THE HELLO MORNING
by Jo Michelmore
So, you want to make your friends think you know something they don't and make yourself look good at work? Don’t be self-conscious, everyone wants to be cool. Here’s a piece of advice. You're at a music festival and you find yourself armed with a program and the concept of seeing one of sixty or so bands live. If you see the name ‘The Hello Morning’ anywhere on that list, drop everything and get to where they are. I was faced with this exact situation last week at Big Sound and luckily I managed to find myself in the same venue The Hello Morning were. It only took a couple of seconds of the sound for me to be captivated and ten minutes or so for me to decide I was a fan.
Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You by The Hello Morning
Your workmates still aren't convinced you're more fashionable than them? Here’s another piece of advice. Once you’ve discovered The Hello Morning, don’t let them go. Buy a CD or a download and listen until you know it backwards. Get their self-titled album and relish in the delicious vocals of Steve Clifford, whose rock voice with incredible control will have you swooning. Let the depth of sound of many guitars carry you away and the lyrics of heartbreak and observation and fear take you to places far from where you are. Let your thoughts run away and your shoulders swing the way they should when great music is playing. Listen to the songs, some of these songs are amazing. Let’s talk ‘Don’t Wait On Me’, ‘Drive You Home’, ‘Edge Of Town’. Songs about all sorts of concepts; of the young being afraid of growing old, the harsh admission of being wrong and admitting it, of travellers being the loneliest souls; “you keep coming home just to turn around and tell your stories loud, like you’re brave for moving on but there’s nothing brave about walking out, and all your reasons don’t make sense to me”. These are lyrics to wrap yourself up in. They aren’t just the usual stories of love won and lost, this is an album you need to actually listen to. If you listen properly you’ll be amazed at what you find.
Your friends are still listening to the latest Minaj track? Hmmm, this may be difficult, but maybe try this: don’t forget The Hello Morning once you’ve discovered them. Play them at home, play them in your headphones and play them in the car, they’re music made for driving to, music made for sharing; so play them to your friends. They are a band that won’t slip into nothingness without a fight. You’ll be one of the people who heard this band before your friends did. Taking inspiration from incredible artists like Otis Reading or more recently, The Black Keys, this is a band that are going to be hard to forget anyway. Remember their names; Steve, Matthew, Dave, Joe, David and Matt. They are all as important as each other in creating the rich sounds they manage to make together.
Edge Of Town by The Hello Morning
One more thing and this is the advice you don’t want to ignore and you should remind your friends of it: sometimes the best bands are found close to home. They're not played every twenty minutes on an FM radio station or Channel V. They don't look or sound like Katy Perry or One Direction because they're not like them. They don’t conform to trends but they relate to sounds, to feelings, to storytelling, things that have a long history and are full of meaning. Bands like The Hello Morning are formed by people with a love of genres of music that are bigger than last week, last month, last year and they play that music with all their heart. That’s music that should be celebrated in every sense of the word.
Now you know who The Hello Morning are, share. Let your friends in on the secret. Go on. They’ll thank you for it, or they should. See what’s happened here? I saw them live last week, fell in love and now I’m cool ‘cause I knew of something amazing you didn’t. So, I’m letting you know how awesome they are and then you in turn fall in love with your new favourite band and you get to be as cool as me. Be nice and let someone else be as cool as us. Your turn.
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