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A passion for musical dialogues
Guitarist and singer-songwriter PIERS FACCINI talks to Chris Searle about the environmental concerns inspiring his new album Shapes of the Fall
ENVIRONMENTALLY CONCERNED: Piers Faccini
[Olivier Wavre/hemu.ch]
SIMON DUFF relishes the cross contamination of Damien Hirst’s greatest hits by street artists from France and the US
In view of the grooming gangs inquiry, SIMON PARSONS feels the relevance of this powerful examination of trauma suffered at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre
JOHN GREEN doubts the motivations of a US war photographer who never questions why, or for whom, she is producing images of imperialist conflict
MARIA DUARTE reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, The Mastermind, and Regretting You
TONY CONWAY welcomes a thrilling and concise history of Hope not Hate, that is also a manual full of tactical advice
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes an inspiring account of living with deafness that has important lessons for the treatment of deaf people in today’s UK
“I CARRY immigrant songs in my blood,” Piers Faccini tells me, “like fragments from a lost homeland that I’ll never find.” An unsurprising declaration, given his Italian, Irish and Ashkenazi roots, and that cosmopolitanism is ever-present on his new album Shapes of the Fall.
A beautifully lyrical and defiant response to “a daily witnessing of the dismantling of the natural world around us,” it’s also Fallccini’s response to “the daily round of news detailing our free-falling ransacking of the planet.”
Born in Luton in 1970, Faccini learned piano, guitar and wrote songs from his early teens. He discovered Malian songwriters like Ali Farka Toure and Boubacar Traore and Mississippi bluesman Skip James and this inspired him to swap electric for acoustic guitar. “I went in a folk direction from then on,” he says.
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