| Darren Hayman — Lido (2012) |
Darren Hayman — Lido Birth name: Darren Russell Hayman
Born: November 30, 1970
Origin: Walthamstow, Brentwood, Essex, England
Genres: Indie rock, Electronic, Folk rock
Occupations: Singer~songwriter, musician
Instruments: Guitar, Ukulele, Piano
Location: Walthamstow, Northern London, UK
Album release: August 27, 2012
Record Label: Where It’s At Is Where You Are/Belka Track And Field
Duration: 49:28
Tracks:
01. London Fields 3:01
02. Black Rock Baths 3:59
03. Brockwell Park 2:07
04. Parliament Hill 4:55
05. Saltdean 3:03
06. The Knap 2:35
07. Super Swimming Stadium 5:29
08. Brentwood 4:44
09. Tinside 3:30
10. Stonehaven 4:36
11. King’s Meadow 1:39
12. Jubilee Pool 2:57
13. Purley Way 3:32
14. Tooting Bec 3:16
Website: http://www.hefnet.com/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/darrenhayman / Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Darren-Hayman/55543614047
Description:
≡ Lido is an instrumental album by Darren Hayman about open air Swimming Pools. This blog will feature words, pictures and sounds about Lidos by various people. The record will be released in September 2012 on vinyl by ‘Where It’s At Is Where You Are’ records and on CD by Clay Pipe Music. // Members:
∩ Currently with The Secondary Modern; Darren Hayman (vocals, guitar, keyboards), David Sheppard (drums, guitars, backing vocals), Dan Mayfield (violin, vocals), Bill Botting (bass, vocals), Dave Watkins (Banjo, vocals) and Simon Trought (guitars, vocals, harmonium, percussion, mandolin)
∩ The Secondary Modern has previously featured Amos Memon (drums), James Milne (bass), Nick Buxton (drums), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Jack Hayter (guitar, pedal steel)
∩ Darren has released four solo albums, two of them with the Secondary Modern
∩ Darren also played bass and sang in Hayman, Watkins, Trout and Lee which also featured David Tattersal from the Wave Pictures on guitar and vocals and Dan Mayfield (violin) and Dave Watkins (banjo). The band previously featured Simon Trought (mandolin) and John Lee (guitar)
∩ Darren was in The French with John Morrison who made one album ‘Local Information’. This album was recently featured as a ‘Buried Treasure’ in Mojo magazine
∩ Darren is perhaps best known for being in Hefner with John Morrison (bass), Antony Harding (drums, vocals) and Jack Hayter (guitars, pedal steels, vocals)
∩ Hefner made four albums and have now released a ton of unreleased songs on expanded editions and new compilations 14 track album on swimming pool blue vinyl. I was thinking about instrumental music and whether it could truly be about something. I was thinking about how classical, jazz and the avant~garde often group music together under conceptual titles and themes. Isn t a lot of this music about music itself? Isn t instrumental music literally about the unspeakable, the indescribable? My name is Darren Hayman and I have made an instrumental album about Britain s open air swimming pools; it s called Lido . If I am known or liked for anything at all in my career then it is for my lyrics. I see words as incisive, accurate tools, when used correctly. I don t want my words to paint vague canvasses; I want them to make detailed, forensic technical drawings. In my own listening, however, I have moved more and more towards instrumental music. I enjoy the heavenly fog of the ECM label. I love following the unpredictability of John Coltrane s reckless career. I adore roots dub reggae it makes me feel safe and calm. Instrumental music has given me something that has been missing from my listening for a few years. Cautiously, over the last few years, I started to amass recordings of my instrumental compositions. When I had five that I thought were good, I needed a title that might pull these sunny, open tunes together; I thought of Lido . From that point onwards I tried to think about what it would be to write music with a specific setting in mind. I tried to write the tunes in my head, while visiting the individual pools. I wanted to make music that sounded half remembered but purposeful. I went to the road where one of the pools used to be. I recorded nothing but the faint rumble of traffic and put in my tune. My album ‘Lido’ is about open air swimming pools and something else as well. It's just impossible to say what it is exactly. 
By George BassAugust 9th, 2012 (http://drownedinsound.com)
≡ To anyone bemused by the Olympic opening ceremony, wondering what nurses, blacksmiths and Mr Bean had to do with Great British athletics, here’s a slice of sporting heritage from ex~Hefner frontman Darren Hayman. Taking a break from his horny underdog persona, the Essex singer has written a tribute to Britain’s open~air swimming pools — lidos — and recorded it without a single vocal. 'If I am known or liked for anything at all in my career then it is for my lyrics… I see words as incisive, accurate tools,' he claimed when he announced the project. It’s a triumph then that Lido is so precise and delicious, its instrumentals perfectly evoking warm memories of paddling under blue skies in chlorine water.
