Biography

This is a long and rambling bio. If you're a press person, head to the 'PRESS' section of the website for a shorter, more media friendly version. But if you're up for a more complete history, then read on...
 
FROM THE START
I grew up in one of the most beautiful corners of the planet - deep in the heart of the south of rural Western Australia - where from my parent's farmhouse home the rolling granite cliffs and heaving southern ocean are clearly visible. My heritage is both coastal and rural and these are the worlds that I understand better than anything. The tender, sublime love that these things can offer is still never far from my heart and mind.
 
In my adolescence I left this childhood paradise for the city of Perth where education and other impetus pushed me - fighting and kicking - into this new kind of life and living. I struggled to find my feet for some time; city kids were different and valued different things. I missed the wide, open spaces and the natural existence. I missed the ocean and the farm. All the things that had defined who I was - hard work, the beach, my ute, the landscape, hanging out with my dog - were no longer around me and the people I was around could not relate to the world I had left behind. I had to find something new.
 
And so it was that my music grew. I had always had music around me - as a kid I'd learned different instruments and picked up others that were around the house and felt my way around them. My parents had always had a strong musical sense, whether my mother's extensive classical music collection, my dad's Stones, Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, and Leo Kotke reel-to-reels or family sing-a-longs. At high school, I found friends who were relating to the world in the same way I was and part of that was through music. In year 9 (15 years of age) I made friends with Matt (Morcombe) and we showed each other different music and different tracks. Our elder sisters had music collections both worth rifling through and we found the music of U2, the Church, David & David, the Motels, Hunters & Collectors as an articulation of our sentiment, our feelings, our personal struggles and disillusion with the world at large.
 
Working out these songs on my mother's old classical guitar, strung up with electric guitar strings, we would bellow the songs out in my back yard or on the balcony of his parent's place in Leeming. Slowly, working out other people's songs grew into writing our own and attempting to express some of our own sentiment. In the last years at high school we started our first band. We were at the beginning of our journey; we were rough, lacking in ability and skills but had all the passion required for the passage.
 
THE OCHRE YEARS
When high school had finished I knew I just wanted to play music. My parents were supportive of this but I knew that they would prefer me to have 'more than one string to my bow' as my mum used to put it. So I complied and went to university and studied Philosophy and Aboriginal Studies; I was fascinated by these things but I also chose that option because I knew that it didn't result in a well-defined career. I didn't want to box myself in to any particular path. My studies at uni were governed completely by what I was interested in - ethics, mysticism, eastern religions, aboriginal culture, the rational vs the spiritual etc. All the while, I was working hard at building up our new band, 'Ochre'.
 
I booked most of the shows in Ochre and worked hard to 'make it happen'. I wanted a music career more than ever. As a band we had a lot of attitude. We tried to fit into a Perth/Freo scene which at the time (early/mid '90s) seemed to us to be mainly lo-fi art-rock where Ochre was intricate, melody-based stuff verging on the grandiose. Our sound was suited to big stages, big PA systems and careful mixing and we often found ourselves struggling on tiny stages through shitty little PA systems. We had much to learn. Initially we were often misunderstood but our live shows became strongly acclaimed, the debut EP 'Will' was very well-recieved and eventually we built up a strong following. By about 1995 we had created a great momentum and we were a very solid, progressive and coherent band.
 
Swimming against the local trends eventually paid off when a demo of ours landed in the hands of a key ex-Sony, ex-Polygram industry man. He fell in love with what we were doing and he threw in his new job at Polygram to manage us. He taught us a lot about the industry, about getting things done and he believed in us as much as we did. We all drew much strength from this and he opened doors for us that would have otherwise remained beyond our consideration.
 
At about this time we did our first real tours - short trips down south and longer jaunts throughout the northwest of WA. We played in boxing rings, we played in Aboriginal missions, took our midweek downtime swimming in the gorges of Karijini, avoided fights in fishing town pubs, played in the desert, played to goldfields high school kids, thwarted shifty publicans shy of paying our wages, clocked up thousands of kilometres and had an absolute blast. The hard work paid off - doing three-hour shows in all these venues, we became better players and a better band. An unsigned band playing its own material for those three-hour shows was, in those days, pretty much unprecedented. Our manager decided we should go looking for a US record deal - therefore guaranteeing us access to world markets instead of only the domestic market that an Australian deal could offer us. So we planned a US tour.
 
