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Oct 01, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Elbow are releasing a new album, Flying Dream 1, on November 19 via Polydor. Now they have shared its first single, the delicate “The Seldom Seen Kid,” via a video. Yes, the song shares its title with the band’s Mercury Prize-winning 2008 album, The Seldom Seen Kid, and that’s because both titles were inspired by frontman Guy Garvey’s late friend Bryan Glancy, who died suddenly in 2006 and was nicknamed “the seldom seen kid” by Garvey’s father. Mark Thomas directed the video, watch it below.

Garvey had this to say about the song in a press release: “Whilst we were recording, the realities of lockdown meant that I often only got to hear the music the lads had been making in their homes in Manchester late at night when the house was still. The first thing I heard was what you hear, the drums leading into a beautiful, daring, woodwind arrangement. I was expecting a piano, not a clarinet, but Craig’s creation perfectly encapsulated my mood at that point and the lyrics came out in the order you hear them.

“It struck me that Bryan meeting my wife Rachael would have been something to witness, a joint charm offensive of grand proportions as both are proud and brilliant and a little bit naughty. In my mind at that point, there was no better thing than watching my best friend dance with the woman I love.”

Elbow wrote the album remotely in their home studios. Then they convened in person and perfected the songs in the empty Brighton Theatre Royal, where they also recorded the album.

“Hiring a two hundred year old theatre that has never in its history been closed for so long was something that could only be done under the circumstances,” Garvey said in a previous press statement, “nice to turn it on its head in that way.”

“Recording in a splendid generous space with no audience was something that throws an anchor in the times that the record was made in,” he added.

Garvey said that recording the album allowed the band’s members time to catch up in a way that they couldn’t in the height of the lockdown. “We don’t phone each other for a chat,” he said. “We don’t talk about life outside the music until we’re together. These hushed, night-time missives told us how each other were doing. When we finally got together, all that was to do was record the songs, honor them with amazing additional singers and players in a gorgeous space and catch up. It was beautiful.”

Of the album’s sound and influences, Garvey said: “We realized we were making a record free of the usual creative guidelines. We love patient, quiet, whole albums like the last Talk Talk records. John Martyn’s Solid Air and Bless the Weather, PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire, Chet Baker Sings, The Blue Nile’s Hats. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. We’ve always written songs like this, but it felt natural to make an album that focuses on the gentler side of our music.”

The band’s keyboardist Craig Potter produced Flying Dream 1, as he did with the band’s last five albums.

Previously the band shared a trailer for the album.

Elbow’s last album was 2019’s Giants of All Sizes (read our rave review of the album).

Read our interview with Elbow’s Guy Garvey on 2017’s Little Fictions.

Also read our 2014 print article on Elbow and our 2014 web-exclusive interview with Garvey on his favorite cities. Plus read our 2016 The End interview with Garvey on endings and death.

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