Artist, performer, songwriter and charismatic frontman Oli Spleen has been making music for more than two decades now, as a solo artist and in bands including The Flesh Happening and Pink Narcissus. Branded ‘queercore’, Oli’s early work was loud and angry, understandable when you consider that his initial motivation was “a near death brush with AIDS on the millennium that drove me to feel compelled to express my pain and frustration through music.”
And it is death again (and the lives of those left behind) that has shaped his new album, Still Life, a collection of 10 new songs depicting different reflections of life enduring in spite of death. As he explains: “Some of the themes within express global concerns, depicting the balancing forces of nature, the environment, displaced people, fears around climate change and mass extinction of species. Other themes are more personal, ranging from our own mortality, terminal Illness, the grief of seeing a loved one slip away from us, and the general anxieties of life in these unpredictable times.”
Now that might sound a little depressing, but as with his previous two albums, 2019’s Gaslight Illuminations and the following year’s Night Sweats & Fever Dreams, Oli’s work is tender and thoughtful, as well as uncompromising and honest. With touches of Weimar cabaret, European folk music, torch song smokiness and Brel-esque chanson, it is at once umbilically attached yet miles removed from his queercore beginnings, retaining the deep-set political beliefs that influenced his early work, but following the lush, orchestral paths of his previous two albums.
Standout tracks include the six-minute Refugee, Oli’s reaction to the awful incident last November when 27 people, including a seven-year-old boy and a pregnant woman, drowned in the English Channel while attempting to reach safe haven in Britain, the largest single loss of life in the Channel since the UN migration agency started recording data. The track was issued as a digital single shortly after the tragedy, raising funds for charities working with refugees. His most recent single, A Memory of a Memory, is a reflection on his own mortality following the passing of his father, writer and journalist John Speer.
The album’s cover features a painting by Sara Abbott of a baby albatross, dead from plastic consumption, that itself was based on a photograph by Clare Fackler of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Sanctuaries. In seafaring folklore, there is a belief that he who kills an albatross is cursed: the striking cover reflects how the human race has to take immediate action to improve its relationship to the environment.
With guest performances from his collaborators on the album, including Mishkin Fitzgerald, Nick Hudson, Merlin & Polina Shepherd, and Oli’s band Spleen, the album’s official launch, at the Hope and Ruin on March 4, will be a celebration of the enduring spirit to live against all the odds. Something Oli is well aware of since he almost died of AIDS related complications in the summer of 2000. Tickets can be purchased from Oli’s Bandcamp page for £6 (£8 on the door, doors open 7pm).
Words by Darryl W Bullock
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