Description
After signing his recording contract in the shadow of William Blake's grave in London, it was only a matter of time before this curious artefact would be brought into the world. It's a record that started life in the Hollywood Hills with a detour through the Mojave Desert, a cabin in Nashville, and a gothic church on the Yorkshire moors, and that ended up being recorded at Childwickbury Manor in St Albans, the former home of director Stanley Kubrick. It's an ungodly collision of big country sound and misty isle musings -- as thrilling a listen as is the story of its conception.
Engineered by Jack Hobbs in a studio adjacent to Kubrick's study, it allowed Saint Leonard to absorb the creative energy that has bounced around the building. Putting sounds down in the place where parts of famed movies The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut were filmed, as well as drawing inspiration from filmic memorabilia that has found resting places there, has lent an ominous quality to the record.
You can hear it in the echoes of melancholy sweeping through the harmonica intro to 'Well, Well, Well', it seeps into the spaces and bends between notes on 'Spooky Lover', the tinkly of piano and strummed, dusty chords of 'Goddess Of Electric Gold', and the echoed piano stabs on 'The Strangelove Hotel Suite'.
