Charles Watson – the London based songwriter/producer/writer and member of indie duo Slow Club and garage-rock super group The Surfing Magazines – recently released ‘No Fanfare’, his debut solo material.

The beautifully wistful ‘No Fanfare’ effortlessly evolves from stripped back guitars to a warm, almost wall of sound crescendo.

“With ‘No Fanfare’ we had to wrestle a bit more than on other songs,” explains Watson. “We all kept switching around instruments and arrangements, leaving it and then coming back to it. The final version was centred around three acoustic guitars and me doing a live guitar and vocal in porch of the studio. There’s lots of repeated imagery across the record and ‘No Fanfare’ is kind of the point at which all the lyrical themes come together.”

A former writing student of Central St Martins and The Faber Academy, Watson uses his own fiction writing as a spring board for his lyrics, a method he has used for his previous records. His new solo material takes inspiration from the reoccurring themes and language of the JG Ballard novel ‘Hello America’. The track was co-produced by Watson with longtime collaborator David Glover at Tesla Studios in Sheffield and features a hand-picked band, including Guillemot‘s Fyfe Dangerfield and Paul Rafferty