A new trailer has been released for the upcoming posthumous solo album from the late Big Big Train singer David Longdon, which you can listen to below. Door One will be released through English Electric Recordings on October 14.
Longdon had been working on the new solo album following the recording of Big Big Train's Common Ground. On the night of David’s tragic accident he had just returned home to Nottingham from a recording session at Playpen Studios in Bristol with his co-producer and engineer Patrick Phillips.
At the time of David’s death, the album was 90% finished. However, David’s partner Sarah, his manager Nick Shilton, Big Big Train founder Gregory Spawton and all the key protagonists involved in its creation agreed that David would want the world to hear the album.
“I met David through working at Real World studios, and we ended up really getting on," says Phillips, who has completed the final recording and mixing." Finishing the album was a balancing act of me trying to honour what we had been talking about, but without his ears to say ‘Yes, I like that’ or not. I don't ever think that there can be an absolute truth in music, it’s the people that are involved in the process at that moment, making choices. David was a massively creative force of nature when it came to music, and I hope that he would have been happy with the choices that we made.”
Door One, which takes it's title from the nickname for a recreation ground in Nottingham near where Longdon grew up and features appearances from King Crimson drummer Jeremy Stacey, Theo Travis (Soft Machine), Steve Vantsis (Fish) and Longdon's. former 1990s Gifthorse band mate Gary Bromham (Bjork, Sheryl Crow, George Michael) who contributed guitar, backing vocals, keyboard parts and textures and Gregory Spawton playing acoustic guitar on two songs,
"David was aware of my passion for 12-string guitar and said he had a song called Love Is All which he wanted me to play on. I recorded my parts for the song a few days after David died," says Spawton. "Although he was gone, it felt like it was one last precious moment of making music together."
The album’s eight songs are highly personal and follow a lyrical journey from darkness to enlightenment, from the intense and raw first single Watch It Burn, channelling Longdon’s love of The Who, to the folk inflected There’s No Ghost Like An Old Ghost, which recalls David’s Dyble Longdon album with the late Fairport Convention singer Judy Dyble, and Love Is All, a heartfelt ballad which closes the album.
The album’s stunning artwork, which you can see with the tracklsiting below, is by Big Big Train artist Sarah Louise Ewing, with graphic design by Steve Vantsis. Sarah’s cover portrait of David is from a photograph by Sophocles Alexiou.
David Longdon: Door One
1. Into The Icehouse
2. Watch It Burn
3. There’s No Ghost Like An Old Ghost
4. The Singer And The Song
5. Forgive (But Not Forget)
6. Sangfroid
7. The Letting Go
8. Love Is All
