Innocents Abroad

Description

It’s been a long time coming, but Late Spring – the third album by Innocents Abroad – reaches back across thirty years to pick up the threads of a music formed when they met as students in Liverpool in the 1980s. It weaves together their love of jangly Rickenbacker rock with strands of European pop and folk music, Bossa Nova and cult movie soundtracks. Showcasing this mix perfectly, are songs such as ‘King Of Luxembourg’, ‘Parramatta Eel’ and ‘Astrud’s House’.

For original members Martin Malone, Stuart Hilton and Peter Mills, the years between the band ending and today have been full, and that continuum of time between then and now is a central theme of the album. They’re older, somewhat wiser, and they’ve certainly lived; these days Hilton drums for Cult Figures alongside running a degree course in animation, while Malone has released solo albums as well as recording with both Eskimo Chains and The Scaremongers and is, now, an award-winning poet. Mills spent time in Eastern Europe before settling to teach music at English universities.

For a long time, this was a story with an ending. Then, around a decade ago, they began, tentatively, to make music together once again, finding small corners for it in their lives. Slowly, they wrote new songs and the need to document them again, as a new Innocents Abroad album, grew stronger.

Along with new member – bassist and writer Jane Breen – they recorded this album with Victor Hildebrand in Berlin. In the studio, the familiar became new again, melodic and driving, but also different. This time it’s the experience of the Innocents, sliding across the years with memories of friends and loved ones who’ve been lost, but still suffused with hope and joy, blossoming into this Late Spring.