‘It’s All Rumours’ by Nick Frater | New Album, ‘Earworms’
Exclusive video premiere of ‘It’s All Rumours’ by Nick Frater, taken from his new album, ‘Earworms’, out November 19 via Big Stir Records.
‘It’s All Rumours’ is the new single from Nick Frater featuring Roger Joseph Manning Jr from Jellyfish. The video was created by Nick Frater and his long time art collaborator Adam Mallett. Continuing the cut’n’paste collage concept of the album cover, the imagery follows two narratives. The first is the story within the song lyrics, of a tempestuous affair between a paparazzi and an actor. With the paparazzi deliberately feeding fake news stories to his newspaper to try and disguise the truth of their relationship.
There is a parallel narrative involving very British cultural references, of characters whose stories are full of rumour, innuendo, scandal. Sometimes from real life (Christine Keeler, Jeremy Thorpe, Prince Philip among many others), or in fiction (The Wicker Man, Nuts in May), or both such as the Sid James “reaching out for help”. Originally conceived as stop motion animation, Frater and Mallett both realised that neither were animators, and life is far too short for that approach! Instead an enormous single image was created, with the camera panning across. Dusting off some high school maths to calculate the points at which text would need to appear. Finally a use for the ‘if a car is travelling at 34 mph towards London, and a train is traveling at 80 mph in the opposite direction, where will they meet’ exercise! The final image ended up about 80 metres long, so if there is anyone who has a wall (corridor?) that needs a bit of artwork 30cm tall and 80 metres long, get in touch
Frater lets us in on the story behind the new tracks, starting with the A-side that’s also the lead track on ‘Earworms’: “This is a tale about actor and a paparazzi who start an affair; but to avoid being hounded by the press the paparazzi leaks multiple fake stories into his own newspaper in the hope to mask the scandal with smoke and mirrors.”
The track features the legendary Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Jellyfsh) on backing vocals, and Frater tells us a bit about how this came about: “While writing this song at the piano I kept hearing the little Queen vocal stab from Jellyfsh’s ‘All Is Forgiven’ in my head at the end of each chorus. So when I recorded it I sampled the record and pitch shifted it into key….it sounded great, but a voice in my head kept wondering, I wonder if Roger would be up for recreating it properly…..he was! And an incredible musician to work with!”
On the exclusive B-side ‘I Remain Convinced’, Nick Frater shares both a catchy new-wave/psych- pop song, combined with an avant-garde experiment in chance composition. The song is a scathing observation of section of the right-wing press England and the readers who consume it unquestioningly. Built around an uncharacteristically simple chord chart, which is almost a 12 bar blues at times, Nick felt the song needed an experimental edge. To achieve this he invited the Big Stir Records family to contribute tape loops, but without anyone having a preview of what the song sounded like. These were then played backwards and added to the track, randomly cutting between them, creating a surprisingly effective sonic collage to accompany the thundering rhythm section. Originally intended to open side B of the vinyl version of ‘Earworms’, the fun of hearing the resulting collective sound composition meant the final track was too long to feature on the LP.
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