By Keith Walsh
Julian Shah-Tayler is about to reveal his true identity to the world. As the leader of the David Bowie tribute project, The Band That Fell To Earth, a keyboardist playing the role of Alan Wilder in the Depeche Mode tribute Strangelove, as well as the creative powerhouse at the helm of the original project The Singularity, Shah-Tayler will be getting back to basics, with a series of eponymous releases starting in May.
“I’m probably going to release a track a month for the foreseeable future until I get bored of it,” he explains. “‘Cause I have, as I say, 400 tracks.” With his new manager, Vicky Hamilton, who has represented Guns And Roses, Poison, Mötley Crüe and Stryper, Shah-Tayler hopes to set the world on fire.
First off, I had to ask him about his gear, about which he obligingly shares details with me as he walks through his home studio in Altadena, during our phone conversation: “I’ll tell you this, if you want to list them. I have a Korg Minilogue, and a Korg Monologue, I have a Casio Privia, I have a Novation X Station, I have a Roland 106, I have a Virus Ti, I have a Roland TR-8, a Roland TB3, Alesis Fusion 6, and a Korg MS2000 and a Multivox MX 202. Also a Moog Sub Phatty…..and I also have a Roland SH-09.”
This is quite a lot of useful gear for this studio whiz – who composes, plays and produces almost everything on his solo projects using Pro Tools and his array of analogue synths – as he’s eschewed virtual synths for the real thing. Shah-Tayler explains: “I used to use a lot of virtual synths, I never do any more. I don’t really program as such, I really play everything. I mean I’m a classically trained musician, so it doesn’t make any sense to me to take off the rough edges, I want the rough edges to be part of the sound.”
Shah-Tayler was born in Leeds, in Great Britain, and raised in Wales, receiving the guidance of his grandmother, a music instructor. “She sent me to Barron Cathedral Choir School, and I was lead soloist there, and I was taught violin, church organ, piano, trumpet…I taught myself guitar, I taught myself drums, you know synthesis, all that stuff I’ve taught myself. But I did get formal training.” All of these skills are put to good use in the multiple projects that Shah-Tayler finds himself active in.
After some initial success in London, with a band called Whitey, Shah-Tayler finally felt the need to move to California. “I was born in Leeds,” he explains. “I never lived in Leeds, I lived in South Wales and York , which is near Leeds, And in York, my band was doing very well, but to be a big band in York is like being you know, a tadpole in a teacup, a complete waste of time, I love York, it’s a beautiful, beautiful town full of lovely people but as far as the music industry is concerned, you’re lucky to make 50 pounds a show. So I moved to London, to become a big star, and then didn’t become a big star, so now I’m in LA.”
Much like Bowie, whom he has been very successful at emulating, Shah-Taylor prefers to leave the visceral, on- the-edge qualities of performance in his music, and this spontaneity also carries over into the way he does things in everyday life. His Bowie tribute began as a fundraiser for a musical project in that gave instruments and musical training to young children in Watts, California. As he explains: ‘I got some of these 6 to 10 year old kids to write songs, and it was a really great experience. But we wanted to buy equipment to donate to the rec center because we were bringing our own stuff. …so I put a Bowie tribute band together and said, ‘look, this is for a charity’, and we did the Ziggy album in its entirety, and it was a huge success, and a lot of people donated money to the charity, and we bought the instruments, and then everybody was like, ‘you cannot not do this. It’s your destiny,’ almost, ‘you know you have to do this.’”
As a result, Shah-Tayler created a project, The Band That Fell To Earth, presenting his spot-on reproductions of David Bowie songs to a wider audience. In addition, for the past few years, he’s played the role of Alan Wilder in the very successful Depeche Mode tribute, Strangelove. All of this is in addition to his solo project, The Singularity. But that’s all about to change.
Partly due to confusion with other projects using the same name, Julian Shah-Tayler will be now known by his actual given name. “I’m changing,” he explains. “From this point forward I have a new manager who is called Vicky Hamilton, she’s managed Guns And Roses, and she is, she just said, ‘look, I’ve looked up Singularity and I’m getting hits above you with music, and it’s terrible music.’ I don’t know what she’s checked out, ‘and you just need to not do it under the name anymore’ And so I’m just going to do it under my own name.”
Shah-Tayler says a new single is coming in May, called “Living In A Dream.” In the meantime, we have an earlier song from The Singularity, “Wetter,” a song that he says is a good indicator of what the new, self-titled project will sound like.
And for his plans after the COVID-19 crisis ends? “Well what I’m hoping for with this Bowie thing, I’m going to do a show where it’s an hour of Bowie, and I’m going to allow people to stay on and watch an hour of Singularity (as Julian Shah-Tayler). ‘Cause my thing is I’d like to transition to a point where people are recognizing me for what I do, not for the facility I have for sounding like Bowie.”
finis
www.facebook.com/thesingularitymusic
www.thesingularitymusic.bandcamp.com/
