Dispo en cd et vinyl

Love’s Enormous Wings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsLzOHPO9lQ

CARS (Gary Numan cover)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl4rFsPRRLU&feature=related

Last Of The Melting Snow (Acoustic – bandstand busking)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W9EvsP_fYI&feature=related

"Beautifully pastoral debut."
MOJO
****

"Wonderful"
Observer Music Monthly
****

"An autumnal mist of British Bank Holiday ennui surrounds Nick Hemming's literate meditations."
The Times

"Magical... shimmers with loveliness"
Word Magazine

"This is a record of extraordinary depth that stays with you long after the final notes have faded."
Notion

"Fragile, beautifully orchestrated and restrained."
The Guardian

"Unflinching clarity and a sense of longing...a uniquely British take on Americana; almost as if Scott Walker or Nick Drake had 'gone country', making music for coalminers rather than cowboys."
The Independent On Sunday"Album of the week : A perfect and timeless album of wintry romanticism that will warm your soul."
Rough Trade

Leur titre : ‘Last Of The Melting Snow’ a été récemment nominé Meilleure chanson pour les Ivor Novellos – avec, dans la même catégorie, Elbow & Last Shadow Puppets.   La version de l’album qui sortira en Octobre aura un packaging spécial ainsi qu’un bonus disc de 6 titres intitulé ‘A Product Of The Ego Drain’.

The Leisure Society

“What are the songs about? Well, there’s a long-running theme of me
striving to do music for a living, of music being an expensive hobby.
That’s where a lot of the longing on The Sleeper comes from.”

Nick Hemming, July 2009

In big, bad, recession-lashed 2009, The Leisure Society’s rise to
prominence offered heartening proof of the old adage ‘talent will out.’
First released on the group’s own Willkommen label back in March, debut
album The Sleeper was a cottage industry labour of love. Better yet, it
won its hearts and minds through word of mouth.

“Things just snowballed”, says Nick Hemming’s chief foil and fellow
multi-instrumentalist, Christian Hardy, mindful of how graceful
wintertime waltz “The Last Of The Melting Snow” got under the skins of
various influential DJ’s. Zane Lowe was first to play it, and Mark
Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie were similarly smitten. When  “…Melting
Snow” secured a Record Of The Week on the latter pair’s show, it did so
with ninety percent of the public vote.

Soon came further airplay, the likes of Bob Harris, Lauren Laverne,
Elbow’s Guy Garvey, and former Cockney Rebel front man Steve Harley all
championing the band on their respective radio shows. None of this was
lost on the judging panel of a certain prestigious songwriting award,
and after TLS scored another Maconie & Radcliffe Record Of The Week
with second single “A Matter Of Time”, news broke that “The Last Of The
Melting Snow” had been nominated for an Ivor Novello.

It was when folks learned that Hemming, then working in a wallpaper
factory, was the first unpublished songwriter to be Ivor-nominated that
things got surreal. “ITN turned up to interview me at work”, says the
Burton On Trent-raised singer. “It was pretty embarrassing.” Naturally,
the band appreciated the interest, but they were also rather perplexed
by the mainstream media’s chosen angle. “Musician With Day Job isn’t
really a headline, is it?” notes Hardy with a laugh. “That’s how most
indie albums get made.”

As with many bands, the birth of The Leisure Society is difficult to
date precisely, but Hemming says he first credited the name to  a song
he composed for the soundtrack of Shane Meadows 2004 thriller, Dead
Man’s Shoes. Nick had befriended Meadows and future actor Paddy
Considine while they were still at art college, and for a time all
three played music together in an outfit named She Talks To Angels.

“I was doing my A-levels at a school nearby”, explains Nick. “When we
had a Pure Maths lesson I’d skip that and go and rehearse with Shane
and Paddy. I was getting in to John Barry and Ennio Morricone, and I’d
started buying lots of odd percussion instruments and sitars and stuff.
I was listening to Brian Wilson as well; that whole thing of how he
made different instruments blend together always appealed to me.”

