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Now Wave welcome Gruff Rhys to the Savoy Cinema, Heaton Moor, Stockport on May 9th for a special Screening of American Interior + Q&A. Tickets on sale Friday 14th March from 10am https://nowwave.seetickets.com/event/gruff-rhys-american-interior-screening-q-a/savoy-cinema/3378539
Originally released in 2014, the album has now been remastered and will be released for the first time on Rough Trade with bonus tracks which have long been out of print on LP and never released digitally.
Single Y Gwenan Gorn, out now on streaming services, was previously only available on a vinyl EP. This is accompanied by a visualiser using clips from the original American Interior full length film.
About American Interior
In 2012 Gruff Rhys embarked on a solo 'investigative concert tour' through the heart of America following the route taken by his distant relative John Evans. Every night he presented songs augmented by a power point presentation that detailed his relative's unbelievable history, along with any new piece of information that had come his way during the day. He was ultimately looking for Evans's lost unmarked grave.
Along with many major cities, the tour took him to play shows at the Mandan and Omaha tribe reservations, a Missouri vineyard, villages that no longer exist and lay at the bottom the Mississippi river and a New Orleans bordello.
What transpired from that ‘investigative concert tour’ was a 2014 album, American Interior, plus a book, film and exhaustive tour of the same name. With the aid of the dusted-off power point presentation, Gruff Rhys and a full band revisits the project in 2025 to perform the songs that formed both the album, and the soundtrack to the film.
Gruff says of the reissue -
“Revisiting American Interior 11 years later, feels very prescient.
In following the unusual story of explorer John Evans (1770-1799) it becomes clear that faked narratives can have profound and unpredictable consequences in real life.
His barely believable journey of verification in searching through continental scale wilderness for a [fictitious] Welsh speaking tribe believed to be living on the Great Plains of North America (an ancient folk tale perpetuated by the Elizabethan court following the subjugation of Wales, to make colonial claims on behalf of the British on the Americas) had a dramatic political effect on the fledgling USA and a devastating impact on himself and some of those who helped him on his way.
I wrote an album of songs inspired by his life; American Interior, which also served as a soundtrack to a documentary film based on a book that detailed his journey, intertwined with my own investigative concert tour, all three of which I worked on simultaneously during a 2-year fever 2012-14.
By far the most ambitious undertaking I’ve ever attempted.
Living with one foot in the 18th century, wearing the same clothes (for cinematic continuity) for that entire period, left me pretty exhausted. (Imagine a cold extra from The Revenant movie).
It took me a while to process the whole experience and its lessons and feel I owe it to my former self to take these songs back on the road for a couple of months and re-tell the story for a new decade. - Gruff Rhys
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Savoy Cinema Heaton Moor, 105 Heaton Moor Road,Stockport, United Kingdom
Tickets