In California, everything came together but also simultaneously unravelled. We received an excellent response from radio stations, interest from several major labels, and the public seemed to completely 'get' what we were doing and loved it all. Our manager had got us gigs in some amazing venues; the famed Roxy, Whiskey Au Go Go and the House of Blues in Los Angeles plus the Catalyst, Planet Gemini, the Monterey Street Fair amongst many others. It was an amazing experience. On that level, the tour was a great success. On another, serious problems emerged. Visa difficulties, personal issues, and varying levels of commitment claimed several of the band's 5 members. The pressures and the proximity of actually getting close to what we'd worked so hard for over the years seemed to be taking its toll. After all this effort, watching things get so close yet not quite 'over the line' was devastating. The cracks were evident to the record company execs that came to the shows. The will was fracturing. It seemed like the end of the road.
 
With the writing on the wall, our manager flew back to Australia. Matt and Chris (Edmondson) flew back after the shows were done to nurse their relationships and their credit cards. Emotionally and mentally I couldn't face returning to Australia.
 
I was in limbo - struggling to grapple with the idea that we could have come so far and so close and ended up with nothing. So I rented a room in Pacific Grove and tried to work out my next move.
 
CALIFORNIA SOLO
It came from studio/club owner Anthony Lane, who offered me the opportunity to record some solo stuff. He had a club on Cannery Row (as in the Steinbeck book of the same name) with a neat studio tucked away with expansive views of the Monterey Bay. We'd played at his club a number of times and he seemed to like what we did. For me, having that recording project was a lifeline. At that time I was gripped by deep, life-threatening depression. I struggled with life, it's purpose and its meaning. Everything up to that point had seemed so blessed, so measured; you put in the effort, you reap the rewards. But now that notion didn't seem to apply.
 
The recording took a long time. Anthony was often busy, finding the time to record was often difficult and other delays occurred like problems with studio/recording gear. I drifted through different cash jobs - house-framing, landscaping, short-order cooking in a Japanese restaurant. The best job was as a tree-climbing tree surgeon. All the hard work I'd done at the farm was providing that extra 'string to my bow' that my mother had so often talked about. Hell, I even had a few nights work as a bouncer which is kind of funny. I drifted through different accomodation - rental places were very hard to find - I couch-surfed through different people's houses, I rented, I lived out of my car, I camped; there are so many stories that came along with it all. Much of it was surreal. I slept on the loungeroom floor of the local cocaine dealer, awaking to find people playing a game of darts over my 'bed'. Most ironic of all was my stay in a three-storey house in Pebble Beach - the 'closed' community in Monterey famed for its mansions and golf course - which was a cold-water squat which I shared with two dogs: Pinto and Bodhi.
 
And I met some amazing people - still friends to this day - and learnt so much. I got back into surfing and spent more time chasing waves then than at any other time in my life. I worked constantly on my songwriting and came to understand how it is in fact an art in itself. I played my first solo shows, dragged myself out of dogged depression and slowly weaved back together all the unravelled ends. By the time I was ready to leave, I had my first solo record - 'Soul-scars and Greenbacks' almost finished. This was first released through Empire in Melbourne when I came back to Australia in 1998, then re-released through AllArt in 2002. I never really promoted the record. The recording is still one of my favourites, I guess because it came out of some pretty interesting times and even though I was trying to find my feet in terms of its sound and you can definately hear that, I feel it's stood the test of time. As a starting point I feel that it's still a true reflection. When Polly Coufos from Perth's XPRESS magazine described it as "an angry brute of an album" I was quietly pleased. It felt like an affirmation.
 
While staying at one of the houses in California I saw a documentary recorded by Daniel Lanois' brother about his producing an Emmylou Harris album 'Wrecking Ball' with players like Steve Earle, Neil Young and Larry Mullen Jr coming in to perform on the recording. It was hugely influential. At that time recording gear was becoming really cheap and recording using a computer was newly possible. When I came back to Perth I set about getting the gear I needed to start recording. I set up a small studio in the house and started playing around with my songs and ideas and then I began recording and producing other artist's demos. This was a really important period because I got to understand how the studio can be used as an instrument itself. I learned how to use the studio to get the sounds and soundscapes that I could hear in my head. And I learnt here how important the 'feel' of a recording is above all else - that technical incorrectness can add character where the mind can interfere with the transmission of a pure idea. So with recording and playing I'd ask myself now, "does it move me?" before I'd ask "is it correct?". This is how recording becomes an art and not just a science. As with life, both the mind and the heart need a place.
 
