiling those slightly-less-simple songs, Rob left school for a foundation art course but carried on the band he’d co-formed at the age of 16, the bafflingly named Paddington Frisk. But don’t think of Michael Bond’s favourite bear, because the real reason displays a much richer imagination. “At school,” Rob recalls, “we’d been studying the play Our Country’s Good, where I first heard the name. When someone gets hanged, the nerves get cut off to the body, but right after you die, you have one final nervous fit, which is called ‘dancing with Paddington Frisk’. Morbid, isn’t it?”
But the band was relatively short lived, as the members were scattered about the country in separate universities and Rob, on moving to Bath, left the Radiohead infused days of Paddington Frisk behind him. ‘’I went back to listening to all the old Beatles albums again’’ he says, “also a lot of John Martyn and Nick Drake. Without the band around me I picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing on my own’’.
In Bath Rob began a BA honours degree (in fine art), but the majority of his time was spent on music and developing the solo-bard blueprint, “I was honing my guitar technique, learning how to finger pick and become a more convincing solo performer, which I did for so long that my songs became softer, folkier and more stripped-down.” By the second year of his three-year course, “I threw in the towel. The music had started to go well, so I had to make a decision one way. Music has always been at the centre of most things I’ve done, so it was a no-brainer when I had to decide.”
Having instigated the recording of ‘Urgency’, Alex Parker – who was becoming something of a music industry bod – posted a demo to Dom Hardisty, co-owner of Lizard King, the label that has discovered The Killers and released their first album ‘Hot Fuss’. Hardisty immediately cottoned on to Rob’s songs, making Rob the first signing to his new label Marrakesh, which is releasing the So The Story Goes EP.
The first recording was a bittersweet start; Rob entered Woodworm studio outside Oxford, where Fairport Convention used to work, and Fairport alumni Dave Pegg, (bass) and Gerry Conway (drums) offered to play on the EP. “I was enthralled with the prospect,” Rob recalls, “but though they’re excellent musicians, what they added to my songs wasn’t quite apt, so I abandoned the session. I felt distressed but Dom just said I could re-record it, so we moved to Moles Studio in Bath, I worked with people I knew well, who had a good grasp of my music, and it went really well.” Cementing the new sessions were, on drums and bass respectively, Sam Nadel (whose house Rob used for recording his demos) and Adam Newton from Blackbud, while Bath resident Paul Corkett (who has engineered Bjork, Nick Cave, Dirty Three and Placebo among others) produced and mixed the EP.
The title track, with its thrumming acoustic guitars, underplayed violin/cello backing and knee-deep mood of resignation, was inspired by a “really grim walk through the centre of Bristol,” Rob explains. “I was struck by the buildings, civilisation in general. The lyric is a vague philosophical skit on all that, talking about religion and how humans strive to live forever. I think we give ourselves too much importance and status in this world.”
It’s no surprise that Rob’s literary heroes are the existentialists – Kafka, Camus, the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Kerouac.” Not that Rob wants to paint himself as some bleak poet. “With this EP”, he counters, “it’s not that I wanted to come out with any message in particular. I just write about things that anger or inspire me. I draw from my own experiences and those of other people I know.”
‘No Grand Gestures’, which shares the title track’s arrangement, is initially Rob “grappling with a looming sense of doubt about a number of issues; like self-consciousness and the nature of good will. Also our obsession with religion and the ideologies which ultimately drive people to undertake insane actions, like war. As hackneyed as it sounds, my message is that we should love each other more.”
‘The Detail Between Us’ is the EP’s starkest, luminescent track, with a purposeful narrative: “It’s written about my girlfriend, and a particular incident that took place one night. It had a significant impact on me.” The closing ‘Scratching Out The Absolute’ is the EP’s most uptempo, band-shaped track. It’s another narrative about kinship, but this time between Rob and one of his closest friends. Full of descriptions of long nights during Rob’s first year of university; it concerns depression and mortality, wild epiphanies and drinking, sitting on rooftops and music, music, music.. “All sorts of music; Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman, lots of Nirvana, The Beach Boys…”
That finale might well point the way to the next stage. Rob reckons the next EP (which should then pave the way for his debut album) will be “completely different. I’ve been swaying a lot more toward the whole band set-up, which I’d like to record quite raw, with piano, bass, drums and guitar, which is a feel that’s more relevant to the songs I’m writing at the moment. I have loads of new material. After my current tour, I’m going to record some demos and experiment.”
That’s how the story goes, so far. But this is only the first chapter…
