Melting Vinyl dedicated to bringing creative artists to Brighton & Kent

Melting Vinyl presents
Jim White + Ben de la Cour at Komedia (Studio) Brighton
on Tuesday 4th May
Doors: 7.30pm
Tickets: £25 adv / £30 on the door
Standing
Age restrictions: 14+, under 16’s accompanied

Southern-gothic, off-beat alt-folk storytelling

Jim White gets around. When he’s not releasing his own critically acclaimed solo albums, he splits his time producing records for other artists, exhibiting his visual art in galleries and museums across the US and Europe and publishing award-winning fiction.

Numerous songs from White’s back catalogue have appeared in film and television, with his Primus-esque Word-Mule being featured in the Heisenberg Episode of Breaking Bad, while more recently Jim’s dreamy duet with Aimee Mann, Static on the Radio, graced the closing credits of the feature film El Camino.

Americana music fans may recognise White as the narrator and de facto tour guide for the award-winning BBC documentary, Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus, a road movie set in the rural South which the LA Times described as “Decidedly strange, delightfully demented.” Released in 2003, the film has attained cult status among Southern Gothic fans far and wide.

Prior to becoming a musician, White led an aimless, diverse life, working countless menial labour jobs: dishwasher, landscaper, lifeguard, cook, surfboard laminator, and road builder, culminating in thirteen long years driving a taxi cab in New York City. It was during a psychological spiral at the end of those thirteen years that White crossed paths with David Byrne, who promptly signed White to a record deal.

Over the ensuing twenty years, there followed a succession of critically acclaimed solo records, appearances on major network shows like Letterman and Conan, and several offbeat side-project releases (Hellwood, Mama Lucky, Sounds of the Americans).

White recently completed his first novel, Incidental Contact, a “Magical Realism memoir” centering on a series of uncanny coincidences that befell him during his days driving a taxi in New York City. Two chapters of Incidental Contact, The Bottom and Superwhite, have previously been published in the literary music journal Radio Silence, with Superwhite being awarded the prestigious Pushcart Prize for short fiction.

White was a pro surfer. He served as a literary commentator for the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a European fashion model. He once nearly got into a fistfight with Ellen DeGeneres. There’s lots more non-linear information that doesn’t really fit the usual bio format. But that’s Jim – he gets around.

A natural storyteller, Ben de la Cour’s visceral songwriting grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go. Weaving evocative stories of desperate characters with his signature ‘Americanoir’ sound, de la Cour shines a glaring light on the human condition. De la Cour’s gothic folk songs are as heartbreaking as they are beautiful.