John Cunningham

Although John Cunningham is Uk, he lives and functions in France. Like his fellow musical expatriate Expenses Pritchard (or for example, Prefab Sprout or the Large Llamas), Cunningham’s elegant make of pop music owes a particular debt to easy pre-rock traditional pop from the Cole Porter college, mixed with some Bacharach, Wilson, McCartney, and Costello. Unlike those performers, nevertheless, Cunningham infuses his music with an nearly Nick Drake-like acoustic vibe that fits his delicate however melodic compositions superbly. (This John Cunningham is usually, of course, never to become puzzled with the Scottish fiddle participant who was an associate of Silly Wizard along with other folk organizations.) Given birth to in Liverpool, Britain, in 1969, Cunningham went to college within the East Sussex city of Brighton, where he quickly dropped in using the city’s flourishing creative and musical community. Following a short and evidently unsatisfying tenure within the Drape Twitchers alongside Jane Fox of Sea Girls fame within the middle-’80s, Cunningham made the decision that a single profession was more desirable for him. A demonstration cassette got him in the small indie La-Di-Da, which released Cunningham’s debut EP, Backwards Actions, in 1989. Made by ex-Housemartins guitarist Stan Cullimore, Backwards Actions owes rather too much to that music group, even though the EP is usually entertaining, it isn’t especially representative of Cunningham’s later on work. Cunningham’s 1st full recording, 1991’s Shankly Gates, is a lot even more stripped down and romantic than Backwards Actions, with jazzy piano and delicate trumpet and oboe accents. It had been rapturously received from the French press, which likened Cunningham to performers like Robert Wyatt and late-period Chat Chat, but as will be the case throughout Cunningham’s profession, sales didn’t match the crucial response. Cunningham’s third launch, 1994’s Attracting the Blue, is usually even more processed and elegant, nonetheless it continuing the pattern of ecstatic evaluations around the Continent, small notice in the uk, and total invisibility in america, with sales numbers to complement. Cunningham decreased out of view for pretty much five years after Attracting the Blue, finally reappearing in past due 1998 using the sublime Homeless Home. Undoubtedly Cunningham’s best function, Homeless Home is really a sweetly melodic and soft album with a far more stripped-down audio than his two prior albums, sounding sometimes like a even more upbeat edition of Drake’s Bryter Layter. Following the discharge of Homeless Home, Cunningham started collaborating with Mehdi Zannad from the French pop group Fugu. Cunningham blended Fugu’s debut, 2000’s Fugu1, and Zannad had written the orchestral preparations for Cunningham’s follow-up to Homeless Home.