≡ With the same homemade production as The Ship’s Piano, Lido is an hour of acoustic~electronic pop, each track swathed in nostalgia like Boards of Canada gone busking. Each track has also been influenced by an actual lido, with ‘Parliament Hill’s violins, beats and bells emerging from the roar of boys’ showers — one of several recorded for the album that must’ve netted Hayman some sort of restraining order. ‘Tinside’ is exquisite, just banjo and mellow accordions, and features the sound of the caretaker lashing the kids with a cold hose; the lido equivalent of a wave machine. Though obviously drawn from Hayman’s Thatcherite childhood, the era he’s targeting is a vague one — ‘London Fields’s plucked guitar and old keyboards could be a Seventies sitcom title.
≡ Lido doesn’t just stay in the capital, and features enough musical variation to fulfill Hayman’s assurance that you won’t miss the lyrics. There are occasions, however, where he commands so much emotion that his reedy vocals would be a bonus: ‘Saltdean’ and its bittersweet keyboards could easily carry one of his venereal anecdotes, as could the sad shuffling banjo of ‘Black Rock Baths’ and its obvious verse~verse~chorus pattern. But it’s a tiny niggle, and Lido works best in its own quaint spirit, remembering the public pools as the hubs of the community they used to be.
≡ And in some places, still are: ‘Stonehaven’, named after the Olympic~size heated seawater pool in Scotland, uses stylophone~led electronics from Hayman’s short~lived duo The French; one of the most promising projects of his career. It’s a bopping five minutes of experimental pop, juggling glitch with folk guitars and cementing the atmosphere Lido’s been striving for — people playing in city centres, innocent times that aren’t quite yet over. Hayman’s channeled this mood into music and the result is a delight, his compositions as sharp as the lyrics he’s dispensed with. Later this year he’ll release The Violence, an album about seventeenth century witch trials that’ll no doubt feature lines about stakes, gibbets and ducking stools. Until then Lido proves a strange double truth: that a group of people isn’t necessarily a mob, and that you can be idiosyncratic without speaking. Score: Darren Hayman 8 / 10
Discography:
Studio albums:
≡ Table for One (2006, Track & Field)
≡ Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern (2007, Track & Field)
≡ Pram Town (2009, Track & Field)
≡ Essex Arms (2010, Fortuna Pop!)
≡ January Songs (2011, Self~released)
≡ The Ship's Piano (2011, Fortuna Pop!)
≡ The Shit Piano (2012, Self~released)
≡ Lido (2012, Where It’s At Is Where You Are)
EPs:
≡ Caravan Songs (2005, Static Caravan)
≡ Cortinaland (2005, Acuarela)
≡ Ukulele Songs From the North Devon Coast (2006, Static Caravan)
≡ Bad Policewoman/Your Heart (2007, Unpopular)
≡ Eastbourne Lights (2007, Static Caravan)
≡ Table for One: the Dessert Menu (2007, Track & Field)
≡ Minehead (2007, Static Caravan)
≡ Songs for Harmonium and Drum Machine (2008, P572)
≡ Losing My Glue (2009, Track & Field)
≡ I Taught You How to Dance (2011, Fortuna Pop!)
≡ Christmas in Haworth (2011, Fika Recordings)
Compilations:
≡ Great British Holiday EPs (CD/DVD set) (2008, Belka)
≡ The Green and the Grey (2011, Belka)
Live Albums:
≡ Madrid — as Darren Hayman & The Wave Pictures (2009, Belka) “Essays on memory and lost, bold, civic dreams” explored on new LP
≡ With the Olympics just seven days away, it’s good to be reminded that the pursuit of health through exercise doesn’t have to be a grim contradiction of fast food, corporate dictatorship, and plasticated superhumans going round and round in circles.
≡ Darren Hayman’s latest project, then, is well timed. Lido is a limited edition album that reflects on the outdoor swimming pools that were once a significant part of British communal exercise, but have fallen on hard times in recent years, with many closing. Lido, is a completely instrumental album, and therefore something of a departure for Hayman, who we're most accustomed to hearing send forth his eloquent lyricism about the shabbier end of life, and things lost.