Further in, the fledgling line-up of The Leisure Society that played a
few gigs around Burton-On-Trent circa 2004-2005 was more an outlet for
Hemming’s songs than a serious band as such, but by 2006, testing
events in Nick’s personal life had prompted him to re-evaluate just
about everything:

“The break-up of my last relationship is key to The Sleeper, too”, he
says. “That was what prompted me to move down to London. My partner and
I had a house together, and then I didn’t have it any more, so I felt
like I had nothing to lose. ” Crucially, he had already written the
aforementioned “…Melting Snow” over a bottle of vodka that New Year’s
Eve. ‘In no doubt / as I leave this town / I will not return’ he sang,
mapping the no-man’s land of heartbreak with quiet dignity. But as one
door closed another was opening…

In London, Hemming moved in with Christian Hardy, an old friend from
Burton-On-Trent. They had become re-acquainted at a birthday party for
Nick’s ex, and naturally conversation turned to music. “The band I was
in had just got a management deal”, recalls Hardy. “I was like, ‘Yeah,
we’re going to take over the world! Why don’t you join the band and you
can stay at my place?’ In my head Nick was punching the air with me,
but it was actually more, ‘Well if it’s that or suicide…’”

For a time, Hemming joined Hardy in his band Christian Silva, but that
outfit was  “plateauing”, to use Hardy’s  own term. Nick had started
playing Leisure Society songs on banjo and guitar late at night, and
Christian was blown away. The two friends started demoing the material
together. By the end of 2008, they had written and co-produced some 30
songs, 11 of which would appear on The Sleeper.

“Give Yourself A Fighting Chance” is perhaps key, in that it is
essentially the sound of Nick Hemming giving himself a good talking to
– with a little help from his friend. “Yeah, the title line is
Christian’s”, says Nick. “In a way, that song sets-up the story of the
record, so I wanted it to be the first track.”

The pair continued writing and experimenting together, their melting
pot of influences including Brian Wilson, Love, Nick Drake and Bob
Dylan, as well as more contemporary artists such as Department Of
Eagles and Sufjan Stevens. Hemming and Hardy’s differing, yet
complimentary musical skills found a mirror in their differing, yet
complimentary personalities. Nick is quieter, less ebullient and
naturally cautious, while Christian describes himself as “a complete
fantasist with relentless positivity”

Both men also read lots of novels – good stuff by Fitzgerald, Salinger,
Hemmingway and the like. Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, written by a
creative type trapped in a dull day-job, chimed with Nick’s thoughts
during the making of The Sleeper, while Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake had
some bearing on the Hardy-penned “Come To Your Senses.”

In time, musicians from Brighton’s Willkommen collective were drafted
in as The Leisure Society developed a full band sound and went
widescreen. Quintessentially English-sounding strings, brass and
woodwind ornamented the arrangements, and Mike Siddell, William
Calderbank, Helen Whitaker, Bas Hankins and Darren Bonehill have since
become members of the band.

In July 2009, The Leisure Society signed a new record deal. There is,
of course, a pleasant irony to Nick Hemming’s much longed-for career as
a professional musician bedding-down on a label named Full Time Hobby,
but you can rest assured that he and Christian Hardy’s decision was
based on rather more than that.

For one thing, the label’s co-founder Nigel Adams had attended some of
The Leisure Society’s early gigs, and in the days pre-Ivor Novello
nomination when column-inches devoted to the band were scarce, Adams
also made it his business to Twitter about the group. “We Were Wasted”
- the desolately beautiful song in which Nick Hemming documents the
dream-like aftermaths of agreeably over-stimulated nights-out in Burton
On Trent – has long been a Nigel Adams favourite. 

To mark their signing to Full Time Hobby, The Leisure Society are
re-releasing The Sleeper on October 5. Happily, the new package will
also include A Product Of The Ego Drain, an eight track EP comprised of
B-sides, demos and the band’s rather magical take on Gary Numan’s
“Cars.”

“The Sleeper is everything that’s led up to where we are now, and the
EP is the full-stop on that”, says Christian Hardy. “I think people who
are expecting the next record to be a folk-pop thing are going to be a
bit confused,” he adds, smiling. “Everything is going to change, but we
still feel as though we have a long way to go.”