English post-Britpop group Starsailor, are best known for their 2003 single "Silence Is Easy", which reached number 9 in the UK, and "Four to the Floor", which reached number one in France as well as the top five in Australia. The band have released six studio albums and scored ten Top 40 hit singles in the UK. After the release of their fourth album All the Plans the band entered into extended hiatus until 2014, during which its members were involved in individual projects.
Starsailor have just announced a headline show set for later this year at The Academy, Dublin on Thursday 4th December 2025 Performing a career spanning set celebrating 25 years of Starsailor!
Where The Wild Things Grow, the new album – produced by Rick McNamara - from Starsailor is one of the natural wonders of the world. Of course, if you’re unsure as to the veracity of this conjecture, you should be aware that I am including certain recordings by Nick Drake and Teenage Fanclub and Tim Buckley amongst these worldly treats, as well as more traditional landmarks like the Great Wall Of China, The Leaning Tower of Pisa and the food delivery services of middle England.
Indeed, so effortlessly beguiling is Where The Wild Things Grow, you may find yourselves, flicking through your record collection to check whether this bunch of songs has been knocking about your house for years. Of course, this turns out to be a wild goose chase, although Starsailor have been releasing ever-increasingly brilliant records for so long now, that we should be easily forgiven such folly – but herein lies a tale.
Formed in and around Wigan at the start of the millennium, or the end of the last one, depending on which way you want to look at it, and featuring James Walsh (guitar, vocals), James Stelfox (bass), Barry Westhead (keyboards) and Ben Byrne (drums), Starsailor have released five albums to date, including Love Is Here in 2001, Silence Is Easy in 2003, On The Outside in 2005, All The Plans in 2009 and All This Life in 2017. A greatest hits compilation entitled, Good Souls: TheGreatest Hits surfaced in 2015, featuring all ten of their UK Top Forty singles to date, including their biggest hit, Silence Is Easy, which reached No.9 in 2003.
In September 2022, ostensibly to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of their debut album, Love Is Here, Starsailor set out on a fourteen-date UK tour. The band’s set throughout the tour featuredthat lauded record in its entirety – and in the correct order! – as well as a smattering of hit singles and noted past releases. The tour was also noteworthy for the arrival of another item of interest, a new song called Heavyweight.
Where The Wild Things Grow– the album- features additional guitar work from Rick McNamara and Travis’s Andy Dunlop, as well as backing vocals by Lucy Joules (Sam Smith). Rick, himself, who produced the album, is now unofficially ‘the fifth Starsailor’ , or, as Walsh puts it, “another creative in the room who really cares about the songs and pushes us to our limits."
Over the past two decades, Starsailor have been compared to everyone from Neil Young and Van Morrison, to Wigan compatriots, The Verve – Walsh cites the latter’s homecoming show in front of 33,000 people at Haigh Hall on 24th May 1998 as a revelatory experience – although, concurrently, perhaps we should add Tim and Jeff Buckley, as well as Arcade Fire to that increasingly debatable list. Whatever your pronouncements on the matter, one thing’s for sure: Where The Wild Things Grow bears up to candid analysis, repeat listens proving it to reveal layer upon layer of casual observations and quiet reflections on life being loved, and love being lived. It’s also an album that has no right to be as good as it is - and yet here it is.
Tickets from €35.65 (inc booking fee & venue facility fee)from Ticketmaster.ie on sale Friday 28th March 2025 @ 10am.Bookings subject to 12.5% service charge per ticket (max €10.50).
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Slán go fóill.