© ycdkwm; Darren Hayman performing with the Secondary Modern, July 2007
© John Winfield; Brentwood Public School, Essex. The school was founded in 1557 and received its charter the following year. Brentwood School has been attended by a number of famous pupils.
| Darren Hayman — Lido (2012) |
Born: November 30, 1970
Origin: Walthamstow, Brentwood, Essex, England
Genres: Indie rock, Electronic, Folk rock
Occupations: Singer~songwriter, musician
Instruments: Guitar, Ukulele, Piano
Location: Walthamstow, Northern London, UK
Album release: August 27, 2012
Record Label: Where It’s At Is Where You Are/Belka Track And Field
Duration: 49:28
Tracks:
01. London Fields 3:01
02. Black Rock Baths 3:59
03. Brockwell Park 2:07
04. Parliament Hill 4:55
05. Saltdean 3:03
06. The Knap 2:35
07. Super Swimming Stadium 5:29
08. Brentwood 4:44
09. Tinside 3:30
10. Stonehaven 4:36
11. King’s Meadow 1:39
12. Jubilee Pool 2:57
13. Purley Way 3:32
14. Tooting Bec 3:16
Website: http://www.hefnet.com/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/darrenhayman / Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Darren-Hayman/55543614047
Description:
≡ Lido is an instrumental album by Darren Hayman about open air Swimming Pools. This blog will feature words, pictures and sounds about Lidos by various people. The record will be released in September 2012 on vinyl by ‘Where It’s At Is Where You Are’ records and on CD by Clay Pipe Music. // Members:
∩ Currently with The Secondary Modern; Darren Hayman (vocals, guitar, keyboards), David Sheppard (drums, guitars, backing vocals), Dan Mayfield (violin, vocals), Bill Botting (bass, vocals), Dave Watkins (Banjo, vocals) and Simon Trought (guitars, vocals, harmonium, percussion, mandolin)
∩ The Secondary Modern has previously featured Amos Memon (drums), James Milne (bass), Nick Buxton (drums), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Jack Hayter (guitar, pedal steel)
∩ Darren has released four solo albums, two of them with the Secondary Modern
∩ Darren also played bass and sang in Hayman, Watkins, Trout and Lee which also featured David Tattersal from the Wave Pictures on guitar and vocals and Dan Mayfield (violin) and Dave Watkins (banjo). The band previously featured Simon Trought (mandolin) and John Lee (guitar)
∩ Darren was in The French with John Morrison who made one album ‘Local Information’. This album was recently featured as a ‘Buried Treasure’ in Mojo magazine
∩ Darren is perhaps best known for being in Hefner with John Morrison (bass), Antony Harding (drums, vocals) and Jack Hayter (guitars, pedal steels, vocals)
∩ Hefner made four albums and have now released a ton of unreleased songs on expanded editions and new compilations 14 track album on swimming pool blue vinyl. I was thinking about instrumental music and whether it could truly be about something. I was thinking about how classical, jazz and the avant~garde often group music together under conceptual titles and themes. Isn t a lot of this music about music itself? Isn t instrumental music literally about the unspeakable, the indescribable? My name is Darren Hayman and I have made an instrumental album about Britain s open air swimming pools; it s called Lido . If I am known or liked for anything at all in my career then it is for my lyrics. I see words as incisive, accurate tools, when used correctly. I don t want my words to paint vague canvasses; I want them to make detailed, forensic technical drawings. In my own listening, however, I have moved more and more towards instrumental music. I enjoy the heavenly fog of the ECM label. I love following the unpredictability of John Coltrane s reckless career. I adore roots dub reggae it makes me feel safe and calm. Instrumental music has given me something that has been missing from my listening for a few years. Cautiously, over the last few years, I started to amass recordings of my instrumental compositions. When I had five that I thought were good, I needed a title that might pull these sunny, open tunes together; I thought of Lido . From that point onwards I tried to think about what it would be to write music with a specific setting in mind. I tried to write the tunes in my head, while visiting the individual pools. I wanted to make music that sounded half remembered but purposeful. I went to the road where one of the pools used to be. I recorded nothing but the faint rumble of traffic and put in my tune. My album ‘Lido’ is about open air swimming pools and something else as well. It's just impossible to say what it is exactly.
