Astrid WILLIAMSON: new Single + Album + Tour!

Day Of The Lone Wolf LP (One Little Indian - 1 May 2006)

Imagine a place where the stimulating strangeness of Radiohead might meet the melodic sensuality of Suzanne Vega … where the soul-bearing intensity of a cult singer songwriter like Lisa Germano might melt into the funky ambiences conjured up by Daniel Lanois … and where the minimalist keyboard backwash of Erik Satie might drift across the surreal landscapes of Laura Veirs.

Well, until now, such places existed only in dreams, but ASTRID WILLIAMSON’s third solo album, DAY OF THE LONE WOLF, is just such a place - a place where all these magical sounds, and more besides, have come together, to rub one up against the other, to collide and spark brightly, illuminating the darker corners of the human heart.

ASTRID WILLIAMSON supports Darren Hayes ( Savage Garden ) on the following dates :

APRIL

Thu 20 GLASGOW Clyde Auditorium

Fri 21 NEWCASTLE City Hall

Sun 23 MANCHESTER Apollo

Mon 24 NOTTINGHAM Royal Centre

Wed 26 LONDON Hammersmith Apollo

Thu 27 IPSWICH Regent

Sat 29 BRISTOL Colston Hall

Sun 30 PORTSMOUTH Guildhall

MAY Tue 02 SHEFFIELD City Hall

Wed 03 WOLVERHAMPTON Civic

Sun 07 BELFAST Waterfront

MAY

Mon 08 EDINBURGH Cabaret Voltaire ( Headline )

Tue 09 ABERDEEN Tunnels ( Headline )

Wed 10 GLASGOW King Tuts ( Headline )

Biography...

Shetland-born ASTRID WILLIAMSON began dreaming of a career as a musician when she was eleven, having played piano, guitar and fiddle since early childhood. She continued on the classical music path and gained a degree from the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow, while putting together the critically acclaimed Goya Dress in the mid-1990s. Goya Dress made just one album for Nude Records, the John Cale-produced Rooms in 1996. "I loved being in Goya Dress," she says, "and the media were mostly very kind to us, but the big sales never really kicked in." Scandalously, in 1998, although critically acclaimed, the record buying public were similarly unmoved by her solo debut, Boy For You, also on Nude Records and produced by Malcolm Burn in New Orleans.

The merits of any artist destined for greatness are invariably revealed through adversity and such was the case with ASTRID WILLIAMSON. "There’s a before and after aspect to my career," she acknowledges. "After my deal with Nude, everything fell apart and I didn’t know where I was going. There was lots of staring at the sea until I got my confidence back."

She rebuilt her career, launching her own record label, Incarnation, and releasing her second LP, the self-financed Astrid in 2003. The album gathered many plaudits - including a Q review that hinted at both its ‘timeless’ and ‘stunning’ content - but it’s really only on DAY OF THE LONE WOLF that she has finally come into her own. And even if she suggests that, "If it turns out to be the last album I ever record, I will not regret anything about it", we suspect she is merely being disingenuous as well as brutally honest.

Apart from its intimacy, DAY OF THE LONE WOLF is also a thoroughly modern record. On opening track Siamese, she evocatively intones, ‘I text I still love you but without the smile/And you go shhh, you go shhh, you only go shhh/You and me are Siamese’, and you know exactly what she means even before she reveals that, ‘My computer finds you/Computers can find anything and my favourites they’re all you’. At other times DAY OF THE LONE WOLF is just plain sexy. True Romance contains the couplet, ‘Look at me and think of this/All my tangled hair across your hips’, the ambiguously asexual Amaryllis could easily end in tears, and both Tonight and Reach reveal her to be a predatory lover. As she says, "There is more of me on this album than anything I’ve ever done before".

ASTRID WILLIAMSON releases DAY OF THE LONE WOLF on One Little Indian on 1 May. The single, Superman 2, backed with her amazing version of Snow Patrol’s Run and the darkly sublime Even If You Killed Me, will be released on 15 May.