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Ian Britt
A Biography
The story of Ian Britt is a simple one. Boy meets guitar, learns guitar, writes impressive songs, gets discovered, and conquers the world.
The end.
OK maybe it’s not quite that simple but Ian Britt is a hugely promising new artist with a rich vault of potent songs, a naturally great voice and a rock'n'roll calling that won't be denied. How complicated can it be?
Well maybe it’s not quite so straightforward after all. How do you begin to explain a singer-songwriter with sensitive troubadour tendencies who says his music is inspired by such 60s power rock trios as Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience and whose record was produced by a leftfield dance act?
Well, we could start by listening to the record and playing spot the influences. There are certainly plenty of them. The soulful voice on I Wash My Hands is reminiscent of Paul Rodgers or Robert Palmer. Waste Another Day hints at a dream teaming of Steve Miller and Eagle-Eye Cherry. If Randy Newman and Paul Simon write a song together and lucked out, they might come up with something not dissimilar to Simple.
Yet it's an utterly futile exercise because Ian Britt sounds like nobody but himself. To suggest he resembles any of his influences is like saying the Rolling Stones sound like Chuck Berry. It might give you about one per cent of the story. But then you're back to square one. Just how do you categorise him?
Let's do the curriculum vitae bit. Born in Sheffield, his parents split up in the early 1980s when he was three. His dad moved to Manchester and he'd make the journey across the Pennines every other weekend to stay with his dad and his record collection. "He used to be a drummer and he was big into music," Ian recalls. "He played me Paul Simon, Randy Newman, Cream, and Hendrix. That was his record collection. It wasn't extensive. But the records he had I really loved and I took those influences."
By the age of 16, he was writing songs and playing them in his bedroom but still had no thought of letting anyone else hear them. After A levels, he didn't fancy going to university and spent a year bumming around, getting increasingly disillusioned. "I've got a lackadaisical way of looking at life. I float along," he admits. As playing the guitar was "always the thing I could do most easily", he floated his way on to the music course at Salford University.
"It wasn't until then I'd sung to anyone in public," he admits. "In the third year I had to get a band together and arrange my songs as part of the course. When I came out of uni I knew what I had to do. I'd found my mission."
He started firing off demos, "caning the music until I could get someone to listen". After several false leads, he was invited down to London by Alex Rizzo and Elliott Ireland, better known as dance producers IKON. They offered him a contract with their Jalapeno label and he recorded his first album over a period of about a year, commuting between London and Manchester, where he was still holding down two jobs to pay the rent and
the train fares.
"I'm basically a singer-songwriter and the album was all written on a tatty old acoustic guitar so it would have been obvious to have gone down the David Gray/Damien Rice route," he says. "But what I liked about Alex and Elliott is that the way they record music is all sequenced because they're dance producers. I love the fact that we could build the songs up in this way, and that we’ve put a bigger, fuller sound on to my naked songs"
Towards the end of the recording they got in some strings and a horn section. "That was great because it as just nice to have some people around. Until then it was quite a lonely process. But I think the album we've put together isn't like anything else around at the moment not only because of my own writing and singing style but also because of the contamination between what I do and what Alex and Elliott do. Every track sounds different."
Indeed they do. On the gentle Against The Overtones he sounds like a classic folk troubadour. Then comes the subtle rock of Open Sea with a kind of Steve Winwood meets Crosby, Still and Nash vibe. Different again is the uplifting Girl Next Door, a pure pop gem that Nick Lowe would have been proud to write, while Fallen Angel with its sweeping strings and country harmonies is one of those killer tunes that within a couple of listens you think you've known all your life.
We still haven't managed to categorise him. And we're not even going to try. His album doesn't sound like a dance record. Despite hero-worshiping Jimi Hendrix and Cream, you won't really find any electric guitar pyrotechnics. And yet the album doesn't fit easily into the singer-songwriter box, either. It's a record that as soon as you think you've got it pinned down, immediately skips off somewhere new. And therein lies its delight. You're thrown back on Duke Ellington's old prescription that there are only two kinds of music - the good and the bad. And what is undeniable is that Ian Britt has made as fine a debut album as you are likely to hear this year
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