Tim Pare

Tim Pare : Biography

Few people can claim to have written an album on the Trans-Siberian Express. But both Tim Pare's music and his experiences are far from ordinary.

29-year-old Pare's music was formed by some uniquely demanding places and events. In 2004 he walked away from his relationship, quit his job in Sheffield, sold his house and moved to China to become a teacher. A year later he found himself in front of his first major audience - a group of drunken Russian conscripts in a carriage on the Trans-Siberian Express, somewhere deep in the silver birch forests between Vladivostock and Moscow. These were desperate men in need of distraction. All eyes fell on Tim.

"The train had 30 soldiers from Siberia and 30 sailors from Kamchatka all returning from 2 years conscription", Tim remembers. "They were aggressive, sexually-deprived, testosterone-flooded killers and they wanted to be pissed all day. They were friendly until they asked us to give them some of our possessions and to buy them vodka. When we refused, they shut one of us in a cabin with three of them until he agreed. We went to sleep sure that we were going to get done over to some degree."

Tim used his initiative. He swapped a bottle of vodka for a battered 4-stringed guitar from an inebriated sniper and began to sing. The soldiers drew back the knife from Tim's neck and stopped threatening to kill him. In this respect at least, Tim's debut international performance was a roaring success. Tim has been invited back to play for the Russian Navy on several occasions since.

Meanwhile back on the Express, the combination of boredom and fear does strange things to a man, and one night out of Irkutsk into a solid 88 hours staring at the flat bogland of the Russian interior, Tim gradually began setting down songs while holed up in a small cabin with an Estonian war veteran. Using his MP3 player to record the rough demos, the basis of "Trans-Siberian Express" was written.

Biography continues below.



The album lived to see its release by a series of twists of fate. Tim was robbed in St Petersburg and lost everything - except the MP3 player that he had left at the hostel by mistake. When Tim finally disembarked from the train, he swore to finish and record the songs after bringing them so far under such testing circumstances. Failure to do so would be to spit Lady Luck in the eye.

Trans-Siberian Express, a mini-album of 6 songs possessed of shining honesty, craftsmanlike melodies and a warm acoustic soul expresses the dangers and rewards of love through Tim's own bittersweet experiences. The textured songs also hint at Tim's pastoral upbringing, he grew up in Shropshire but like Coldplay, Ryan Adams or Ray LaMontagne, they also evoke a modern journeyman melancholia that anyone can relate to.

It had begun when love back home went sour and Tim headed to China. Perhaps perversely, his music incubated in the creative death zone of Communist rule. In 2005, Tim wound up in Ji'Nan, Shandong Province, a city so polluted that trees would not shed their leaves in the winter because the coating of pollution was so thick they couldnt recognise the seasons. Little wonder it all poured out on the train back home.

"The biggest battle was with the lack of imagination and creativity of a nation who have been so successfully brainwashed", Tim says. His eldest student was a 78-year-old man who had been sent for "Thought-Reform Through Hard Labour" by Chairman Mao because he taught psychology.

Tim began his own cultural revolution in the classroom. Tasked with giving English names to more than 50 Chinese pupils, he began with the names he knew best - Bono, Hendrix, Morrison - and three friends called Crosby, Stills and Nash are alive and well and scraping their knees in the playgrounds of Shandong Province right now.

Back in Sheffield - a place whose own monotone greyness also masks a certain romance - Tim took to the business of crafting his music ready for release. Now he can reflect on how his Trans-Siberian experience encapsulates much bigger changes in his life. It all looks crystal clear now.

"All that distance and all that time gave me the chance to look at my own journey", he says. "Exorcism is the decision to go and change the way my life was going. Shoot to Win is about falling for someone because of naive belief that they couldn't possibly be feeling differently. Looking At Me is about the realisation that sometimes to love someone is not enough. Afterglow is remembering how love and lust can feel, Losing My Touch is the way it breaks down, and the end of the journey is Youve Got Your Work Cut Out, the moving on and looking ahead."

Some part of Tim Pare is still on the Trans-Siberian Express. But mostly, he's here in Britain putting real experiences to good use in brilliant music.

As those soldiers would probably say: Na zdorovye.