Brooke Fraser Announces UK & Ireland Autumn Shows & Tickets
Monday, 09 May 2011
Written by Jon Stickler
Following a successful sold out Irish gig recently at Dublin’s Sugar Cub Platinum selling New Zealand artist Brooke Fraser has announced she will play a handful of UK and Irish shows this autumn.
Brooke Fraser released her debut Irish single ‘Something In The Water’ back in March, followed by the release of her album, ‘Flags’ in April. ‘BETTY’ will be the second single which will be out on July 8th.
A self-taught singer and songwriter from an early age, Brooke Fraser signed to Sony when she was eighteen, and released her first album in New Zealand in 2002. It debuted at number one, stayed in her native top ten for a year, and eventually went eight times platinum: an astonishing feat for an artist so young. Fraser went on to support the likes of David Bowie and John Mayer, before penning her second album, ‘Albertine’. This saw her success expand to America, where she toured extensively, entered the Billboard Top 100 chart and climbed to number five on the digital retailers’ US album chart.
Still aged just 26, Brooke Fraser has made her third album in ‘Flags’, but it’s the first that she’s releasing in the UK. It is very much the synthesis of the sounds and stories that got her to this point. Fraser grew up in what she describes as a “less than affluent” part of Wellington, largely indifferent to the influx of musical imports from
the rest of the world (Steps, S Club 7, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony etc). Her home, however, was filled with seminal records by the likes of Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. Unfortunately, her brother broke the vinyl player, so she grew up with them only in the visual sense. The revelatory moment came one afternoon when her friend’s mum was driving them to netball practice: James Taylor came on the radio, and Brooke suddenly put two and two together. It kickstarted an obsession with classic singers and songwriters that
would feed into the music that she makes to this day.
‘Flags’ is a contemporary and often-atmospheric take on the Laurel Canyon records Brooke loves, and was in fact written in Los Angeles, the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and Northern California’s Bodega Bay. It’s all there in ‘Something In The Water’, an instantly-appealing and breezily upbeat number that is to become her first UK single. Elsewhere on the record, ‘Betty’ is about a cool, unapproachable girl who hides her Canadian-shaped birthmark (a thinly veiled metaphor for all the other things she is afraid to show people), while ‘Ice On Her Lashes’ is a meditation on the cycle of grief. The record’s gorgeous title track, meanwhile, finds Brooke at her most philosophical. “I was traversing these incredible landscapes,” she explains, “and wondering about all the people who had come to arrive in and then leave these places. One day this image of a flag popped into my mind. It seemed that our lives were like flags: a stake in the ground, marking our territory, but eventually our flag will wear out and return to the ground and someone else’s flag will replace our own.”
Brooke Fraser has announced the following UK and Ireland shows:
Brighton Concorde 2 - 4th October 2011
Manchester Academy 2 - 5th October 2011
O2 Academy Birmingham - 6th October 2011
The Academy Dublin - 9th October 2011
Limelight, Belfast - 10th October 2011
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
