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Ian Gronow - Say What You Want

from From The Kitchen Disco Volume One by Various Artists

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www.facebook.com/iangronowmusic?fref=ts

iangronow.com

Ian Gronow is a 25 year old singer songwriter, originally from Blackburn, Lancashire, currently living and performing in and around Tokyo, Japan.

With his parents originally hailing from South Wales, Ian became involved in music from a young age by taking keyboard lessons before starting school. However, a few years after starting school, he gave this up to concentrate on his education. During primary school, Ian was part of the school choir, and was asked to collect the trophy as his choir won the regional competition. He was also part a largely unsuccessful boy band, who made no recordings and got no gigs, as well as miming as Paul in an S Club 7 tribute act.

Upon moving to high school, Ian decided to pursue his interest in songwriting by taking up the guitar, and asked for an acoustic guitar for his 13th birthday. He took lessons during school hours, from Burnley fan Michael Haworth – a complete u-turn from his primary school days, where he was fully focussed on his education.

In the early days, Ian worked closely with David Westell, who was then lead guitarist of rock group All Medicines Out (and has more recently worked with the group Nepenthe). Together, they created really bad 4-track demos for Ian’s MySpace page, on which he had fans from as far afield as the USA, France, and Accrington. Early hits ranged from the marginally popular Stay, to the much despised Someone Else. Ian was also presented with many high profile performing opportunities, including on the school bus home and in his own bedroom.

By the age of 18, Ian began to actually write some half-decent songs. The first of these, Days Just Pass Me By, can still be heard being performed today, and was also written in icing on the birthday cake for his 21st birthday. None of the songs written since have been anywhere near as delicious! Ian then began his long lasting (strictly musical) relationship with Paul Stuart Davies of Elite Music School in Darwen, who gave him his first opportunities to perform, and they recorded his first release, the Days Just Pass Me By EP, which contained four original songs.

The EP was released as a free download in September 2008, and received positive reviews from a couple of the lads down the road. At the same time, Ian chose to study Linguistics & English Language in Bangor, North Wales (even though only around 0.8% of the population of Wales speaks English), thus returning to his Welsh roots. During his time in Bangor, Ian took part in over one open-mic night, as well as returning to Darwen for his own headline slot at Darwen Live ’09.

During the summer of 2010, Ian worked with Paul again on his first full album, Everything You Want Me To Be I Am, which contained seven reasonably good tracks, and two which are best forgotten about. 50 limited edition copies were produced, and all proceeds have been donated to the charity Music As Therapy. Friends Westell and Polish dancer (but not pole dancer) Antoni Dabrowski were also involved with this project.

In the following two years, (one of which was spent in Manchester, thinking that becoming a lawyer would be an appropriate career choice), Ian wasn’t so involved in music. He would just sit and play with himself in his room (guitar), although this “lost era of Ian Gronow” still gave rise to the future hits I Want My Stuff Back and Bitchin’.

It wasn’t until moving to Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2012 (to work as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language), that Ian rediscovered his passion for music. It was this move that inspired Ian to write the song The Riddle, which is about being honest and telling someone how you feel about them before you leave.

In January 2013, Ian met musician Aleš Koblížek and began practicing with a view to performing together. However, shortly after they met, Ian decided that he would leave the following summer, so this instead turned into a recording project. They decided to rerecord two songs from the previous album; Say What You Want and Summertime, along with previously unreleased songs I Want My Stuff Back and The Riddle. Demos for the songs were completed in April 2013, and the following month, recordings for the final versions began.

Ian left Prague in July 2013, to move to an island close to Ireland, called England. Whilst back in the UK, Ian laid down the vocals for the new EP at The Grand in Clitheroe, with help from Tom Peters, whilst also laying down a couple of new demos. Meanwhile, Aleš had enlisted the help of fellow musicians Roman Sabotka (drums), Jaroslav Kubr (lead guitar), and Ondrej Rokos (trumpets), with brother David Koblížek working alongside Aleš on the production. The lead vocals were sent back to Prague to be added to the mix, via various transport methods, including carrier pigeon, courier on horseback, and smoke signal.

With the mixing of the EP nearly finished, Ian met director Samuel Andrew Fenton, with a view to creating a video to represent his most recent song, The Riddle. Due to the inspiration behind the song, it seemed appropriate to film the story just before Ian was to leave again, this time for Tokyo. Ian is very close with his family, so it was fitting that they could all appear in the video, particularly nieces and future superstars Olivia, Maisie and Imogen. Sam must be the Derren Brown of filmmaking, as he successfully extracted the story from Ian’s brain and made it a reality. The duo are sure to work with each other again on many future projects.

Now living in Tokyo, and with the mastering to the EP nearly done, Ian was introduced to the local music scene, after being invited to a local open mic night in the Chiba area by Andrew Holtby. Ian has gone on to perform regularly in central Tokyo and Chiba, along with many great bands, which you can find listed on the Friends page.

These have included the July 2014 launch gig for the finally completed EP, Fine, Fine, Fine, which is named after a lyric from the opening track Say What You Want. The EP is available now, with half of all proceeds going to Music As Therapy. You can read more about the charity at www.musicastherapy.org.

Whilst performing in Japan and promoting the current EP, Ian is currently working on demos for a full album, which is set to be recorded in 2016. From May 2015, Ian will start performing songs from the EP and forthcoming album with a new trio – with Jason (bass) and Tom (drums).

credits

from From The Kitchen Disco Volume One, released April 12, 2015
Written by Gronow/Westell/Davies

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Trash City Tokyo, Japan

Established in 1987 as an independent tape label releasing music by musicians in the city of Bath, England, Trash City was reactivated as a digital label in 2013. Working in partnership with musicians to make their music available to a wider audience, the label releases both new and remastered archive recordings as free downloads. ... more

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