Ol Beach aka Yellowire has had an eventful life so far. He was born in London and grew up in Switzerland from the age of ten. He was educated at L’Ecole Nouvellein Lausanne before joining the Montreux Jazz Conservatoire at 16, studying under Blue Note recording artist Thierry Lang. His previous band, Wire Daisies, had a brief but glittering career: they recorded two albums for EMI, had number 1 tracks on iTunes in France and the UK, had a song featured on a top Brazilian soap opera, playing festivals including Womad, Beautiful days and the Montreux Jazz Festival. They also toured Europe with Starsailor and South Africa supporting Robbie Williams.

Since forming Yellowire in 2010 the band has performed at HMV's Next Big Thing, Isle of Wight Festival, Rock am Ring & Rock im Park – Germany, Hard Rock Calling in Hyde Park, Latitude festival and will be playing Reading and Leeds festivals later this month. The band’s first single ‘One Last Breath’ was playlisted by Radio 2 in the UK and had international support with Radio play across Europe, to as far afield as Dubai.

On the back of this success the band are about to release their debut album ‘Machines On Fire’ on August 15th. Their latest single, also named ‘Machines On Fire’, has already had plays on Absolute, BBC Radio London and Radio 2. It will officially be released and available for download on the 15thAugust.

Machines On Fire is released by Swiss independent label id Records and distributed by Universal. It features a one of a kind collaboration with renowned graphic artist Jimmy Turrell (Dazed and Confused, The Prodigy, Getty, The Wall Street Journal, The Observer). The physical album will be a limited edition and includes a 24-page booklet of original art, 12-panel poster and a unique signed animation cell from the bands promo video ‘Starlife’. This package gives fans the chance to own a bespoke piece of art by Jimmy along with the Yellowire album . The album is also available as a special iTunes LP with video.

The video ‘Starlife’ was directed by Marcus Lyall, who has worked with the likes of Rolling Stones, Oasis, The Chemical Brothers and Metallica. He and Jimmy combined to create 60,000 individual silk screen images of the band, edited in to an old-school stop-frame style animation video. It was produced by Mark Logue, grandson of speech therapist Lionel Logue, who treated King George VI and was immortalized in the film “The Kings’s Speech”.

Ol wrote, produced and engineered the songs for this debut album ‘Machines OnFire’ and then joined forces in London with producer Richard Flack (Florence and the Machine, Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters, Guy Chambers). The result is a style that alludes to the gentle, almost gospel-ish fervour of some early-70s Rolling Stones to the more urgent sound of Tender-era Blur, although Ol reckons it’s more Lou Reed meets U2.

Yellowire will be performing a secret London gig to launch the album on the 25th August before heading to Reading.

Links

Starlife
Making Of Starlife
One Last Breath