SCARED TO DANCE

Scared To Dance presents Darren Hayman on Tuesday 4th October performing songs from Hefner’s We Love the City and Dead Media.

He will be joined by former Hefner bandmate Jack Hayter and Amelia Fletcher for the show. Support comes from McCookerybook & Rotifer at The Ivy House and tickets are on sale at DICE.

Darren Hayman is a thoughtful, concise and detailed songwriter. He eschews the big, the bright and the loud for the small, twisted and lost. Throughout his prolific solo career he has taken a singular and erratic route through England’s tired and heartbroken underbelly.

Hefner’s third album, We Love the City, became the critical and commercial highlight of their short, intense career. By this time Hayman had started to develop a sharp, incisive voice. The song narratives now took place in the toilets and kitchens of everyday British homes. Hayman sang about the thread on skirt hems and the hairline cracks in the china as well as the tears on cheeks. Hefner’s fourth and final album, Dead Media, presented an erratic creative left turn. Largely leaving their guitars in their cases, the band made a bizarre, stuttering bleeping confection on ancient analogue synths.

The collaboration between Helen McCookerybook (The Chefs, Helen and the Horns) and Robert Rotifer has been one of those things people always talked about doing, then actually went ahead and did. Together they made an EP called Equal Parts, based on the simple idea of an equal share of writing, singing and playing, based on the same idea, and since then there’s been no letting up. Gideon Coe has played them quite a bit on BBC 6 Music.