Thursday 25th May 2006
Too broke to go on the road, 24 year old singer/songwriter Sandi Thom decided to set up a webcam in her South London flat and staged a three week world tour from the basement. Part of a new breed of internet-made acts that include the Arctic Monkeys, Gnarls Barkley and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Sandi spread the word about the ‘21 Nights from Tooting’ tour via Myspace.com and her own site, inviting fans to watch the tour live on the web or in person at the very modest underground venue of her basement (capacity 10 people, byob and a sleeping bag). Pulling in an audience of 70 on the first night, news of the gigs spread like wildfire on the internet and by the end of the ‘tour’ she had 70,000 web viewers from as far afield as Russia, the USA and Pakistan.
Closer to home an RCA A&R man was being interviewed by a student magazine for a local secondary school. While discussing the internet and what an excellent vehicle it was for getting yourself noticed creatively, one of the kids mentioned Sandi Thom’s webcast ‘world’ tour. Less than two weeks later Sandi Thom signed a contract for five albums with RCA Label Group in front of the very same webcam in that auspicious Tooting basement, making it the first webcast signing in major record label history.
Born in Banff, a small fishing village on the North East Coast of Scotland, Sandi played the piano and church organ as a child. At 14 she joined a covers group called The Residents and sang and played keys with the band for 3 years, gigging every weekend to audiences across Scotland. At 18 she left to busk around Europe for 6 months before being offered a place at the Institute of Performing Arts in Liverpool. While there, Thom joined both a gospel choir, Love and Joy, and a 7 piece band that made it to the semi finals of Radio 1's Urban Music Awards.
After university Sandi moved back to Scotland to record demos of her solo material. She financed the recordings with session work that included the voice of the Impulse body spray ads and a German dance hit ‘Better Days’ that made it onto a Playboy compilation. After sending the completed demos out to various publishing companies, Thom inked a songwriting deal with Windswept Pacific Music giving her the opportunity to work with a wide variety of other musicians and songwriters and develop an album of solo material. All the while Sandi continued to gig. Aside from playing her own solo shows in Scotland, she toured with The Proclaimers and Nizlopi. On one of Sandi Thom's recent Glasgow dates she was spotted by a fisherman who moonlighted as the head of a small independent label Viking Legacy. He signed her on the spot, and financed the production of her debut solo album, ‘Smile… It Confuses People’, which has now been licensed by RCA Label Group.
Drawing on a musical palette that varies from Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley through Carole King and Stevie Nicks to Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, Sandi Thom joins the dots between black and white music. Throughout ‘Smile… It Confuses People’ - which was produced in a barn by bandmates Jake Field and Duncan Thompson – she seamlessly blends folk and soul strains and influences. Sandi takes a similar approach lyrically, bringing together a diverse range of themes and subjects from broken hearts and newborn relationships through musicians and musicianship to the current world’s preoccupation with “progress”.
‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker’ is the first single to be released from ‘Smile… It Confuses People’. Ironically it is a technophobe’s lament, pining for the days ‘When music really mattered and radio was king...And computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything”. Other highlights on the album include: ‘Little Remedy’, where Sandi throws down the gauntlet to a prospective lover; ‘Lonely Girl’ an ode to the lost, isolated and the abandoned; ‘Time’ a comment on the current hare and tortoise race between humanity and the clock; and ‘What If I’m Right’ which explores the bittersweetness of a newfound relationship, where the excitement of what there is to gain is eclipsed by the fear of what there could be to lose.
'I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker' will be released on May 22nd by Viking Legacy/ RCA Label Group
'Smile… It Confuses People' will be released on June 5th Viking Legacy/ RCA Label Group
Click here to buy 'Sandi Thom - Smile...It Confuses People'
David Jensen Photography:
https://www.davidjensen.co.uk/
