Nick Hodgson: Tell Your Friends

It has been about five years since Nick Hodgson left Kaiser Chiefs and in that time he has been in the studio helping other artists but more recently helping himself by writing and recording a solo record. Today he announced (31/07/17) that this was his last day recording his record which the title is unknown but I have a feeling – a strong feeling – that it is called Tell Your Friends from subtle (ish) hints on his various social media accounts.

Now I am very excited for his solo material because firstly he is a fantastic writer and a very talented musician and secondly I love his voice. On Kaiser Chiefs records he tended to do harmonies but there are a few tracks which he did main vocals for.

He has worked with the likes of Olly Murs, Mark Ronson (who produced the Kaiser Chiefs’ third studio album Off With Their Heads), The Vamps, John Newman and Kodaline but more recently with two artists which I hope to see live soon; LIFE and RATBOY. But now it his own turn. We know very little about his solo material but I hope to condense everything we know so far in this blog post.

When teasing potential solo material on the 26^th March this year via Twitter it caused quite a stir but nothing else was mentioned until the 1^st June when he commented – also on Twitter – that the record is going “nice”.

Now throughout this, I have been getting very excited. I love music. Hence the blog name and the majority of my posts so I get excited about hearing music from my favourite artists. Right now I’ve got two albums on pre-order: Mania by Fall Out Boy and As You Were by Liam Gallagher. With these two artists I sort of know what I am getting after hearing the singles that have been released so far and performances at festivals but the great thing about Nick Hodgson’s material is that we don’t really know what it is going to be like.

Well…apart from it “sounding like ELO in a revolving door with ELO” if you can get your head around that. But I like the sound of it!

So what else do we know? Not much to be honest. He’s been very sneaky and has kept everything very under wraps so much so that the sixty-six day gap between the 26^th March and the 1^st June I wondered whether it was actually happening especially because during that time he has been doing other stuff with other artists as mentioned earlier.

Then towards the end of last month he revealed that Andrew “Whitey” White has done some of the guitar on the record which got the fans buzzing because although there is an air of excitement around Nick releasing solo material I think having Whitey on the record created that Kaiser Chiefs connection which got some fans who weren’t hyped before super excited. Another connection – sort of – is the record label he has (I think) been signed to; B-Unique. Which until recently was the Kaiser Chiefs’ label.

Not only is Nick himself singing on the record (obviously) but also Rob Harvey who used to sing in a band called The Music. Apart from this I can’t tell you anything else but I wish I could!

Going a bit soppy for a second, I personally find Nick very inspiring. Not only as a drummer and ex-pianist trying to teach herself guitar but just as a person. It takes guts to sort of start again. Yes he has some eager fans (like myself) waiting for him to make his mark on the music world again but it is all very different. If you have followed the Kaiser Chiefs as closely as I have then you will know how hard they worked to make it over a decade ago. They had failures, rejections, they were even dropped under a different band name but they had each other to spur themselves on. This is a completely different gig and I admire him for going for it.

Anyway…I am very much looking forward to Tell Your Friends (if it is even called that) and hopefully to see Nick Hodgson perform at some point in the near future.

Nick Hodgson:

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