THE LONG ROAD - GOING BUSH
In 1999, I convinced Chris to leave his secure day-job and come on the road with me to play as an acoustic duo getting whatever work we could get. I figured if we could average two nights a week we could make a go of it for a living. The way I looked at it, why not hit the country pubs and clubs for all the work we could if it meant we could earn a living from our music? Inadvertantly, this meant playing some real backwaters and clocking up some phenomenal kilometres on the backroads and highways. As he puts it in his song 'For What It's Worth'; ..."so I took to singing wheat-bars where I learned to stretch the truth, took an elastic-sided foot-hold amongst the cigarettes and booze...". And it was very much like that. Any intention of attaining some kind of high cultural ground was dashed by the crude, lambasting, cynical and absolutely comical crowds we put ourselves in front of each night. Finishing a three-hour show in this duo format as the Long Road, without the rythm of bass and drums to soothe the drunken crowd was like running the 400m over 180 minutes, feeding the insatiable appetite for 'something we can dance to' with thumped, pounded and thrashed acoustic guitars, the shadow of the jukebox ever looming.
 
So for about two years we played hole-in-the-wall bars and pubs on the weekends, messed around in the studio during the weekdays and clocked up well over a hundred thousand kilometres doing it. By this time I had a bunch of recorded songs that I wanted to start circulating.
 
I started putting demos together of some of the tracks that I'd been recording. With the help of my dad I managed to 'shop' some of this music to record labels in Australia. At this stage much of the infrastructure for the independent musician seemed still in its genesis and I was still stuck in the trap of thinking I'd need a label and management behind me before I could progress at all. To be honest, this belief and mind-set probably set me back a few years. I was far too cerebral in my approach - I should have just buried myself in the passion of it all but it was a stage I had to go through.
 
After reading an article about Sheryl Crow and how she got her first break through someone who was a publisher, I figured I should probably do something similar, so as well as sending songs out to record labels I also sent them to publishers. I wasn't gigging much at the time and had no band to speak of so if I had anything to offer anyone it would be through the songs themselves. This punt paid off. A CD came to be in the hands of a fantastic lady from publishers WarnerChappell. She loved the songs, making copies to play in her car of tracks like 'The Weight' and 'Maria'. These tracks would eventually find themselves in the Glorifications album that I released independently. She wanted to help out but it didn't really fall into her own roster of artists. Instead she organised meetings with us with WarnerChappell people around the world - Munich, London, New York and Los Angeles. This coincided perfectly with a trip we were planning already. So in August of 2001, 5 years after the Ochre chapter had washed up, I flew overseas again armed with an acoustic guitar hoping to secure some kind of musical career.
 
By the time we came back to Australia, we had met with all of the WarnerChappell people, had met with a very successful NY-based attorney plus done a successful showcase for a massive booking agency in Monterey (MPA) at the same time (once again, at Anthony Lane's club). Doing all of these travels and meetings with my father was a unique experience and something I will treasure to the grave. All this happened right before the trade towers were destroyed in September of 2001. In fact I got stranded with a good friend in Los Angeles when all the planes were grounded.
 
So we felt we had the booking agency onside ("if Simon gets a deal we'd be happy to work with him") and our high-flying attorney ("there's no doubt Simon could get signed") and the support of our publisher friend in Australia. It seemed all the components were there. Yet somehow, the weeks turned into months and the months slipped by and our ability to capitalise on what we had achieved seemed to slip away. I didn't have enough recorded material, the attorney was too busy, we waited for further opportunities, I didn't have enviable record sales to convince overseas industry and I didn't really have an operational band. The frustration became disillusioning.
 
Not really knowing what to do, I headed east to do some shows, hung out in Queensland with my sister, wrote a whole bunch of songs (Adrift and Gone, Tropical Sunday etc) and reassessed the situation. I figured I needed to get more of my ideas down in a recorded environment but it needed to happen in a more felt, live studio scenario.
 
Feeling like I was letting a fantastic opportunity slip through my fingers, I came back to Perth and headed into the newly-built Blackbird with a bunch of songs, a cobbled together band of friends and started to record tracks which would eventually evolve into the debut Simon London + the Spirits release. At the time we went in it was early 2002 and I'd effectively pulled Matt out of drumming retirement, had workshopped the songs with Tim Keady and so it all started.
 
SIMON LONDON + THE SPIRITS: BAND & ALBUM
I chose to go to Blackbird because I knew Dave well, we'd played together for some time and had messed around in my home studio and the SAE studio enough for me to know that he was entirely sympathetic to what I wanted to achieve, how I wanted to record and not only that, he's a great person and if you like the people you're working with it can only be good. Dave managed to capture the ambience and energy of the band beautifully - there's a distinct and coherent mood to the recording which he fostered and captured. He's one of the very few people in Perth who actually 'produces' in the true sense of the word. I think that one attribute of a great producer is that they can manage and foster the mood of the recording process in a way that is subtle enough for a band to be unaware that the 'managing' is even happening. Dave has this.
 
