Belfast Bard Andy White – New Spoken Word Album + January Tour Birmingham Jan 14th

Published by admin On January 10, 2024

Belfast songwriter Andy White releases ‘Good Luck I Hope You Make It’, his first spoken word album, on 5th January 2024, and tours the UK and Ireland starting on release day. Tour details below.

Andy has crammed as many words as possible into songs ever since his debut single ‘Religious Persuasion’ and career highlights ‘Looking for James Joyce’s Grave’ and ‘Speechless’. However, on ‘Good Luck I Hope You Make It’ the word count has really gone through the roof.

Political and personal, from the sarcasm of funky opener ‘The Revolution’ to the fun ride of the title track, Andy has been inspired by Hip Hop and went back to where he first came in, listening to John Cooper Clarke and reading Jack Kerouac novels. He started writing the new album with breakbeats and a bass guitar, and took it from there.

Before ‘Rave on Andy White’, his first album, Andy was a performance poet, not a folk singer. He read poems and gigged with a Roland drum machine. When writing ‘Good Luck I Hope You Make It’, he returned to his roots, filtering it all through his songwriting and recording experience. Raging about the news, laughing maniacally through lockdown, and enjoying how the spoken word is now a ‘given’. Everybody’s doing it; why shouldn’t he?

“On my last release ‘This garden is only temporary’, I started with poems. You can hear them in ‘Another Sunny Day’ and ‘Everything’s Turning White’, but these songs, and eventually that album, took a different path. When it was complete, I had one instrumental track in search of lyrics – ‘Bass Priority’. When the words came, it was a spoken word story about colonisation. I was sitting on ancient land, thinking about what happened in Ireland and then in the continent we now call Australia. These things resonate. I downloaded beats and started writing.

“I read ‘Book of Rhymes’ by Adam Bradley, listened to ‘Howl’, and watched Kerouac reading from ‘On the Road’. I played Gil Scott-Heron and Bob Dylan records loud like I did when I was 20. I wrote lyrics in notebooks and on my phone, and improvised rhymes on the mic. Played bass like when I was a teenager. I was talking to Belfast, texting a friend in Canada, watching the clown show of UK politics while checking Patti Smith’s Instagram. Walking half an hour a day, unaccompanied. Good luck, I hope you make it.” Andy White

Recorded in Melbourne, mixed in Calgary and mastered in Los Angeles, Andy thought he had made “a stylistic version of Hip Hop” with its heart very much in Ireland.

Andy has written with Peter Gabriel, Allison Russell, and Liam Ó Maonlaí. He has been produced by John Leckie and recorded with Billy Bragg and Sinéad O’Connor. Earlier this year Andy released ‘AT’, a collaboration with his ALT bandmate Tim Finn. Famous friends, but the essence of what Andy does is in concert with his acoustic guitar, a bunch of pedals and all those words. We can’t wait to hear how he performs the new album. Good luck, I hope you make it.

UK & IRELAND JANUARY TOUR DATES

Fri 5 BELFAST Crescent Arts Centre

Sun 7 DERRY Sandinos

Tue 9 DUBLIN Whelans Upstairs

Sat 13 HIGH WYCOMBE Kingsmead Concerts

Sun 14 BIRMINGHAM Kitchen Garden Café

Mon 15 BRIGHTON The Greys

Wed 17 LEYTONSTONE What’s Cookin’

Fri 19 COATBRIDGE Georgian Hotel

Sat 20 GLASGOW Partickhill Bowling Club

Sun 21 EDINBURGH Leith Depot

Mon 22 HAWICK Border Club