Yellow Wire
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You could say that Ol Beach, who is to all intents and purposes (and he is pretty intense and purposeful) Yellow Wire, has had an eventful life so far. His dad, Jim Beach, has been the manager of legendary rock band Queen since 1978, and he grew up in Switzerland. A musical youth, he was educated first at L’Ecole Nouvelle in Lausanne and then at the Montreux Jazz Conservatoire, where his teacher was Blue Note recording artist Thierry Lang. His previous band, Wire Daisies, had a brief but glittering career: they recorded two albums for EMI, had number 1 tracks on iTunes in France and the UK, had a song featured on a top Brazilian soap opera, toured Europe and South Africa as support to Starsailor and Robbie Williams, and performed twice at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
In 2008, Wire Daisies became Yellow Wire, with new personnel, a new direction, and of course a new name, which was given to him by, of all people, a masseuse he went to on a day off in Johannesburg on the Robbie Williams tour. She was, explains Ol, a masseuse with a difference. “She told me she’d been abused as a child and was living on the streets,” he recalls his fateful conversation with the woman who would prove pivotal to his career. “She decided to end it all and jump off a bridge when this complete stranger walked up to her and gave her a phone number to ring. She called it and the lady who answered invited her over and eventually became her adopted mother. She was an intensely spiritual woman who taught her everything she knew about being a masseuse and basically changed her life. Anyway, this adopted daughter was giving me the most unbelievable massage when she asked what my band was called. I told her it was Wire Daisies and she said, ‘No, the name is Yellow Wire.’ So I adopted the name Yellow Wire when I went out on my own because of this wonderful soothsayer lady.
Some of her deep-heat treatment must have rubbed off on Ol, because there is a spiritual quality to the music he’s been recording as Yellow Wire, with a gentle, almost gospel-ish fervour that recalls everyone from early-70s Rolling Stones to Tender-era Blur, although he reckons it’s more Lou Reed meets U2. He wrote the songs, and produced and engineered them himself in Cornwall and Switzerland, with mixing duties handled by John Cornfield, whose own CV at Cornwall’s celebrated Sawmills Studio includes such stellar names as Robert Plant, The Stone Roses and Muse. Ol sang and played most of the instruments, including guitar and keyboards, with a little help from other musicians, some of them from the Wire Daisies days, on electric guitar, pedal steel, bass, drums, organ, percussion and strings, which are sometimes live, other times programmed. “It’s just me working with some other guys,” says Ol of the Yellow Wire project. “I write the songs. It’s driven by me.”
The first of those songs to see the light of day will be the single Where Is The Summer, a mellow, infectious pop-rock number about looking on the bright side. “You can read it in many ways,” says Ol. “That’s what’s lovely about music. I was listening to a Beatles song the other day, one I’ve heard a thousand times, and suddenly I heard it in a different way. A friend of mine said that one of my tracks was about something completely different to what I’d intended, but that’s great.” So is Where Is The Summer about being optimistic in the face of gloom? He doesn’t want to spoil alternative meanings, but says, tentatively, “Yeah…” He adds: “When it’s raining we get down and depressed, like, ‘Oh, man, the rain’s coming down’, even though we know that really, 200 metres above our heads, it’s still glorious, beautiful weather. We get squashed beneath the cloud layer with our negative thoughts. The song is about how our emotions when it’s sunny are different to when it’s raining, and how we shouldn’t let that 200 metres of cloud ruin the loveliness.”
Ol believes Where Is The Summer is poppier and more “happy-go-lucky” than anything else on the album, whose projected title is Starlife. The title track is a strings-drenched stormer reminiscent of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, with a rousing, anthemic chorus. It is, says Ol, perhaps still reeling from that massage, “about our lack of engagement with our surroundings… If you go into our homes, we’re surrounded by products that we’ve created ourselves and given meaning to so that we can feel like we’re inside, but actually we’re outside. Homes are just stones carved into a certain shape to make us feel as though we’re indoors, and they take us away from our outside essence. People say ‘go back to nature’ but we already are. We just need to keep in touch with our realness and wake up to our existence in the universe.”
It sounds far-fetched and far-out, but the beauty of Yellow Wire’s music is that you can lie back and trip out to it, or just revel in the catchy melodies and simple truths expressed in the lyrics. Take Better Man, for example, which is a real epic lighters-aloft affair, a fanfare for the common people about the need for individuals to reconnect so they can experience the oneness of humanity. You can search for deep meanings in it, or you can just enjoy it for what it is, which is essentially an update of the message communicated by The Beatles on All You Need Is Love, with an equally irresistible tune.
“Most of my songs revolve around the same concept,” says Ol. “They’re about how we all live in our own bubbles, and how we need to break out and see everyone else as people as opposed to extensions of our individual consciousness. It’s like, everybody’s a stranger but really we’re all flatmates on the same planet! We pretend we don’t know each other but really we’re all friends. A lot of the album represents my thoughts on that subject.”
The music on Starlife, which will be released in the spring 2011 by Swiss independent label id Records and distributed by Universal, will feature a diverse range of styles, as well as artwork by acclaimed illustrator Jimmy Turrell (responsible for memorable imagery for Glastonbury Festival and The Prodigy) and renowned photographer Gabrielle Crawford. However, as Ol points out, there is a consistency of tone because, after all, the songs were all written and sung by him. “It’s eclectic, but it’s got the same energy running through it. So whether it’s a rocky track or a ballad, something that stirs the emotions, something quirky, or something quiet – and it can be a bit schizophrenic – it’s all based around the same ideas. It’s all me, just me in different moods.”
