![]() ![]() Her fifth album makes that state of affairs seem both unfair – she’s an exceptionally talented singer-songwriter – and understandable. ![]() Her last album was a collection of duets written and performed with Sam Beam, better known as Iron and Wine. A phone call from Elbow’s Guy Garvey ultimately led to her relocating from California to Chorlton-cum-Hardy: the pair have collaborated regularly ever since. Her debut album featured, among its cast of backing musicians, Stewart Copeland of the Police. She was encouraged to start a musical career by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, after they employed her as a nanny. Which brings us to singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop: if what she’s called “handshakes and hugs from great people who believe in me” amounted to commercial success, she’d never be off the top of the charts. But at least it gave the era a memorable phrase: from then on, the term “heavy friends” denoted an artist enjoying the career-boosting patronage of their better-known peers, but whose music was overshadowed by said peers’ presence. It was a ploy that backfired in spectacular style: Rolling Stone called the album “absolutely terrible” most of the heavy friends decided they didn’t want to be friends after all, and claimed they’d been duped into recording it, Page going so far as to call the enterprise “criminal”. In 1970, novelty rocker and politician Screaming Lord Sutch released an album called Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, a title that deliberately drew attention to the fact that his backing musicians – Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and Noel Redding among them – were much more famous than he was.
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