Health scare inspired Circa Waves’ new album
It was a life-changing experience that inspired much of indie powerhouse Circa Waves’ latest album, Death & Love, Pt 1, which was released at the end of January.
For in early 2023, singer/guitarist Kieran Shudall, who had recruited second guitarist Joe Falconer, bass player Sam Rourke, and drummer Sian Plummer (replaced by Colin Jones in 2015) to form the band in Liverpool back in 2013, received a call from doctors to say that the main artery in his heart was severely blocked.
Two days later, he was lying on an operating table watching a wire being inserted into his heart to fix it.
What followed was the cancellation of a number of shows, working out a lot of medication and, most crucially, having to navigate a new way of life.
“It was a big factor in the writing, I didn’t realise it would be,” notes Kieran, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Liverpool, near the famous Strawberry Fields, a former children’s home immortalised in the Beatles song Strawberry Fields Forever.
“But when I got home after it happened, I just felt all these songs pouring out of me. I guess in a cathartic kind of way, I needed to make songs to help me.
“So a lot of the tunes were created in that small period after I got back from hospital, and it’s been a great help to write and be able to put music out about it.”
Which of the nine tracks on the album – the group’s sixth studio effort – most directly address what happened to Kieran?
“Blue Damselfly, I wrote that in the hospital,” he replies, “which was about the fear of me passing away and leaving my wife and child behind – and a sort of moment of realisation that they would be fine without me.”
The anthemic, Strokes-esque Like You Did Before is the most recent single to be released from Death & Love, Pt 1.
It follows the album’s first offering We Made It and the topical American Dream.
Death & Love, Pt 1 is the first instalment of a moment in time – a reflection on a terrifying experience and the joy of coming through the other side.
Kieran, who cites Hold It Steady as one of his standout moments on the record, has indeed come out the other side, “in terms of the feeling that I had before the operation”.
He adds: “I mean I’m on medication and all that to keep me in check, but apart from that I wouldn’t even know I had it – my life doesn’t feel any different to where I was before the operation.
“It’s quite unusual in that sense, that every now and again I remember that I’ve had this thing, and I forget how serious it was.”
In their early days, Circa Waves earned favourable comparisons to The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, and The Vaccines, before they hit the ground running with their debut album, Young Chasers, in 2015.
Buoyed by singles like T-Shirt Weather, which Kieran says always goes down well at their gigs – as do the songs Do You Wanna Talk, Movies and Stuck in My Teeth – the album reached the top 10 of the UK album chart and led to a series of well-attended live shows.
Subsequent releases have continued that success. The band’s 2020 LP Sad Happy, for example, reached an impressive number four in the UK album chart, while 2023’s Never Going Under garnered widespread critical and commercial acclaim.
Circa Waves will be appearing at the Cambridge Junction (J1) on Tuesday, 18 February. Tickets, priced £31.50, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Circa Waves, go to circawaves.com.
