‘I DON’T need a symphony/just a simple melody,” Gerard Sampaio sings on Stars, a typically understated, modestly gorgeous track on The Silence And The Common Sense, the debut album by his band The Sweetheart Revue.
Released at the beginning of next month by Glasgow label Foxstar Records, it’s an album of tender, Americana-tinged love songs, witty, would-be drivetime tracks such as Somebody Else’s Garden, and stale relationship ode Roisin, and darker songs like the ominous, string-swathed Instinct, and Father Of The Bride, a bittersweet take on family estrangement. There’s certainly a wider range of tones than a light-hearted “revue” may connote.
The “sweetheart” part is spot-on though – Sampaio originally got the band together around 10 years ago after trying to impress a woman he met at a party by telling her he was in a band. He wasn’t.
“I never learned an instrument until I was in my 20s, though my family are musical,” he says. “I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was about 24. I’d been in London for a few years and when I moved back to Glasgow I fell in with a lot of musical people. There’d be a lot of parties when the guitars would come out and I would sing a couple of songs. ”
After assembling university friends guitarist Jack Cocker and bassist Liam McArdle together with members of fellow Glasgow melodicists Attic Lights, The Sweetheart Revue’s first big gig was a performance “in a tent in a field next to some bison” at a DIY festival McArdle put together with his partner on their farm in Muchalls, near Stonehaven. There are murmurings that the festival, a welcome part of the area’s live scene, will be repeated next year.
It was further down the north-east coast, at St Cyrus near Montrose, where The Silence And The Common Sense was partly recorded with producer Jack McConchie. The band rented the old Rockall fishing station with the cash they’d earned from one of their tracks, the forlorn Sweet Release after it was used to soundtrack the climax to Valerie Brieman’s Hollywood 2012 romcom Overnight. One of the film’s stars, Rachel Blanchard – known to fans of Flight Of The Conchords and viewers of the first season of Fargo as former Miss Hubbard County Kitty Nygaard – is a friend of Cocker from his time living in Canada.
“That track ended up paying for recording a lot of the other ones,” says Sampaio, explaining that the other half of the album was recorded over the course of the preceding eight or nine years. Despite that time lag, you wouldn’t know – The Silence And The Common Sense feels cohesive and whole, a full-length cardi you appreciate more and more as the evenings become chillier.
“Johnny Smillie mixed it all at La Chunky,” says Sampaio of the Hidden Lane studio his own office in Finnieston overlooks. “That helped it sound the way it does, with no ‘joins’. It’s funny; someone joked on Facebook that they preferred our earlier work and I was like: ‘but this is our earlier work.”
On the album’s liner notes, particular thanks is given to Warren McIntyre. It was the Foxstar Records head whom Amanda McKeown credited with giving her the confidence to develop and record her songs as Sister John, the equally impressive four-piece who recently released their debut album Returned From Sea on Last Night From Glasgow.
Alongside Sampaio, Cocker, McArdle, drummer Moshe Price and cellist/accordionist Jennifer McKee, The Sweetheart Revue count among its six core members Sister John violinist Heather Phillips, while Sister John viola-player Sophie Pragnell Bell also contributes.
Former member Jamie Houston from Attic Lights is set to join them for this gig, which Sampaio says he hopes will be the first of a healthy clutch of live dates before the year is out.
“It’s very difficult to get us all together,” the frontman says. “People have had kids, everyone has jobs, and Jack and Liam in particular travel a lot for work. This is why the only band picture we’ve got is six individual photographs put together.
“But we’ll definitely be doing more gigs in the near future, we’re just putting them together. Forming a band was the best decision I ever made. I’d recommend it to anyone.”
Tomorrow, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 8.30pm, £8.50, sold out
Tel: 0141 552 4267
The Silence And The Common Sense is out on Foxstar Records on 6 October
www.foxstarrecords.com
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