AMANDA APPLEWOOD
‘I Love Boys’
Debut Album released September 12th 2011
'Pretend We're In Love'
Single released September 5th
Listen to songs from Amanda's album here:
‘I Love Boys’ is the debut album from Amanda Applewood
Up until now, Amanda Applewood has been best known as the keyboardist, recorder player and cake thrower with indie-pop favourites The Boy Least Likely To. While she was sitting on the tour bus to Cardiff one afternoon, she realised that she had written enough songs for her own album. She hijacked the band’s studio, and began recording the very next day.
From the obsessive rush of that unobtainable office crush, through to the quiet despair of lost love on the album’s final track, I Love Boys might not be a fully blown concept album, but the theme of the title remains present throughout its thirty-four minute duration. The album embraces the low cloud and light rain of a June afternoon in England, with many of the lyrics written near Frenchman’s Creek where Daphne Du Maurier’s heroes lurked in the moonlight. It was produced by the legendary Bobby Charm, with help from the Voluntary Butler Scheme’s Rob Jones.
This is a very English piece of poetic pop. Amanda grew up in a village in Oxfordshire, and spent her formative years reading Nancy Mitford and Richmal Crompton, listening to The Sundays and daydreaming about Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited. Taking inspiration from Kirsty Macoll, A A Milne, Emiliana Torini and Strawberry Switchblade, I Love Boys is awash with electric piano, accordion, synths, flutes, close harmonies and softly strung acoustic guitar, while the lyrics reference the Blackwall Tunnel, Hever Castle, Cluedo (lead piping and all) and Enid Blyton. Elsewhere, inspired by the Armada Book paperbacks of her childhood, Amanda contacted 84 year-old million-selling children’s pony book author Diana Pullein-Thompson and gained her permission to use the title plus a spoken extract from the book I Wanted A Pony - to illustrate the curious moment when girls transfer their affection from horses to boys.
I Love Boys is a bittersweet album about growing up in the British Isles, a record that stays with you like a faded polaroid, long after it finishes playing. It’s a record for when the whole world seems contained in the smallest of spaces - a rock-pool on a beach somewhere in Cornwall, or a cramped dance-floor in Leeds - when all that you need to know and understand can be glimpsed through the moving carriage of a train.
I Love Boys has been made the album of the week by Rough Trade record shops. The album is released on September 12th on Too Young To Die Records (The Boy Least Likely To, The Best Party Ever, The Law Of The Playgound et al) and is available on cd and as a digital download.
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