New album

The new Spearmint album ‘Are You From The Future?’ is released on Friday 1^st November, and we are untypically proud of it! You can order a CD here, and get it digitally from all the usual places.

Vinyl album

There is an extremely limited pressing of 100 customised, numbered, white-label vinyl albums, each autographed by Shirley, Jim, Ronan and Si. You can order your copy here.

Special guest for London show

We are delighted to announce that Piney Gir will be joining us for our London show at Water Rats on Thursday 14^th November. Hear the new songs live for the first time plus some selected favourites! You can get your ticket here.

Brighton gig

On Thursday 5^th December we will return to Brighton to play at the Prince Albert (under the station with the amazing murals of departed musical icons). Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to Meningitis Now – tickets available here

Near Perfect Pitch Podcast

The latest edition of this excellent podcast features me rattling on at length about the new album – check it out here… and here is the Magic Biscuit Tin Infographic, which I initially didn’t believe existed!

Article 54 album

Our friend Rhodri has made a new album. Remember those three great Free French albums on hitBACK? Rhodri also produced Spearmint’s ‘Paris In A Bottle’ and ‘My Missing Days’ albums. Well, the new album is called ‘The Hustle’ by Article 54. It’s an eight-song disco response to the Brexit circus, and it’s my favourite new album of the year so far. You can get it here . This will release some of that tension that may have been building up in you for past three years… and if you’re not close to Brexit (I envy you), then I recommend you get it anyway – it’s simply a brilliant album.

Scottish Pop radio show

The good folk at 22westmedia.com, the student station at Long Beach State University, have put together a whole radio show based around our song ‘Scottish Pop’! Lots of great tunes, including some (perhaps provocatively mainstream) selections from me. You can listen here.

Shirl

X

The video for the new Spearmint single is out now:  https://youtu.be/TQSmNTwKWWY

‘St Thomas in the Darkness’ is released on 18th October and is the second single from the album ‘Are You From The Future?’, which comes out on 1st November. The song was originally conceived as an acapella piece over a quite sombre drum-beat, a bit like something the Shirelles or the Crystals would have done. That’s where the harmonies over the single chord in the verses came from. Then as usual when writing, it kept going round in my head while I was walking round town, and in my mind it started to become a disco tune, a bit ‘Heart of Glass’.

From there the one-note bass-line for the verses emerged, which I really like, and that became the centre of the arrangement.

Lyrically it’s a love song, and it’s totally literal – I don’t feel like it needs any explanation. I’m very fond of the words as they are close to my heart, but also, I really like the “When I’m weak…” and the “I’m not good with names…” sections.

We recorded the song in Brighton with our producer JB. Even during recording it veered between disco, girl-group plain-song and a more gothic direction, which we slightly backed away from in the end, but we might explore more when we play it live. We landed on a mixture of these and I think it works well. Ronan put the drums down, Jim did the bass and Si did all the harmonies.

We shot the video in the Observer Building in Hastings with director Martin Gordon. I really enjoyed how pretentious it all got, almost Hammer Horror, with us creeping round the vaults in darkness. The song is totally Spearmint, fits nicely on the album, and we’re really looking forward to playing in our live shows.