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| FAKESENSATIONS
Biography
Before the music
Christian Ward used to be a pop writer. He once interviewed Pete Burns for two hours. He also got to meet his heroes, Daft Punk, in Paris, when he worked at NME. He had a demo of an early piece of music he wanted to give to them – on cassette! He didn’t, thankfully (as it was rubbish).
French disco
Working as a music journalist around 2000/2001 meant that Christian was in prime position for the golden age of French house, which was his passion at the time. Every week a new masterpiece appeared – Alan Braxe & Fred Falke’s ‘Intro’, Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’, Demon vs Heartbreaker’s ‘You Are My High’. Inspired, Christian started making music, and chose a suitably disco-ish moniker – hence Fakesensations. He got vaguely matey with Richard X after giving his Whitney/Kraftwerk mash-up single of the week in NME, and Mr X gave him some kind words about his first demo – the subtext being, you’re not very good at making house music, dude.
Selfish girls
Christian’s other passion was American R’n’B, also going through a golden age at the same time – Kelis, Destiny’s Child, Aaliyah, Tweet and others were all releasing incredible singles produced by genius knob-twiddlers like Timbaland, Rodney Jerkins, and Christian’s personal heroes the Neptunes. Inspired by Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’, Christian decided to ditch the rubbish house trax he’d made, and try and create a kind of DIY, white-boy English R’n’B, based on the Neptunes template.
The result was a track called ‘Selfish Girls Stay Thin’. It got picked up by Alvin C at Wall of Sound in 2004 and was soon gracing the compilation We Love You… So Love Us Three alongside Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand. Every review of the comp singled it out as a stand-out track – from NME, to Q, to 6 Music’s Round Table, Fakesensations was the name being dropped. Radio 1, XFM and Triple J played it, and it even became something of a cult hit in Australia.
Due to sign to Wall of Sound to produce his debut album with Damien Mendis (Electric 6, Gorillaz), Christian decided instead to retreat back to his home studio and concentrate on honing his songwriting and production skills, with a view to setting up his own label and putting out an album in classic DIY style.
Isaac
It was during this time that Christian got drunk watching Yellow Submarine on YouTube and realised that what he’d wanted to do all along was make a psychedelic concept album.
The idea for Fakesensations since ‘Selfish Girls…’ had always been to combine the melodies of the ‘60s that Christian loved so much with the sounds of hip hop and R’n’B. With that in mind, Christian sourced a huge amount of old skool breakbeats, and during one single week off work in 2007 wrote and recorded pretty much all the songs that would make up his debut proper – Isaac and the Secret Chord.
One man band
Christian does everything on his records. He writes everything, plays every instrument, records it all in a small room in his London flat, mixes and even masters everything himself. Isaac and the Secret Chord was released on his own Selfish Girl Records label, distributed through Tunecore to every download store on the web. He promoted it himself (garnering rave reviews from Popjustice amongst others), and is soon to go out on stage to bring the story of Isaac to the public!
The future
Christian has just signed a 6-song publishing deal with Incentive Music, as well as hooking up with Pitch & Sync (the team behind the Jacques Lu Cont robot car ad success) to license the Isaac album worldwide.
He is currently looking for management and label partnerships.
What the press say:
"implausibly charming" – NME
“Fakesensations… dazzle” - Q
“superb” – Metro
“file alongside Saint Etienne, Loney, Dear, and Sebastian Tellier” – Popjustice.com
Contact:
Christian Ward
Email: christian.ward@gmail.com
Links:
fakesensations.com
last.fm/music/FakeSensations
myspace.com/fakesensations |
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