![]() ‘Lights Out’ (featuring Romy & HAAi) – March 2022 “The physical touch of someone throwing themselves around you can really cure us of a whole lot I think”. Considering ‘Billie’ was written and pieced together during lockdowns, Fred’s intended message of “allowing people to help you, when you need it most” carried a lot of weight. The first song to be revealed from the “cheerful” second chapter of Fred’s ‘Actual Life’ album trilogy – a record that turned despair into hope – the London-based artist built upon a sample of Billie Ray Martin’s cult 1994 dancefloor hit ‘Your Loving Arms’. With Dury’s playful, tongue-in-cheek lines (“ let’s dance again, shall we?”) riding a house beat, you’re transported to the club post-pandemic, eavesdropping on strangers’ stories in the smoking area. Living for the moment again was the message of Fred’s hedonistic collaboration with poet and vocalist Baxter Dury, which really got the good times rolling after over a year of missed sticky dancefloors. ‘Baxter (these are my friends)’ featuring Baxter Dury – August 2021 Some months later, when festivals returned, it naturally became a highlight of Fred’s long-awaited Coachella debut. Injecting determination and hope into this positivity-spreading banger, listening to ‘Marea’ during lockdown made millions of people around the world feel like a light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t too far away. ‘Marea (we’ve lost dancing)’ featuring The Blessed Madonna – February 2021įrom the closure of nightclubs to the heartbreak of losing loved ones, few other artists capture the feelings of pandemic-forced isolation and grief so vividly as Fred and DJ/producer The Blessed Madonna. This first offering to the world showcased an artist with an intricate ear for sampling (Fred approached poet and MC Guante after coming across one of his poems) and was an indicative taste of what would follow: total euphoria. Having dropped tracks on his YouTube channel for several months beforehand, Fred’s debut streaming release landed after years of behind-the-scenes work. This is the story of Fred again.’s rise in 10 banging tracks… ‘kyle (i found you)’ – November 2019 Putting personal stories first, Fred stitched these collaborative sonic diaries together to form the ‘Actual Life’ series of albums, eschewing popular pop songwriting for something mellower, more personal, but just as thrilling. In the three years since debut single ‘Kyle (I found you’), his emotive song-crafting style of sampling voice notes and real life recordings from friends and strangers has resulted in a raw documentation of living through the COVID pandemic. Also that year, encouraged by family friend Brian Eno, he decided to step into the light as a solo artist, launching the dance-focused artist project Fred again… Fred’s been so prolific that he features on the credits of a third of 2019’s UK No 1 singles, namely Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’. His collaborators range from Charli XCX, Little Mix, George Ezra, BTS, Stormzy, AJ Tracey and more. As the BRIT Award-winning producer and songwriter with the stars has shown in his reflective ‘Actual Life’ album trilogy – with its most recent entry out last week (October 28) – life, sometimes, gets in the way of other pursuits.Īs an in-demand producer and songwriter in the shadows ever since 2015, Fred’s been providing beats and lyrics for this decade’s biggest artists. Far from being annoyed, Fred Gibson smiled, laughed, reassured his new pal with a hug and re-cued the track. During a high-energy hour, an over-excited audience member accidentally cut the music when their flailing arm hit the decks. ![]() That Sheeran has trailed it as a “surprise” and “mad” tells you more about his innate populism than the song itself: it’s a well-written, extremely commercial pop song, cowritten by regular collaborators Fred Gibson and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, the latter of whom also had a hand in earlier Sheeran hits Shape of You, Photograph and Bloodstream.Fred again.’s viral Boiler Room set featured a right clanger. This is not a state of affairs that Bad Habits looks likely to change. ![]() He’s spent the last decade enjoying the kind of success that, in one sense at least, brooks no argument: even his loudest detractor couldn’t argue against his ability to write one song after another that attains a weird kind of omnipresence, hits that evolve into inescapable facts of daily life. Every track is immediately recognisable – you could have spent your every waking hour engaged in a dogged attempt to avoid the music of Ed Sheeran and you’d still know exactly what they were and who they were by within seconds of them starting. ![]() The “plays” column of the latter makes for mind-boggling reading: the figures look less like streaming statistics and more like long-distance phone numbers. ![]() Spotify has chosen to promote Ed Sheeran’s new single by sitting it at the head of a playlist of his previous hits. ![]()
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