SHAYNE P CARTER | ARTIST

Shayne P Carter is pleased to announce the release of his album Offsider, out on CD and digitally 9th of September via Flying Nun. This August Shayne P Carter and band are on tour around New Zealand - the tour dates are below. Pre-release CDs will be available to purchase at these shows. Offsider will be released internationally and on vinyl early 2017. 

No-one is better placed than Shayne to tell is own story - so he has written the below bio and background on the album:

Shayne P Carter writes his bio:

I was born in Dunedin ages ago now, and wrote all the songs for my first band Bored Games on one string. My flatmate Graeme Downes taught me the chords of D and E and G while we were flatting together in a student hovel and I applied that information to six strings in my successive bands the Doublehappys, Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer.

I guess I grew up around the fabled Flying Nun Dunedin scene but when my friend Roger Shepherd sent me a signed copy of his new book recently, he'd signed it to David Kilgour. I thought maybe there was a metaphor in that.

Rock n roll has taken me everywhere from the Winz office in Dunedin to the Arista offices in New York with both locations providing their own oppressive ambience. 

I've never been into the industry but I have an extraordinary love of music and I long ago learnt that "music" does not equal "music industry"  and how important it is to keep those two concepts separate for reasons of sanity and survival.

I've enjoyed varying levels of success here and abroad. I've been given a few New Zealand Music Awards including the old school perspex ones that bust in half when they get sent to you in the post. They inducted our band Straitjacket Fits into the Hall Of Fame which made my mum proud so there was always that.

I recently decided to release my music and play my band shows under the name Shayne P Carter (and band) after using the name Dimmer for all of my post Straitjacket Fits work. I felt Dimmer was associated with one period of my career - basically a long extended exploration of grooves  - and after a career where I never played my old songs I feel like I'm at a point now where I can embrace and pick and choose from my entire body of work. If a song's good - it's always going to be good.

My band still includes two of my longtime Dimmer cohorts - trusted lieutenant Gary Sullivan on drums and guitarist James Duncan who's moved over to bass in our new three piece format.

I'm about to release a new album of piano based songs called "Offsider". I like the title cos it seems to suggest being out of step or out of kilter with the times which it probably is. I decided to write the songs on piano - despite having never played the instrument before in my life - because I liked the idea of naivety and discovery and having a new angle on songwriting after so many years doing it. I explored the classical music solo piano music canon before embarking on the project because I wanted to see what had been done with the piano before I sat my useless self in front of it. Schubert's lieder, Chopin's Nocturnes, Debussy's neo psychedelia, Mozart's pristine classicism, Beethoven's cosmic exploration - it was an amazing journey of discovery of a whole universe of music I'd previously known nothing about. Like all influential music it was the essence of this music rather than it's actual sound that inspired me. We'll be playing stuff from this album as well as a selection from my back catalogue on this tour. Cheers...Shayne P Carter.