Dave Jackson - Cathedral Mountain

Cathedral Mountain is Dave Jackson’s first album under his own name. The album was written, recorded and produced with Liverpool legends John Head (The Pale Fountains, Shack, John Head and the Streams) and Tim O’Shea (Send No Flowers, Shack, John Head and the Streams). Cathedral Mountain came about over drinks in Liverpool’s Everyman Bistro when John Head challenged Dave to come up with an album’s worth of song ideas which he would help write and produce. Tim O’Shea, long-time friend of John’s and Country Mess co-conspirator of Dave’s was co-opted and the team was complete. The idea behind the album was to strip the songs back to the basics of vocals and guitars and to concentrate on creating a sparse but atmospheric mood for each song. The original plan was to make an album entirely without drums and the only track that features them is Going Stray on which the kit was recorded as an overdub. All three were looking to create songs that gave a prominent setting for Dave’s lyrics and with a timeless quality that also got across the interaction of musicians and singers performing live, in the studio. An old unreleased Benny Profane song, Jerked to Jesus was given a re-vamp with a female backing choir, featuring John’s sister, Joanne. Only the lyrics remain of the original song off the Peel session. The songs are all miniature stories, set in noirish parallel worlds where a pyromaniac femme fatale might invite herself back after drinks, a vicar turned side-show poisoner is finally hung by more cynical men than himself, a lovelorn husband searches for his drowned wife in a glass-bottomed boat and a torture garden lures in the unwary newcomer to the city beneath Cathedral Mountain. The LP has been described as a cross between the soul searching vocals of Edwin Collins and the dark Country sentiment of Jonny Cash.  Dave Jackson has been writing, recording and singing with his bands The Room, Benny Profane, Dust and Dead Cowboys since the early 1980s and has toured the UK, Europe and in the USA with acts such as The Fall, The Birthday Party, Bauhaus, The Violent Femmes, Tom Verlaine, Microdisney, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, Aztec Camera, The Wedding Present, The Lemonheads, Happy Mondays and The Inspiral Carpets. Jackson recently completed his first novel and has adapted it for the screen - a steampunk fantasy called Violet City - which has been filmed this summer, entirely on green screen, by director John Maxwell. Both the title track from Cathedral Mountain and the song Deadly Ship will feature in the movie.

Tracklisting:

In the Mud by a River, 3am, Lone Hawk Hotel, Red Car, Cabin, Deadly Ship, Cathedral Mountain, Going Stray,  Religious man/ Jerked to Jesus#2,  At the End of Love

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