“We’re back and playing better than ever!” Ben Byrne declares excitedly.Starsailor are back and busy getting ready to hit the 2014 festival season! They are due to make their festival return at the Isle of Wight which holds a special place in their hearts. In July they will have the honour of supporting James at ‘Summer In The City’ in Manchester before joining them on their UK tour in November. You can also catch them at ‘Rock Zottegem’ festival in Belgium, and at ‘V’ festival in the UK.Starsailor burst onto the scene in 2001 when their single Fever earned them the title of "Britain's best new band." The band was formed at Wigan and Leigh Music College by music students James Walsh (vocals/guitar), James Stelfox (bass), and Ben Byrne (drums). Later saw the arrival of keyboardist Barry Westhead, who cemented their sound. In April 2000, after seeing their first London show (at the Heavenly Social) the NME wrote: "One live encounter was enough to convince many sceptics that here was a band who were genuinely special, blessed with a singer whose voice thrummed like an emotional telegraph wire, that swerved the pitfalls of indie melancholia and were clearly in love with rock 'n' roll and all its possibilities."Their second single, Good Souls, reached the Top 20, and Alcoholic earned the band their first UK Top 10 hit. Their album Love Is Here reached Number Two in the UK Album Charts in October 2001, after receiving great critical acclaim. The year ended with the band winning the "Brightest New Hope" award at the NME Awards. “The whole thing was amazing,” laughs Walsh. “It was like being catapulted into a world of madness. There was no preparation for it at all.”The band have enjoyed more than their fair share of prestigious gigs, supporting the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Police, The Killers, and U2, and have sold over 3 million albums worldwide. They decided to take a break in 2009 to explore other projects and chose 2014 as the right time for them to come back and hit the music scene once more.EmbraceIf coming back means losing sight of what you were there for in the first place, there’s really no percentage in returning. In an age that’s produced more comebacks than the Boomerang Olympics, it’s easy to treat regenerations with a degree of skepticism. In the case of Embrace, however, rather than grabbing at the coattails of former glories, a seven-year hiatus was precipitated by the most commercially successful high-point in their career.Having notched up another number one album and scored their highest placing in the UK singles chart with Nature’s Law, the band simply decided to head back home to their roots in West Yorkshire and take a clean break.The album This New Day being a false dawn, the five-piece strode into the sunset with success still striding like a shadow behind them. Curious behavior, for a band whose 1998 debut The Good Will Out was one of the fastest-selling British albums ever. But for some, success is not the pinnacle of pursuit…“We were a bit fried after the last album,” singer Danny McNamara says. “Things went really well, from a commercial point of view, but I think we lost sight of what we were about and what we really wanted to do.“You can tend to get swallowed up in the mechanics of it all,” Danny reflects. “We just got to a stage where we didn’t really recognize ourselves. We just needed a break from it and needed to regroup.”And regroup they did, but not in the egalitarian manner in which the last album was made – essentially a studio-based group effort – Danny and brother Richard instead returning to their solo-writing mandates, producing over 100 tracks in the interim – ten of which make up the monolith that is their latest calling card, the eponymous Embrace.Danny reveals: “It just feels like we’re starting over. That’s why we called it Embrace, cos it’s like we’re redefining ourselves. Loads of titles came out, but they felt quite limiting. Calling it Embrace just felt right.”With the self-titled new album, the band have mined their very essence and delivered a piece of work that unearths the core of what Embrace have always been about – skyward-bound music of the soul that reaches far beyond life’s parameters. As a group, Embrace have always inspired a fervid and devoted following – not because fashion dictated (quite the contrary, in fact) – but because theirs was always a sound and a voice that elevated while, paradoxically, grounded that feeling in something that was real. And the fervor that essence has propagated hasn’t diminished in the seven-year gap.
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“We’re back and playing better than ever!” Ben Byrne declares excitedly.Starsailor are back and busy getting ready to hit the 2014 festival season! They are due to make their festival return at the Isle of Wight which holds a special place in their hearts. In July they will have the honour of supporting James at ‘Summer In The City’ in Manchester before joining them on their UK tour in November. You can also catch them at ‘Rock Zottegem’ festival in Belgium, and at ‘V’ festival in the UK.Starsailor burst onto the scene in 2001 when their single Fever earned them the title of "Britain's best new band." The band was formed at Wigan and Leigh Music College by music students James Walsh (vocals/guitar), James Stelfox (bass), and Ben Byrne (drums). Later saw the arrival of keyboardist Barry Westhead, who cemented their sound. In April 2000, after seeing their first London show (at the Heavenly Social) the NME wrote: "One live encounter was enough to convince many sceptics that here was a band who were genuinely special, blessed with a singer whose voice thrummed like an emotional telegraph wire, that swerved the pitfalls of indie melancholia and were clearly in love with rock 'n' roll and all its possibilities."Their second single, Good Souls, reached the Top 20, and Alcoholic earned the band their first UK Top 10 hit. Their album Love Is Here reached Number Two in the UK Album Charts in October 2001, after receiving great critical acclaim. The year ended with the band winning the "Brightest New Hope" award at the NME Awards. “The whole thing was amazing,” laughs Walsh. “It was like being catapulted into a world of madness. There was no preparation for it at all.”The band have enjoyed more than their fair share of prestigious gigs, supporting the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Police, The Killers, and U2, and have sold over 3 million albums worldwide. They decided to take a break in 2009 to explore other projects and chose 2014 as the right time for them to come back and hit the music scene once more.EmbraceIf coming back means losing sight of what you were there for in the first place, there’s really no percentage in returning. In an age that’s produced more comebacks than the Boomerang Olympics, it’s easy to treat regenerations with a degree of skepticism. In the case of Embrace, however, rather than grabbing at the coattails of former glories, a seven-year hiatus was precipitated by the most commercially successful high-point in their career.Having notched up another number one album and scored their highest placing in the UK singles chart with Nature’s Law, the band simply decided to head back home to their roots in West Yorkshire and take a clean break.The album This New Day being a false dawn, the five-piece strode into the sunset with success still striding like a shadow behind them. Curious behavior, for a band whose 1998 debut The Good Will Out was one of the fastest-selling British albums ever. But for some, success is not the pinnacle of pursuit…“We were a bit fried after the last album,” singer Danny McNamara says. “Things went really well, from a commercial point of view, but I think we lost sight of what we were about and what we really wanted to do.“You can tend to get swallowed up in the mechanics of it all,” Danny reflects. “We just got to a stage where we didn’t really recognize ourselves. We just needed a break from it and needed to regroup.”And regroup they did, but not in the egalitarian manner in which the last album was made – essentially a studio-based group effort – Danny and brother Richard instead returning to their solo-writing mandates, producing over 100 tracks in the interim – ten of which make up the monolith that is their latest calling card, the eponymous Embrace.Danny reveals: “It just feels like we’re starting over. That’s why we called it Embrace, cos it’s like we’re redefining ourselves. Loads of titles came out, but they felt quite limiting. Calling it Embrace just felt right.”With the self-titled new album, the band have mined their very essence and delivered a piece of work that unearths the core of what Embrace have always been about – skyward-bound music of the soul that reaches far beyond life’s parameters. As a group, Embrace have always inspired a fervid and devoted following – not because fashion dictated (quite the contrary, in fact) – but because theirs was always a sound and a voice that elevated while, paradoxically, grounded that feeling in something that was real. And the fervor that essence has propagated hasn’t diminished in the seven-year gap.
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