Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
"…oddball electronica-goes-Tin Pan Alley... a hit of aural Ectasy with a champagne chaser."- W magazine
"Imagine an English-speaking Serge Gainsbourg rolling around Tin Pan Alley with synthesizer in hand." - The New Yorker
"The Real Tuesday Weld (a.k.a. Stephen Coates, a.k.a. the Clerkenwell Kid) makes very special records, which are not just records in the usual sense but multimedia song cycles fairly dripping with the man’s dapper Englishness and, well, jaunty wit, all neatly woven into the most up-to-date of electronic dance’s sampling/programming modes. In Coates’ easy charm and obvious brains, one finds a new way of hearing music, and a startlingly fresh sound… he’s like the P.G. Wodehouse of electro-pop, or the Cole Porter of modern cool, you might say. [On] I, Lucifer, TRTW’s new disc… the superbly arranged, wickedly clever textures and beats will set your toes to tapping, but its bittersweet melodies will linger for days and weeks . - LA Weekly
"I, Lucifer is nothing short of hot as hell. … As cabaret as they are club, all the songs sound as if they come with their own devil-red velvet curtain and searing hot spotlights." Next Magazine, New York City
"I, Lucifer is both wildly inventive and completely miserable, a fascinating combination of old-tiemy jazz and modern-day electronica, drenched in heartbreak and despair. ..in a hushed, nioctine-buffed purr, [it's] as if he's just recovered from one hangover and is plotting another (with you.)" - SF Weekly
"the artist known as the Real Tuesday Weld, Stephen Coates has developed an intriguing retro-future musical vocabulary, recontextualizing his impressions of 30s European cabaret and 40s Brit big bands in modern electro dreamscapes... Coates has found a common ground between the twilight worlds of Tom Waits and Portishead"- Now (Toronto)
"…the album is sort of a cross between a song cycle and a tone poem that depicts the Devil's attempt to return to earth and take another shot at mortality and repentance. There's something of a Tom Waits feel to the whole affair — the song cycle's story line and the faint cabaret flavor that infuses many of the songs both hint at Franks Wild Years, … "Innocent When You Dream (78)."... the overall feel of the album is warm and organic and surprisingly gentle; there are few insistent beats or power chords, just lots and lots of carefully-constructed quiltworks of sound that coalesce into startlingly attractive post-postmodern pop music… Very highly recommended." - All Music Guide
"Coates' music is a sly witty, cinematic fusion of contemporary styles like deep house and club jazz with classic elements of Serge Gainsbourg and Burt Bacharach. If you liked the soundtrack to "The Triplets of Belleville," then you have to check Coates' upcoming "I Lucifer" (Six Degrees)." - New York Newsday
"…jazz at its most languid, the smoky sophistication of Paris cellar bars…. Devilishly good." - Flux (U.K.)
"…perhaps the most charming bundle of nonsense you'll hear all year." - Jack (U.K.)
"What with the name, the title and the fact that it’s decorated throughout by crackling 1930s jazz 78s, it’d be easy to dismiss this as an exercise in novelty music. Yet the tinny beats and silly-yet-sombre lyrics of the four tracks here herald a fantastically playful charm. And unlike Clerkenwell itself, there’s not a Duffer in sight." - Jockey Slut (U.K.)
