Foy Vance Tickets

FOY VANCE ‘SIGNS OF LIFE’ BIO

Before he could hit the intoxicating heights with his glorious new album Signs of Life, Foy Vance had to hit

the wall. And before he could do that, the musician had to hit the brakes and halt something he’d been

doing non-stop for over two decades.

“I stopped touring on November 4th 2017, the last of three nights at Union Chapel in London,” begins the

Northern Irishman who can spin a yarn as well as he can spin a heart-wrenching tune. “That was the first

time in over 20 years that I’d walked offstage and I didn’t have anything in my diary for the next couple of

years, no gigs, nothing.”

“It took a while getting used to being home,” he adds, and he’s not joking – the singer-songwriter admits

he only emptied his on-the-road suitcase of the last of its contents this spring, a pacey three-and-half

years after that final show. But finally, at his adopted home in Highland Perthshire, the Bangor native got

on with life. Or, his version of it, at least.

“And it took a while to get used to writing again. Which is why I turned, practically, to old, unused songs

and sorting through them, just so I was doing something. ’Cause when I was writing it was just shit – I

could come up with melodies, or cadence, or words, but none of it felt anchored to anything. It all just felt

like a paper bag in a hurricane. Nothing was happening. Until Sapling.”

Sapling is the opening track on Signs of Life, Vance’s fourth album proper and his first release since the

one-two punch of 2019’s From Muscle Shoals and To Memphis, three-day projects recorded in the titular

musical sweetspots. Written and played more or less entirely on his own, with able assistance from young

Northern Irish producer Gareth Dunlop, it’s the sound of a beloved singer-songwriter at the peak of his

powers. It’s also the sound of a man – a husband, a father, a sinner, a wreck-head – belatedly coming to

terms with his demons.

“Getting off the road, one of the things you realise is: wow, I drink two bottles of wine and at least a half

bottle of vodka a day!” he reflects ruefully. “Then I’d start the day with codeine to get myself sorted. And

I’d smoke joints throughout the day. So I realised: I have so many incredibly bad habits here. I’m showing

all the signs of death, getting ashen, grey, smoking more, drinking more, smoking more… So, yeah, I hit a

wall.”

A close friend recommended a therapist who recommended that Vance gradually wean himself off his

addictions. Vance, headstrong to the last, ignored that. He stopped everything, immediately. As with his

approach to most things in his life, he was all-in, at once, no messing.

“I lay in bed for three days, my wife and my daughter bringing me new sheets a couple of times a day.

And the embarrassment of it, the emasculation of it…” he winces. “I just felt really fucking feeble. And the

next time when I went in the studio, when my head felt right, I had the Sapling chords – then those words

came.”

The song, as earwormy a mea culpa as you’ll ever hear, begins with a lovely piano figure, like the stage

curtains opening. Vance sings: “I once built a bower, I could build you a home.” It was promising his new

wife that he’d do more than simply offer a new domestic setting. Or, as he puts it in his inimitable style:

“Let me go further and do the actual right thing instead of being a drunken ballbag.”

Sapling became a pathfinder song, literally and figuratively a sign of new life that lead to the song Signs of

Life, another moment of stirring uplift. Taken together, they showed Vance the way forward. These were

songs about birth and rebirth, degeneration and regeneration, life and death, blooming into existence

while all around a global pandemic was doing the opposite.

“When I wrote Sapling I had a daughter and a son. Then between after that and now, I proposed to my

wife, married her the next day – she didn’t know anything about it, it was a secret wedding up in the

woods near Kenmore, I flew her soul sister over from Australia to marry us. It was a beautiful, wild night,

the universe really showed up, it really did – I’d never seen the Milky Way as fucking clear."

Then came the song Signs of Life, presciently written the day before his second son, Sol, was born (his

name ultimately also serving as an acronym for the song and album title). It was another good omen, and

showed Vance that he was, finally, on the right path. As well as pouring everything of himself into writing

everything, he was also playing everything.

But working out of his Pilgrim studio at home on the shores of Loch Tay, and out of another recording

set-up in a nearby Dunvarlich House, he “over-immersed” himself in doing everything: guitars, bass,

drums, keyboards. It was knackering him, and also confusing him. “I stopped hearing what should happen

next.” In a year of lockdowns, he didn't need the walls closing in any more.

