UK Americana star JACK FRANCIS to perform an Album Launch at The Slaughtered Lamb on February 3rd....
In little over a year, Jack Francis went from playing his unique brand of Soulful Folk at small local gigs in his hometown of Southampton, to appearing at major UK festivals such as the Isle Of Wight, Victorious and Stone Free Festival at the O2 Arena.
As well as receiving radio play from Tom Robinson's BBC6 Music show, the singles from Jack’s debut album have been championed by Iain Anderson and Ricky Ross on BBC Radio Scotland, Janice Long on BBC Radio Wales and Eve Blair on BBC Radio Ulster.
“Brilliant voice and amazing songwriting talent” - BBC Introducing
“…really good, really, really great” – BBC Scotland
“what an amazing talent” – BBC Ulster
“this is really very good” – BBC Wales
“Stunning” – BBC Solent Record Of The Week
‘I don’t know what it is that an artist needs to be great, but whatever it is, Jack Francis definitely has it’. – BBC Essex
“Brilliant” - BBC Gloucester
Jack Francis is a singer-songwriter from the deep south – of England. A troubadour straight out of Southampton, Jack is one of the exciting new breed of UK Americana acts that includes rising stars such as Jade Bird, Ferris & Sylvester and Yola. The heartfelt songs on his new/debut album are rooted in the finest musical traditions of America, while staying true to his own geographical heritage.
Born in England to Irish parents, Jack found his calling and his spiritual home after a visit to New York. He arrived in the Big Apple at a low point in his life. He had studied Music Performance at university and had been playing in bands since he was 15. But none of it had worked out. Now stuck in a dull office job, he had given up playing music completely.
New York fired his imagination and inspired him to try again. Two years later he would return to the city, a changed man, to get married and extend his travels to Nashville. In between these two life-changing excursions, he picked up his guitar again and started writing songs. And things began to happen.
He travelled the length and breadth of the UK and Ireland, playing basements, backrooms, clubs and bars, honing his skills as a singer and performer. He met Jade Bird playing a Sofar Sounds gig in east London and she encouraged him to seek out Rafael Pesce owner of the Spiritual Bar in Camden, the aptly-named venue which has become recognised as the spiritual home of a group of influential UK artists working in the Americana tradition. Raf gave Jack a gig, and he quickly became a regular attraction at the Spiritual.
Word spread and, after he was scouted at a show at the Boogaloo, up the road in Highgate, Jack was signed to Catherine Songs, the publishing company run by producer and songwriter Jamie Scott, renowned for his collaborations with Rag’n’Bone Man, Niall Horan and Michael Kiwanuka among others.
Jack was thrown into a new world and a new way of working. “Catherine Songs did a lot of mainstream pop and I worked with a few other songwriters and got to see a bit of that side of things,” Jack says. “It was interesting to say the least, and opened my mind a bit. But it didn’t really work out.”
The process of co-writing in pursuit of a magical “hit” formula was not the route that Jack wanted to take. Instead, when his contract at Catherine Songs expired last year, he returned to his original vision and embarked on recording an album of songs with a deep, soulful resonance, unfiltered by any compromises or collaborations in the writing department.
The album was recorded with the help of his Spiritual Bar comrades Ferris & Sylvester in their house in Wiltshire, where the duo have amassed an impressive cache of recording equipment and instruments, including a Hammond organ and Leslie speaker combo, no less.
Jack moved into the duo’s house for varying stretches of time, as work on the album progressed during 2020. At a time when both acts would ordinarily have been out on the road, the restrictions owing to the C-19 pandemic meant that they were able to work for long stretches with no distractions and get to the musical and emotional core of the songs Jack had written.
“It was great fun making it,” Jack says “We had the drummer Ross Gordon. And we got in horn players and someone to do the strings. But all the rest - bass, piano, organ, guitar - it was just me and Archie [Sylvester]. We were able to experiment and focus and really just do what was right for the songs.”
The first single, A Little Love, has a melodic appeal that is both instant and timeless. Throughout the album, Jack’s rangy, English voice lends authority to lyrics which explore the emotional terrain of a young man’s life with passion and poetic precision. “Am I an engine made of steel/Or am I just the wheel?” he sings in The Wheel, a song that combines yearning echoes of Levon Helm’s work with the Band with something of Noel Gallagher’s irrepressible sense of pop melody. The classic sounds of Hammond organ and acoustic and slide guitar are leavened by a blast of fiddle at the start of To Mean As Much As You which propels the listener to a bar in the backstreets of Dublin.
Having already featured on Tom Robinson’s show on BBC Radio 6 and BBC Introducing, Jack is about to take his music to the next level with this inspired collection. “It’s all about the songs,” he says. “I just want to write the best songs I can possibly write.”
Mission accomplished.
Socials