DHP Family Proudly Presents...VC Pines
+ Estella
+ GoodGoodbye
Live at The Bodega
Saturday 04 May 2024
14+
Tickets on sale now: http://alt.tkts.me/tl/19il
VC Pines (Violet Coloured Pines) is Jack Mercer, the smart, articulate alt-soul singer-songwriter whose gripping tales of love, loss and late nights in London keep growing in depth and sophistication. After acclaimed EPs Concrete (2021), Skully (2020) and Indigo (2019), Jack’s ready to release his first VC Pines album, which tells the tale of “someone struggling with mental health, juggling relationships, friendships, addictions and emotions, while being a creative person.”
MRI is 10 songs that aren’t trapped in obvious labels and categories, an album that’s in some ways an easy listen, yet displaying a depth and breadth most of his peers can’t match. The tyranny of the playlist can be a prison for artists, but Jack’s determined to furrow his own path, somewhere in the alternative hazy meadows between r&b, indie and soul. He put the album together over a year, from autumn to autumn, finally in full creative control, running in and out of studios with a variety box of producers, each with their own twist on VC Pines, going wherever the muse called.
MRI, of course, is magnetic resonance imaging - the almost-magical medical technique that scans your body with magnets, searching for evidence. You’ll hear its implacable, eerie yet weirdly comforting pulse on the album’s scene-setting opener, Chamber. “You have the juxtaposition of a thing that feels like a seizure - depressing and warm but feels nice,” explains Jack, “with the sharpness from an MRI scan stitched into it.”
Jack was 17 when he started having seizures. “I was panicking a lot about it. I thought it was me going mad. I got sent to a neurology department and had some [MRI] scans and got a [temporal lobe] epilepsy diagnosis.”
“I thought epilepsy meant light sensitivity, but that’s only 3% of epileptic cases. I get triggered by memories and sense, so I have synaesthesia linked to my epilepsy - I’ll associate letters, numbers, sounds or chords with a colour which ties to an emotion. So if I’m writing or producing a song I’ll feel like this is definitely green, or this verse is purple. In my mind’s eye, I’m seeing a cloud or haze of colour. Some people have synaesthesia where they hear something and see a hallucination, a shooting of colour across the room. I don’t have that, but my favourite moments are purple in my head.”
Finally, Jack’s life made a little more sense following the diagnosis. His mum reminded him that he would have odd little spells as a kid where he complained of feeling funny but could never work out why. That persisted into his teens, and what would turn out to be a serious neurological condition got confused with normal teenage exploits - he had no idea his brain worked differently to most people.
“At the time [my epilepsy] definitely was mixed up with drugs and drink,” Jack says. “So after my diagnosis I calmed a lot of that down, but it’s still in my life.” New song Damn Different digs into the toxicity and temporary nature of relationships based on intoxicants. Of course, Jack’s not as reckless as he was when he was a teenager.
“I’ve started telling myself nothing good happens after 3am!” he laughs. But living in a city like London, for a storyteller like Jack, means a trove of experiences to seek out, the biggest mirror possible to see yourself in, indelible memories to be made. And having that creative spark is something which has always kept him tethered to reality.
Event Venue
The Bodega, 23 Pelham Street, Nottingham, NG1 2ED, United Kingdom,Nottingham, United Kingdom
Tickets