Sister Ray Davies to play Nottingham date on first ever UK tour
Alabama duo Sister Ray Davies have announced a UK tour that will include a date at Billy Bootleggers in Nottingham.
The tour follows the release of their hugely acclaimed debut album Holy Island with a series of headline shows, as well as supports with reformed shoegaze legends Chapterhouse and Japanese psych trailblazers Acid Mothers Temple.
Sister Ray Davies is Adam Morrow and Jamie Sego. They met when Adam played on sessions at Jamie’s Portside Sound studio (the former Muscle Shoals Sound Studio B) for artists such as John Paul White, Belle Adair and Donnie Fritts and they realised they had much in common, both personally and musically.
Adam said: “We were mixing other work and always joked, ‘well, if this was a shoegaze song we’d do this’.
“It all felt so intuitive.”
Jamie says how the shoegaze DNA ran through many of his formative musical experiences – ‘buying a Starflyer 59 CD as an adolescent in the Bible Belt, being thrilled by the chainsaw guitars and girl group melodies of the Ramones, being enamoured with fuzz, tremolo and reverb of ’60s psych compilations’ – while Adam points to the likes of Slowdive, Ride, Galaxie 500, Yo La Tengo and Talk Talk. Adam continued: “It finally dawned on us, why don’t we lean into the kind of music we love listening to?
“How many times do we have to blast Souvlaki on the studio monitors before it clicks?
"We actually made the record before we had a band name.” That name – a mix of The Velvet Underground song and The Kinks’ frontman, which originated on a list of tongue-in-cheek monikers Sego had drawn up with an old roommate – is actually a great signifier of the duo’s mix of Americanness and Anglophilia.
Their Nottingham date, with Swallowtail, is on April 17.
Visit linktr.ee/sisterraydavies for tickets.