"A different kind of sound experience that draws on a lot of familiar touchstones drawing a wavy line from Kurt Weill to Clint Eastwood. Bring your musical sense of humor and enjoy the ride." - Midwest Record Recap
"I, Lucifer (Six Degrees) genre-hops merrily between accordion ballads and dance floor fodder like the single "Bathtime in Clerkenwell," which will remind moviegoers of "The Triplets of Belleville" in its infectious evocation of 1920's cartoon music. No style or tempo lasts more than four minutes, making the record fun for actually listening to, without feeling one should really do the dishes now." - Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields in the New York Times
"…like Beck covering Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Impressive, whichever way you look at it." - www.hour.ca (Canada)
"London-based Stephen Coates creates an intriguing brand of soft pop that leans on such influences as Burt Bacharach, Ennio Morricone and Serge Gainsbourg." - Pioneer Press
- from six degrees
Discography
The Valentine EP (Dreamy)
When Cupid Meets CD Psyche (Dreamy)
Where Psyche Meets Cupid (Kindercore)
L'amour et la Morte (Kindercore)
At the House of the Clerkenwell Kid (Bambini)
The Meteorology of Love (Bambini)
I Love the Rain 7" (Dreamy)
I, Lucifer CD (Dreamy)
I, Lucifer CD (PIAS)
I, Lucifer CD (Six Degrees)
Bathtime in Clerkenwell 10" (PIAS)
The Ugly and the Beautiful CDS/ 10" (PIAS)
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
[THE REAL] TUESDAY WELD ~ Biog
It’s a lot to ask: Write songs about love, death, time and memory. Inform them with a narrative and musical sensibility at once intelligent, wry, witty, playful and profound. Be understated yet poetic, romantic yet post-modern, English yet universal. Admit your worst fears and failings, but remain charming and irresistibly cool. Pay homage to heroes as far apart as the French legend Serge Gainsbourg and pre-war crooner Al Bowlly, pass the sparkling style and champagne spirit of the Twenties and Thirties through a no-nonsense Twenty-first Century filter. Be accessible and sophisticated.
It’s a lot to ask. But, having been visited in a dream by the aforementioned Bowlly, one-man-industry [The Real] Tuesday Weld (a.k.a. Stephen Coates, a.k.a. The Clerkenwell Kid) has made it his working brief. Urban anatomist of love and sampler par excellence The Real Tuesday Weld has honed a musical method of succinct composition and delivery (‘antique beat’, as he’s been wont to call it) that has the effect common to all nifty invention: it makes you wonder why no one’s done it before.
Stephen Coates became [The Real] Tuesday Weld in 1997.
Inspired by dreams of Al Bowlly and the American actress Tuesday Weld and influenced by 1930s jazz, Gainsbourg and Morricone, he has spent the subsequent period crafting recordings that try to capture the way he heard music when he was a child - the strange and haunting sounds of old songs floating from radios in the late afternoon. ‘I remember playing and singing along to old 78s on a portable record player even when I was very small' he says 'and I would be totally transported by songs like 'White Horses' and Somewhere over the Rainbow'’.
The first full-length release When Cupid Meets Psyche (released 2001) provided the stylistic range at which its shorter predecessor The Valentine EP (2000) had hinted, with songs that were “…warm and welcoming as well as arty… a gypsy knees-up, a psychedelic bossa Latino, the polite reeds of a ‘30s dance band crushed by booming hip-hop bass…” (Q Magazine). The follow-up release, I, Lucifer has new territory to explore. Conceived as a soundtrack to Glen Duncan’s novel of the same title, the album gives us the Devil’s take on humanity, and The Real Tuesday Weld’s take on our favourite sins. The result is a mischievous, astute, funny, and ultimately melancholy collection.
“…Meticulously arranged, touching, intimate, and with mesmerising melodies… superbly atmospheric…” (Uncut)
A near-death epiphany in icy waters off the Siberian coast inspired another ongoing collaborator, Brooklyn-based Russian animator Aleksey Budovskiy to create the international award-winning video for the track 'Bathtime in Clerkenwell', a quirky, bizarre animation nominated for many film awards including Sundance festival.
There’s no handy summation. These are songs that speak intimately of intimacy and dispassionately of passion, but never at the expense of humour, brevity, or that much maestro-neglected phenomenon, the Tune. You can listen, you can shuffle around the lounge with a pink gin and a cheroot, you can ponder. You can even - if you’re that way inclined - groove.
Originally released on Dreamy records early 2003 the ‘I Lucifer’ album has been picked up for a full release by [PIAS] Recordings. It has been painstakingly repackaged, resequenced and remastered, including new songs plus the award winning video to the song ‘Bathtime In Clerkenwell’, which has also been picked up for inclusion on Rough Trade shops forthcoming ‘Counter Culture’ compilation. It will also be receiving a simultaneous release in the US on Six Degrees Records.
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