By George BassAugust 9th, 2012 (http://drownedinsound.com)
≡ To anyone bemused by the Olympic opening ceremony, wondering what nurses, blacksmiths and Mr Bean had to do with Great British athletics, here’s a slice of sporting heritage from ex~Hefner frontman Darren Hayman. Taking a break from his horny underdog persona, the Essex singer has written a tribute to Britain’s open~air swimming pools — lidos — and recorded it without a single vocal. 'If I am known or liked for anything at all in my career then it is for my lyrics… I see words as incisive, accurate tools,' he claimed when he announced the project. It’s a triumph then that Lido is so precise and delicious, its instrumentals perfectly evoking warm memories of paddling under blue skies in chlorine water.
≡ With the same homemade production as The Ship’s Piano, Lido is an hour of acoustic~electronic pop, each track swathed in nostalgia like Boards of Canada gone busking. Each track has also been influenced by an actual lido, with ‘Parliament Hill’s violins, beats and bells emerging from the roar of boys’ showers — one of several recorded for the album that must’ve netted Hayman some sort of restraining order. ‘Tinside’ is exquisite, just banjo and mellow accordions, and features the sound of the caretaker lashing the kids with a cold hose; the lido equivalent of a wave machine. Though obviously drawn from Hayman’s Thatcherite childhood, the era he’s targeting is a vague one — ‘London Fields’s plucked guitar and old keyboards could be a Seventies sitcom title.
≡ Lido doesn’t just stay in the capital, and features enough musical variation to fulfill Hayman’s assurance that you won’t miss the lyrics. There are occasions, however, where he commands so much emotion that his reedy vocals would be a bonus: ‘Saltdean’ and its bittersweet keyboards could easily carry one of his venereal anecdotes, as could the sad shuffling banjo of ‘Black Rock Baths’ and its obvious verse~verse~chorus pattern. But it’s a tiny niggle, and Lido works best in its own quaint spirit, remembering the public pools as the hubs of the community they used to be.
≡ And in some places, still are: ‘Stonehaven’, named after the Olympic~size heated seawater pool in Scotland, uses stylophone~led electronics from Hayman’s short~lived duo The French; one of the most promising projects of his career. It’s a bopping five minutes of experimental pop, juggling glitch with folk guitars and cementing the atmosphere Lido’s been striving for — people playing in city centres, innocent times that aren’t quite yet over. Hayman’s channeled this mood into music and the result is a delight, his compositions as sharp as the lyrics he’s dispensed with. Later this year he’ll release The Violence, an album about seventeenth century witch trials that’ll no doubt feature lines about stakes, gibbets and ducking stools. Until then Lido proves a strange double truth: that a group of people isn’t necessarily a mob, and that you can be idiosyncratic without speaking.
Discography:
Studio albums:
≡ Table for One (2006, Track & Field)
≡ Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern (2007, Track & Field)
≡ Pram Town (2009, Track & Field)
≡ Essex Arms (2010, Fortuna Pop!)
≡ January Songs (2011, Self~released)
≡ The Ship's Piano (2011, Fortuna Pop!)
≡ The Shit Piano (2012, Self~released)
≡ Lido (2012, Where It’s At Is Where You Are)
EPs:
≡ Caravan Songs (2005, Static Caravan)
≡ Cortinaland (2005, Acuarela)
≡ Ukulele Songs From the North Devon Coast (2006, Static Caravan)
≡ Bad Policewoman/Your Heart (2007, Unpopular)
≡ Eastbourne Lights (2007, Static Caravan)
≡ Table for One: the Dessert Menu (2007, Track & Field)
≡ Minehead (2007, Static Caravan)
≡ Songs for Harmonium and Drum Machine (2008, P572)
≡ Losing My Glue (2009, Track & Field)
≡ I Taught You How to Dance (2011, Fortuna Pop!)
≡ Christmas in Haworth (2011, Fika Recordings)
Compilations:
≡ Great British Holiday EPs (CD/DVD set) (2008, Belka)
≡ The Green and the Grey (2011, Belka)
Live Albums:
≡ Madrid — as Darren Hayman & The Wave Pictures (2009, Belka) “Essays on memory and lost, bold, civic dreams” explored on new LP
≡ With the Olympics just seven days away, it’s good to be reminded that the pursuit of health through exercise doesn’t have to be a grim contradiction of fast food, corporate dictatorship, and plasticated superhumans going round and round in circles.
≡ Darren Hayman’s latest project, then, is well timed. Lido is a limited edition album that reflects on the outdoor swimming pools that were once a significant part of British communal exercise, but have fallen on hard times in recent years, with many closing. Lido, is a completely instrumental album, and therefore something of a departure for Hayman, who we're most accustomed to hearing send forth his eloquent lyricism about the shabbier end of life, and things lost.