April 2024
Wednesday
April 17, 2024
This April, two superbly talented songwriters, Niamh Regan from Ireland, and Christof Van Der Ven from The Netherlands, team up to perform 8 double headline shows across the UK.London-based Christof van der Ven has built a truly impressive CV over the past few years, supporting the likes of Bon Iver, Lisa Hannigan, and Nick Mulvey. In that time, he has released two LPs - Empty Handed (2018) and You Were The Place (2019) - alongside multiple EPs, the latest of which is ‘Haul’ (2023). 2024 promises more new music from Christof, as he prepares to release his next record. Recently, Christof headlined a tour in various venues across Europe and the UK, and was an Artist in Residence as part of Sounds From A Safe Harbour - where he collaborated with Niamh Regan
Niamh’s album ‘Hemet’ introduced her as an artist with a gift for crafting folk-tinged songs with a quiet, reflective intensity. The release achieved over 1 million streams on Spotify and led to nominations for both the RTE Folk Awards and the Choice Music Prize ‘Album of the Year’. Since its release, Niamh has embarked on headline tours around Ireland, UK, Australia, pairing this with many festivals and working with artist such as CMAT, Villagers, John Grant, SOAK, Patrick Watson, Sam Amidon, Cormac Begley, Sorcha Richardson, Josh Ritter, and many more. Niamh will release her second album, ‘Come As You Are’, in May 2024 via Faction Records.
VIDEOS:
Christof van der Ven ‘What’s In It For’ https://youtu.be/_9hEFTWEHtI?feature=shared
Niamh Regan ‘Madonna’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcO3Achn5tk
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Scott Lavene is a born storyteller, through his records and his writing Scott has long been populating a hallucinogenic world of his own creation with ne’er do wells, ragamuffins and eccentrics. With his exceptional third album Disneyland In Dagenham set for release this May via Nothing Fancy, Lavene heads out on the road again, having just done a circuit of the UK in support of The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn.
Disneyland in Dagenham Bio
In the 1980s the Walt Disney Company were considering building their first European theme park not on the outskirts of Paris, but in Dagenham, Essex. In his youth, Scott Lavene used to pick up drugs from a dodgy flat overlooking the proposed site. Disney and Dagenham were never a good fit, he thought, as he stood on the balcony one evening as the sun set, awaiting an overdue hash delivery. It never happened of course – perhaps the multinational corporation were put off by the sewage works and car factories that Mickey Mouse and Goofy would have counted as their neighbours.
So he recalls on the title track of his exceptional third album Disneyland In Dagenham, monologuing in warm deadpan over a wandering acoustic guitar. It encapsulates his conflicted feelings about the county he was raised. “A cowboy kind of place, a bit rough around the edges,” as he puts it. “A lot of funny stuff happened that you’d tell to normal people who’d be like, ‘What the fuck?!’” It’s changed a lot since then. Filming the video for the song, he and his sister took a drive around their old haunts along the A13. “The sewage works don’t smell anymore and they’re now calling Rainham ‘East London’, which is hilarious. It made me grateful for my past, for the shit we could get away with back then.”
A born storyteller, through his records and his writing – he sends out monthly short stories under the title ‘Bits & Bobs’ via his mailing list and is currently working on his first novel – Lavene has long been populating a hallucinogenic world of his own creation with ne’er do wells, ragamuffins and eccentrics. From a man draining the blood of property agents in the aid of local businesses (‘Keeping It Local’) to a talking horse who travels Europe selling hash, gambling and performing covers of Talking Heads, Disneyland In Dagenham is no exception. It’s a record that tumbles together the autobiographical and the imagined, the heart-breaking and the preposterous; the
tale of that itinerant drug-dealing horse, for instance is also a genuinely touching allegory for the way friendships can slip through one’s fingers.