Songdog Podcast
Songdog's frontman Lyndon Morgans has recorded their very first podcast, taking you through the tracks on their new album "A Wretched Sinner's Song"
SONGDOG: BOOK CLUB LAUNCH
SINGLE: 'PILGRIM HILL'
RELEASED: 14TH APRIL 08 (ONE LITTLE INDIAN)
Taking a novel approach to guerrilla gigs, acclaimed Welsh trio Songdog are launching the UK's very first guerrilla book club. Noted for their songs’ literary references, SONGDOG have decided to share their reading passions with the rest of London’s population by leaving hundreds of copies of their favourite books in public places for people to take for free.
Each book will include a personal recommendation written by Songdog and a message inviting the finder to read the book, keep it or pass it onto their friends. They’ll also be setting up an online forum for people to exchange views on the books they’ve found and recommend their own too!
Books distributed by the band will include works of Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and various others. If you're not lucky enough to find a copy on the streets of London, they will also be distributing free books at their Roundhouse FreeDM Studio gig on Thursday 27/3.
Songdog - Tour Dates
18 July 2008 - Analog Festival
Songdog - A Wretched Sinner’s Song
‘A Wretched Sinner’s Song’ is the band’s fourth album release and the follow up to their critically acclaimed last album ‘The Time Of Summer Lightning’ released in 2005. If all three previous albums had been award-winning playwright and Songdog frontman Lyndon Morgans' attempt to escape his Welsh heritage, the former black sheep from conservative mining town Blackwood has gone full circle, with ‘A Wretched Sinner’s Song’ altogether more reflective and confessional
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News From The Press
"Profound ideas and affecting stories set against the most delicately formed musical backdrops" - UNCUT
"Lyndon Morgans and his band brew up some of the most gorgeous twilight sounds" - The Independent.
"Songdog convey a powerfully visual world that's at once intimate and cinematic" - Metro.
Songdog: acoustic music with a strap-on
Hushed, candlelit punk rock. “Waiting For Godot” sung to a three-chord trick.
Songdog are really all about the songs. Dark, literate songs sung from the prison-cell of the heart (from where you can sometimes see just as far as from the top of any mountain).
Their third album “The Time Of Summer Lightning” is due early summer 2005 on One Little Indian Records.
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” - the closing lines of Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ nail the brooding heart of this record perfectly, a dark and poignant collection of songs about dreams gone wrong, loves left behind, new lusts and old obsessions. Loss and Time Past haunt this beautiful album like muffled footfalls in an empty old house.
THE BAND:
The band consists of Lyndon Morgans (vocals, acoustic guitar and songs), Karl Woodward (electric guitars, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, keyboards) and Dave Paterson (drums, keyboards, percussion). Lyndon and Karl are from Blackwood in South Wales, Dave from Dundee. They met up in London and self-released Songdog’s debut album “The Way Of The World” in 2001, followed by “Haiku” in 2003 on Evangeline Records.
INFLUENCES:
Lyndon reveres Leonard Cohen, James Joyce, Joni Mitchell, Samuel Beckett, Tom Waits, Marcel Proust, Bob Dylan and Emile Cioran best. (Plus Roy Orbison and Franz Kafka, the Beatles and Baudelaire).
He doesn’t really like to hang out, but if these people were to book a coach and ask him along for a summer-afternoon’s chilling in the hills he’d definitely go, because they’re the people he grew up reading and listening to, his role-models if you like. (Some of them he’s seen live, some of them he’s just visited the graves of. And he taught himself French so he could read some of them in their own language).
For Lyndon, if it’s not about poetry (the shorthand of the heart) and great tunes it’s probably just a career move. Sure, poetry can encompass anything from “The Waste Land” to “Long Tall Sally” but just so long as it’s there! In earlier bands Lyndon used to yelp his stuff in front of Marshall-stacks and big fuck-off bass-bins, but with Songdog he changed tack and sold his gold-top Les Paul for a Martin. So there’s as much attitude in his songs as ever, only now it’s murmured sotto voce.
A NEAT MERCHANDISING ANGLE:
‘Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll and Art’ might be a good slogan for a Songdog T-shirt. When rock n’ roll pretends to disdain art, that’s just its inferiority complex showing, says Lyndon. Art-schools have been the cradle for all the most important British rock music, so we should just quit acting dumb and embrace the ‘A’ word. (‘A’ is for Animal Rights too. ‘The way we exploit animals is just ….. heartbreaking’).
ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE:?
Before Songdog, Lyndon wrote plays and won the Verity Bargate award for one called “Water Music”. He found the theatre world a bit of a snake-pit, all farty and no arty. Only times he ever goes now is for Howard Barker plays or Robert Wilson extravaganzas.
THE PLAYERS:
Karl paints, went to St Martin’s for a while. You can check out some of his stuff at the ‘Podlean Gallery’ page of the band’s website. He’d probably pretty much praise all the same names as Lyndon, but Neil Young would have to feature somewhere very near the top-end of the list. Dave went to music college and understands jazz. A photographer thinking of taking up an instrument once asked Dave what a key was and the explanation took twenty minutes and the snapper just stuck with photography.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY:
"… dislocated, defiant and erotic songs that echo [their] principal influences - Brel, the Beat poets, Dylan, Leonard Cohen - without compromising the often startling originality of [their] own vision." - Uncut
"..daring, sometimes magical..." Mojo (on Haiku)
"...supremely accomplished work..." Time Out (on Haiku)
