East Portland Blog is run by a man I’ve never met, but have become good friends with over the past few years. Let’s call him Davey. And just to prove that Davey takes notice of what he puts up on EPB, in one of our email conversations the other day, he asked “So what’s going on with FOE?” If you recall this was – the operative word being was – the nom de guerre of a Hannah Louise Clark from Hampshire in southern England. FOE’s music was full of alienation, crunk guitars and nightmares. Early on, she was championed by Shirley Manson – it was Shirley that gave me the tip actually dahling, along with her other 100,000 followers on Facebook. Along with musical collaborator Entrepreneurs, FOE produced IMHO some of the outstanding music of 2011 / 2012. Her Bad Dream Hotline album from January 2012 remains an undiminished pleasure, and one to turn to when the iPod soup has gotten tepid. There was a mad year or so of touring, and then that was it, over as suddenly as it began. I’m pretty certain I saw her last gig, in that guise at least, opening for Marina And The Diamonds in Liverpool in late 2012. And I’m glad to say that at that gig, we at least said hi, exchanged a few words about the vagaries of ‘the biz’. Then there was fab little holiday song called ‘Xmas Breakup’ and that’s all she wrote – for then at least.
Knowing Hannah though, there was far too much creativity going on to be stifled for too long.
A couple of weeks ago, she sent this video out. It’s a quiet affair, 3 songs, sounding like it was recorded on the side of a motorway, but it’s exciting – things are stirring, and there are damn strong tunes buried under the sound of jet planes on their final approach to Heathrow.
I dropped her a line, wanting to know what’s going on and if it was cool to re-post her missive. Her reply “Please feel free to share it! I have lots of stuff in the pipeline, including a very exciting new band line up, but I can’t give too much away just yet 😉 I’ll be putting another video up soon too.”
And if anyone wants to know what the fuss is about, all I can say is that that FOE portion of her musical life was utterly brilliant – hard rock and child-like, knowing and naive. Your best bet is to dig your way through their YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuQc99g0Fdo1kc2Ns0dDEtA but you must, absolutely must, start with this one (below): http://youtu.be/zuPLWclnXzw