The Blackbird sessions both then and since have all been done live with only a few overdubs like vocals or second guitars done later. Since we started doing it like this we've not gone back. Some of my favourite recordings - the Black Crowes, John Mellencamp etc - all have that sound of a 'band going off in a room' feel and the spill and noise and stuff is so real. That's what a band recording should be. Everything else is just an approximation.
 
The process we went through in 2002 to record the album was a genesis for us. Matt started gigging again and we took the band on the road and did a lot of shows. Our residency at Clancy's (which ran for a year and a half and led to the 'Saturday Night Live' solo live cd release) was really important for helping us define a sound and a feel which despite all the changes in band lineup since has somehow stayed with us. Tim Keady's part in this has been enormous. He always manages to squeeze so much melody into his bass playing that all the tracks have what I call this 'sub-melody' - rumbling bass melodies that the rest of the song's melody sits on. This is despite the fact that I bring the main vocal melodies etc to him; somehow with his gifted playing he often makes it sound as if the bass was there first and everything else has been built upon it.
 
When Matt left in mid 2004 Tim and I were worried the sound would suffer drastically, given his sublime and graceful approach to his drumming was such an integral component of the Spirits' sound. Finding Tim Stacey (well, perhaps stalking is more accurate) was a godsend because he has understood the songs from the inside and has brought his own innovative, classic power to the songs. We've grown as a band because of this.
 
More often than not, the Spirits lineup has been like a revolving door. Chris started playing again with us on tours and then Tim Stacey came on board in mid 2004 and Clem has dropped in too for recordings and live shows, it's intrigued me no end that the songs seem to have become entities in themselves regardless of who's playing them. We've turned up at Settlers in Margaret River twice within a few months with an entirely different band and punters probably wouldn't notice any major change in sound. First time around it was with Matt and Tim Keady, second time around it was Tim Stacey, Chris and Clem. Then in 2008, Matt re-joined the band on drums.
 
For this I'm incredibly fortunate. All are highly gifted musicians and players. This was recognised in the press the first time we toured Melbourne which was nice. This further culminated with the airplay and reviews that we received for the debut album - 'Simon London + the Spirits'. While I've pumped out a few solo releases over the years, this album seemed to be the first coherent band album and while the sound and style are very much from a particular point in the Spirit's evolution, I still feel that it's a strong statement. As an album it certainly opened up some important doors for us.
 
HIGHWAY STATE OF MIND
Delivering our second follow up album - 'Highway State Of Mind' was a further step forward. When it came out it generated some good interest; it was supported by good press and air play and our tours to support it expanded in to Queensland and New South Wales. We tracked over twenty songs for that album and then ruthlessly whittled them down to the remaining ten. Some good songs missed out. The way we recorded it was, once again, predominantly live in the studio but this time with both Clem (piano, hammond, rhodes) and Chris Edmondson (guitars) recording with us to flesh out the sound.
 
After the tours for that album were done, I felt like it was time for a change so I started doing more solo shows and tours. I teamed up with some other great musos to tour all around Australia for a whole bunch of different tours including a tour across Canada in 2007. Some of the biggest highlights were with fellas like Matt Irvin (now based in New York) and Joel Barker (now living in London) and Josh Backwell (now living in East Timor). This meant about half my shows were solo and half were with the Spirits.
 
NOW THAT THE HORSES HAVE BOLTED
This 'dual' approach meant it made sense to make the next release a double cd release - one band, one solo. The Spirits headed to a farmhouse in Mobrup in the south west late in 2007 and recorded eleven songs in a five day blast and six of those were chosen for the final cd. While touring around the place I was recording solo acoustic songs on my laptop and added these to some tracks from a session I'd done in Melbourne via some free time awarded to me from the kind folks at 30Mill studios. The band songs were mixed by Forrester Savell (Helmet, Butterfly Effect, Karmivool et al) and the solo ones were mixed by Shaun Callaghan (John Butler Trio et al). The release picked up two WAMI Song of the Year nominations in 2008 which was nice.
 
EUROPE
My wife Tammy and I married at the start of January this year and packed up our bits and pieces to head to Sweden for 2009. We've been doing shows together, writing songs together and are now planning some tours through Europe. The stuff we do as a duo is more country, more gospel and more focused on the singing than the band stuff I've done so far. We're hoping to have a recording out soon. While I'm away the Spirits stuff will obviously go on hold for a while and I'll be writing more songs to pitch to the lads when I get back.
  
So if you've got this far, then hopefully it's been a bit interesting and has offered an insight into what we're about.

The support that we've been receiving from our appreciators out there has been profound and humbling. I can only hope to keep offering up our music to you both live and recorded for a long time yet.