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The album Postcards From Valonia is now available as a strictly limited edition at The Mercurymen gigs and online exclusively from Fish Records. Click here to buy your copy now!
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Meet The Mercurymen
Three of the UK's most talented acoustic musicians, Jinder, Simon Johnson and Gavin Wyatt have been a quiet sensation since colliding as solo artists and forming new Arista signing, The Mercurymen. The result is the beautifully crafted debut album Postcards From Valonia.
Postcards? “Oh yes,” says Simon. “Our songs are like little snapshots, little souvenirs of a journey, like postcards from your holidays. Gavin lived in a road called Valonia Gardens, and everytime we wrote a song, we'd send it off to our friends with a card saying “another one from the Valonia Hit Factory!”
But it was only a favour for a friend that brought them together in the first place, as Jinder remembers, “We were all doing session work as vocalists and guitarists, just helping out in a local studio and we were all doing a vocal session together, putting a three part harmony on a track. We all got round one mic, and as soon as we opened our mouths it was like “Oh. OK. This works!”
Each Mercuryman brings a very different set of experiences to the table, leaving audiences on a recent UK tour with Melody Gardot in no doubt of their potential. You can hear the lush melodic harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the pop sensibility of early Bee Gees, a dash of Crowded House fronted by Townes Van Zandt and before you know it a run into the nu-folk territory shared by the likes of Fleet Foxes & Bon Iver. Nevertheless there's a heady brew of influence at play in the Mercurymen sound.
Jinder elaborates, “My family on my mother's side are Native Americans by origin and so there's a lot of Americana about my life. But I grew up in Warwickshire and I heard a lot of English folk music. Every summer I could open my bedroom window and hear the Cropredy Festival happening in a field literally half a mile away, which really broadened our horizons”.
By contrast, Gavin and Simon came to the band after an apprenticeship with the greatest pure pop producer the UK has ever produced, Mickie Most.
“We spent three or four years being guided by him”, Gavin recounts. “We'd have a couple of days writing some songs, then go to Mickie and play them to him. We might be halfway through the first verse of one and he'd go ‘No!' and you'd have to play another one.”
Needless to say, no strong words could ever discourage all three from a life in music. “I was 11 when I got my first guitar for Christmas”, remembers Simon, “and by 13 I was playing gigs, begging grotty little bars to let me in!”
Hooking up with Gavin at school in the New Forest, the pair forged a creative partnership, eventually running into Jinder on the Bournemouth live circuit. The former lead singer of the acclaimed indie band Candlefire, he was described by Radio 1's Zane Lowe as “a significant new talent”.
Gavin identifies the key factor that Jinder brings to the band, “His phrasing is so unique, he has his way of doing things that wouldn't necessarily be the same twice in a row. He just feels music.”
And Jinder hopes that feeling will spread to the band's audience, “The songs are universal. They were written for friends of ours, but we'd like everyone to relate to them – make them feel better or make them want to leap about playing guitar on a tennis racquet – whatever they want!”