So Vance began thinking about getting in a producer, and discussed a few “heavy-hitters” with his

management and his record label, Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records. But in the end, he sent them

to Dunlop, a mate back home. “He’s been making records for years. But in the last couple of years the

records he’s made in his place, Sycamore Studios in Belfast, sound like they’ve come out of Ocean Way.

The guy’s really got his head switched on in the engineering and scientific side of it.”

The enthusiasm went both ways. “When I was around 14 years old I wandered into a coffee shop in

Belfast and saw Foy playing in the corner,” says Dunlop. “I was completely spellbound by what I heard. It

was a lightbulb moment that sent me on the road of wanting to discover my own voice and musicality.

Back then I would never have imagined that I would be co-producing a record with him 18 years later –

and that I would be just as inspired and spellbound by what he does.Working on Signs Of Life with Foy

has been all things wonderful – especially for the 14-year-old in me.”

Having found his simpatico wingman – and with brief recourse to guest bass and Hammond players on

individual songs – Vance got stuck back in, recording in Scotland and at Plan B’s Kings X studio in

London, then bouncing the ideas between himself and Dunlop.

With the creative wellspring now unstoppered, the songs flowed.

Time Stand Still has a rhythmic, percussive drive, based round a riff “I’ve had since 2001”, it finally making

its way into a song after Vance’s patient manager finally lost his rag with the artist who, he freely admits,

“was pissing it all up the wall. It was him that made me get help. And in those moments, you do wish time

would stand still. Can’t I just stop here and sit in this moment before I have to take up that mantle?”

The embracing widescreen hush of It Ain’t Over also has its roots in his extensive unrecorded back

catalogue – he used to close his shows with it – but on Signs of Life “it got a new evolution, a new life,

and new verse.

“I do feel a sense of rebirth,” he expands of the mindset that has coloured an album whose expansive

warmth belies its minimal, stripped back beginnings. “I can give up smoking, work out every day, eat

better, have a bit more command over myself. And that reminds of the time before I went on the road and

I got lost in it all. Doing this record, I felt a real sense of control again. And that song reminded me of that

time.

“It’s the signs of life again, the cyclical nature of things. It was a crest of a wave, or an echo towards the

end of the record.”

Then there’s the mantric blues of Hair of the Dog, which lists Vance’s self-medicating crutches. It’s not a

long lyric, but it’s a big lyric.

“That’s another song where the first verse and the idea have been around for a while. I was smiling as I

wrote it. I thought it was a bit too on-the-nose, but then, the situation is on-the-nose. And the feel is a tip

of the hat to the woosy-ness of the beginning of this journey. I want it to make you almost feel a bit

seasick.”

The biggest chorus on an album chock-full of them might be We Can’t Be Tamed, a song written when his

then-girlfriend, now his wife, moved from London to join him in the Scottish mountains. It’s a primal song,

rich and enriching, that speaks of Vance channelling his environment.

He’s also channelled the encouragement of his de facto label boss, that man Sheeran.

"I feel like I’ve got a confidante in Ed, a real ally. A patron is probably the best at describing what he is. In

many ways he has found a way to afford me the ability to keep on making art the way I want to make it.

It’s comforting to know that no matter what I wanted to do, he would fight for it. ‘It’s an album of Foy

screaming for three minutes, that’s what it is and we’re gonna put it out.’”

That faith and mutual trust is well-placed. Created out of the grimness of 2020, Signs of Life is an album

of dawn after darkness, hope after despair, engagement after isolation, uplift after lockdown. It comes in

bold sleeve artwork that reflects Vance's desire to embrace all sides of everything, all humanity's textures.

Shot on a 160-year-old camera which does arresting things with colours and shading, the back image is

of Vance as a bare-chested, bare-knuckle boxer. On the front, he's in a dress, blonde wig and theatrical

make-up.

“They’re just mad, striking images, and I loved the fact that it was male and female. You know, life’s

extreme, life’s volatile, life explodes into reality sometimes, and stops just as quick. So to be struck by

images on the cover made sense.”

At any time, Foy Vance’s new collection of songs would be a tonic. At this particular time, they can’t arrive

a moment too soon.

“That’s a huge part of it,” he agrees. “Signs of Life is about re-emergence – me in my own soft revolution,

the world re-emerging in what we’re about to see as we hopefully go back to some semblance of

normality. But just life in general – flowers growing through the cracks in Chernobyl. Life finds a way,

doesn’t it?”