Well Hung Heart, profiled in the current issue of Classic Rock (and featured before on this website), have unveiled their new video. The band, formed around couple Greta Valenti (Vocals) and Robin Davey (guitars), tour the UK in April as support to Robin’s other band The Hoax. Big Plans features guest star Exene Cervenka, the singer of legendary LA punk band X:
She’s A New Orleans singer who grew up in the theatre, absorbing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and all things glam. He’s the Cornwall-born bassist in blues rockers The Hoax, drawing from BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and other guitar deities. They met in 2006 via a YouTube video competition, and now Greta Valenti (vocals/keyboards) and Robin Davey (guitar/ bass) make sweet, face-smashing music in California – when they’re not running production company GROWvision, which has made videos for Buckcherry and Papa Roach. And last year they got married in Mexico.
Speaking from their honeymoon, Well Hung Heart are understandably happy. Their second album, Go Forth And Multiply, has been mastered by Gavin Lurssen (behind Queens Of The Stone Age’s Like Clockwork) and sounds good. “The new record has more of a punky blues thing going on,” Robin tells us, “whereas with the first record we went into a room and spent three or four days just playing and recording. We had maybe two or three songs written, but other than that we just started doing it.”
“I think we were really finding our own sound with this one,” Greta says. “It’s more focused.”
With this focus comes an Iggy-Pop-meets-Black-Sabbath quality; it shares the fearlessness of their debut, Young Enough To Know It All, but smoothed out with groovy weight. Indeed, combining Robin’s bluesy experience – he’s played with Buddy Guy and Mick Jagger – and Greta’s fondness for raw sexy rock (David Bowie, New York Dolls) and their shared spontaneous creativity was a masterstroke. “I always say: ‘I can’t go wrong!’ Because whatever happens I can make it turn out right!” Robin laughs about the improvisational element. “Because I play simultaneous bass and guitar, and also a bit of a keyboard sound, I’m basically trying to emulate a full band on one guitar.”
For all their off-the-cuff aptitude – last year they wrote, recorded and released a single and video in 48 hours for GROWvision show Made In 48 – a stylishly edgy theatricality prevails. “Rock’n’roll is theatrical,” Greta says. “Even with Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, there’s a theatre to everything they do. If people are gonna pay money to see a show, you want it to be entertaining and interesting.”
With Well Hung Heart, entertaining and interesting is what you get. Not that it hasn’t resulted in hairy situations, as when filming their controversial video for early track The Music Made Me Do It [below] – in the desert, with a sheep. “We were taking it on a walk,” Greta recalls. “But I wasn’t holding the leash properly and it starts running away… and there’re spiky trees and bushes everywhere, so we’re chasing this sheep in the pitch black…”
Now that’s a band worth investigating.
Go Forth And Multiply will be self-released digitally in 2014. Well Hung Heart feature on the CD of the latest issue of Classic Rock available digitally here http://goo.gl/z4Yhu (in the UK) or herehttp://goo.gl/YUnR9 (for the US), from all good newsagents or direct from www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk.
(Polly Glass)
WELL HUNG HEART – The Music Made Me Do it (Official Un-Censored Version) from Well Hung Heart on Vimeo.
