Sunbirds: ‘I was waiting for the right songs to come along to get that interest going again’

After a musical career that had encompassed million-selling highs with the Yorkshire bands The Housemartins and The Beautiful South, Dave Hemingway felt he had lost his way four years ago.
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Sunbirds

“I was pretty tired of doing gigs,” he says, addressing his 2016 decision to leave The South, a nine-piece featuring several of his former comrades in The Beautiful South. “They seemed quite happy continuing to play the old stuff, which is fair enough, I’m not knocking them, but I wanted to do some new songs. I was feeling a bit jaded with it all.”

The retirement, however, didn’t last long. Within a couple of years he found he had got the songwriting bug again working on “guitar and vocal demos” with long-time friend Phil Barton. “Two years after the demos we eventually got a finished album,” he says. “It was quite a long process but we got there in the end.”

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The pair call their new band Sunbirds. Its line-up also includes Laura Willcockson on vocals and violin and seasoned session drummer Marc Parnell, who has worked with everyone from Girls Aloud to Joan Armatrading.

“Laura played in a band called Steel Threads that used to support The South on numerous occasions,” Hemingway says. “When we decided to go along the route of violin and female vocals there was no better prospect than Laura, so we got in touch.

“Phil knew Marc from down in London, that was the connection there. That’s how the four of us came to work on the album.”

The band’s first album, Cool To Be Kind, is a blend of their individual interests. “There are diverse songs in there, I hope,” says Hemingway, 60. “People may say it’s a bit country and western but I don’t think that’s particularly true. Overall I think the album covers a diverse musical landscape. Within the band there are a lot of musical tastes, so we’ve done a bit of New Wave, a bit of Americana, a bit of country and western and a bit of pop as well.”

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The album’s lyrics touch on contemporary themes as well as age-old matters of the heart. It’s also sprinkled with humour. “I’ve always felt with all the bands I’ve been in, good songs are important and good lyrics are important, and humour is important as well,” Hemingway says. “With any song, they’ve got to be good lyrically and if you can set that to a good tune as well then I think you’re onto something. I was waiting for the right songs to come along to get that interest going again. In a way all these years later it’s like starting again.”

Meet You on the Northside is a hymn to Hemingway’s home city. He explains: “That song is about growing up in the 60s in Hull, and the fishing industry, and all the haunts and landmarks, a lot of them are still there, thankfully. It’s where I was born and I’ll probably be returning there in the near future. Of course it’s always been special and I’m thinking of returning to my roots there.”

Cool To Be Kind is out now. sunbirds.co.uk

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