Signs of Life

LPA

1. Sapling
2. We Can’t Be Tamed
3. Signs Of Life
4. Roman Attack
5. People Are Pills
6. Time Stand Still
7. If Christopher Calls

LPB

1. System
2. Hair of The Dog
3. Resplendence
4. Republic Of Eden
5. It Ain’t Over
6. Percolate

Signs Of Life is the sound of a beloved singer-songwriter at the peak of his powers. It’s also the sound of a man – a husband, a father, a sinner, a drinker – belatedly coming to terms with his demons. Namely, after years and years of almost constant touring, an addiction to alcohol and painkillers. In the recently released track “Hair Of The Dog” Vance tackles the subject head on, listing his self-medicating crutches while confessing “You no longer make me happy / You no longer make me smile / You take everything that’s good within me.”

“I had my first extended period off the road for twenty years, and I realised: wow, I drink two bottles of wine and at least a half bottle of vodka a day,” Vance explains. “I’d start the day with codeine to get myself sorted, and I’d smoke joints throughout the day. I’m showing all the signs of death, getting ashen, grey, smoking more, drinking more, smoking more… I hit a wall.”

Album opener and lead track “Sapling” – which is rapidly approaching 2m streams on Spotify – was one of the first tracks Vance wrote for Signs Of Life, and it showed him the path forward. The song, as earwormy a mea culpa as you’ll ever hear, begins with a lovely piano figure, like the stage curtains opening. Vance sings: “I once built a bower, I could build you a home.” It was promising his new wife - who’d recently moved from London to join the Bangor native in his adopted home in the Scottish Highlands - that he’d do more than simply offer a new domestic setting. Or, as he puts it in his inimitable style: “Let me go further and do the actual right thing instead of being a drunken ballbag.”

Signs Of Life was recorded in three locations: Vance’s Pilgrim studio at home on the shores of Loch Tay in Highland Perthshire, another recording set-up in a nearby Dunvarlich House, and at Plan B’s Kings X studio in London. The album was written and played more or less entirely by Vance, with assistance from young Northern Irish producer Gareth Dunlop.

Created out of the grimness of 2020, Signs of Life is an album of dawn after darkness, hope after despair, engagement after isolation, uplift after lockdown. It comes in bold sleeve artwork that reflects Vance's desire to embrace all sides of everything, all humanity's textures. Shot on a 160-year-old camera which does arresting things with colours and shading, the back image is of Vance as a bare-chested, bare-knuckle boxer. On the front, he's in a dress, blonde wig and theatrical make-up.

“They’re just mad, striking images, and I loved the fact that it was male and female,” explains Vance. “You know, life’s extreme, life’s volatile, life explodes into reality sometimes, and stops just as quick. So to be struck by images on the cover made sense.”

At any time, Foy Vance’s new collection of songs would be a tonic. At this particular time, they can’t arrive a moment too soon. “That’s a huge part of it,” says Vance. “Signs of Life is about re-emergence – me in my own soft revolution, the world re-emerging in what we’re about to see as we hopefully go back to some semblance of normality. But just life in general – flowers growing through the cracks in Chernobyl. Life finds a way, doesn’t it?”