Quelle Text
Offizielle Homepage
Myspace
Quelle Bild[/url]
Offiziell Bestätigt
You could say that Ol Beach, who is to all intents and purposes (and he is pretty intense and purposeful) Yellow Wire, has had an eventful life so far. His dad, Jim Beach, has been the manager of legendary rock band Queen since 1978, and he grew up in Switzerland. A musical youth, he was educated first at L’Ecole Nouvelle in Lausanne and then at the Montreux Jazz Conservatoire, where his teacher was Blue Note recording artist Thierry Lang. His previous band, Wire Daisies, had a brief but glittering career: they recorded two albums for EMI, had number 1 tracks on iTunes in France and the UK, had a song featured on a top Brazilian soap opera, toured Europe and South Africa as support to Starsailor and Robbie Williams, and performed twice at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
In 2008, Wire Daisies became Yellow Wire, with new personnel, a new direction, and of course a new name, which was given to him by, of all people, a masseuse he went to on a day off in Johannesburg on the Robbie Williams tour. She was, explains Ol, a masseuse with a difference. “She told me she’d been abused as a child and was living on the streets,” he recalls his fateful conversation with the woman who would prove pivotal to his career. “She decided to end it all and jump off a bridge when this complete stranger walked up to her and gave her a phone number to ring. She called it and the lady who answered invited her over and eventually became her adopted mother. She was an intensely spiritual woman who taught her everything she knew about being a masseuse and basically changed her life. Anyway, this adopted daughter was giving me the most unbelievable massage when she asked what my band was called. I told her it was Wire Daisies and she said, ‘No, the name is Yellow Wire.’ So I adopted the name Yellow Wire when I went out on my own because of this wonderful soothsayer lady.
Some of her deep-heat treatment must have rubbed off on Ol, because there is a spiritual quality to the music he’s been recording as Yellow Wire, with a gentle, almost gospel-ish fervour that recalls everyone from early-70s Rolling Stones to Tender-era Blur, although he reckons it’s more Lou Reed meets U2. He wrote the songs, and produced and engineered them himself in Cornwall and Switzerland, with mixing duties handled by John Cornfield, whose own CV at Cornwall’s celebrated Sawmills Studio includes such stellar names as Robert Plant, The Stone Roses and Muse. Ol sang and played most of the instruments, including guitar and keyboards, with a little help from other musicians, some of them from the Wire Daisies days, on electric guitar, pedal steel, bass, drums, organ, percussion and strings, which are sometimes live, other times programmed. “It’s just me working with some other guys,” says Ol of the Yellow Wire project. “I write the songs. It’s driven by me.”
The first of those songs to see the light of day will be the single Where Is The Summer, a mellow, infectious pop-rock number about looking on the bright side. “You can read it in many ways,” says Ol. “That’s what’s lovely about music. I was listening to a Beatles song the other day, one I’ve heard a thousand times, and suddenly I heard it in a different way. A friend of mine said that one of my tracks was about something completely different to what I’d intended, but that’s great.” So is Where Is The Summer about being optimistic in the face of gloom? He doesn’t want to spoil alternative meanings, but says, tentatively, “Yeah…” He adds: “When it’s raining we get down and depressed, like, ‘Oh, man, the rain’s coming down’, even though we know that really, 200 metres above our heads, it’s still glorious, beautiful weather. We get squashed beneath the cloud layer with our negative thoughts. The song is about how our emotions when it’s sunny are different to when it’s raining, and how we shouldn’t let that 200 metres of cloud ruin the loveliness.”
Ol believes Where Is The Summer is poppier and more “happy-go-lucky” than anything else on the album, whose projected title is Starlife. The title track is a strings-drenched stormer reminiscent of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, with a rousing, anthemic chorus. It is, says Ol, perhaps still reeling from that massage, “about our lack of engagement with our surroundings… If you go into our homes, we’re surrounded by products that we’ve created ourselves and given meaning to so that we can feel like we’re inside, but actually we’re outside. Homes are just stones carved into a certain shape to make us feel as though we’re indoors, and they take us away from our outside essence. People say ‘go back to nature’ but we already are. We just need to keep in touch with our realness and wake up to our existence in the universe.”
It sounds far-fetched and far-out, but the beauty of Yellow Wire’s music is that you can lie back and trip out to it, or just revel in the catchy melodies and simple truths expressed in the lyrics. Take Better Man, for example, which is a real epic lighters-aloft affair, a fanfare for the common people about the need for individuals to reconnect so they can experience the oneness of humanity. You can search for deep meanings in it, or you can just enjoy it for what it is, which is essentially an update of the message communicated by The Beatles on All You Need Is Love, with an equally irresistible tune.
“Most of my songs revolve around the same concept,” says Ol. “They’re about how we all live in our own bubbles, and how we need to break out and see everyone else as people as opposed to extensions of our individual consciousness. It’s like, everybody’s a stranger but really we’re all flatmates on the same planet! We pretend we don’t know each other but really we’re all friends. A lot of the album represents my thoughts on that subject.”
The music on Starlife, which will be released in the spring 2011 by Swiss independent label id Records and distributed by Universal, will feature a diverse range of styles, as well as artwork by acclaimed illustrator Jimmy Turrell (responsible for memorable imagery for Glastonbury Festival and The Prodigy) and renowned photographer Gabrielle Crawford. However, as Ol points out, there is a consistency of tone because, after all, the songs were all written and sung by him. “It’s eclectic, but it’s got the same energy running through it. So whether it’s a rocky track or a ballad, something that stirs the emotions, something quirky, or something quiet – and it can be a bit schizophrenic – it’s all based around the same ideas. It’s all me, just me in different moods.”
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