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JS Rafaeli

About Me


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JS Rafaeli has a long, and shady history on the British music scene. Facts are hard to ascertain, but we have pinned him down as the former front man of now deceased band of anti-folk lit-punks Go RImbaud. Though based in London, this band was started in by Rafaeli in Scotland, where he had been collaborating extensively with the Fence Collective, who have produced such folk luminaries as King Creosote, James Yorkston, and the early Katy Tunstall.
After the implosion of Go Rimbaud things get a little hazier. There are contradictory reports and rumours, but few facts. We know there was a group of epic, poetic noiseniks called Angels Fight The City who toured with big names such as Razorlight and the Mystery Jets, but there are also reports of a spell as the touring the guitarist for psyhcedelic harmonists, The Aliens (EMI), featuring members of the legendary 90..s group The Beta Band. All members of both bands have refused to comment.
Keeping up his penchant for maintaining seemingly impossible contradictions, Rafaeli has re-emerged as a song-writer in the Beach Boys influenced sugarpop group The Bicycle Thieves while also, being seen doing two hour long noise improv shows with former Can frontman, Damo Suzuki, and establishing himself as a solo artist purveying songs that owe as much to Dostoevsky and Henry Miller as they do to Leonard Cohen or The Velvet Underground. More recently he has been playing bass and singing with Dog of Hearts, an orchestral pop group founded by Jamie McCarthy, the violinist of the iconic Canadian-German supergroup The Hidden Cameras.
Rafaeli..s name has also popped-up as a collaborator with dance and theatre pieces, most notably with the piece Be Water, which was performed as part of The Arches Live festival in Glasgow, 2008.
Amidst all this, JS also seems to have found time for the written word. Various poems and stories have been published, and we have gathered that a more are due from the Paris based English-language publishers Zocalo Press.
There maybe more to this story, and more is expected. But this is what our sources have been able to ascertain thus far...

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 17/10/2006
Band Website: www.myspace.com/thebicyclethieves
Band Members: JS Rafaeli
Influences: The Bicycle Thieves, Angels Fight The City, Go Rimbaud, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, William S Borroughs, Pavement, Silver Jews, Jean Genet, William Blake, Sam Cooke, Sonic Youth, The Ronnettes, The Clash, John Spencer Blues Explosion, Kurt Vonnegut, John Milton, Blind Willie Johnson, Patti Smith, Lord Byron, The Stooges, The Moldy Peaches, Jeffrey Lewis, Jimi Hendrix, Thomas Pynchon, Will Oldham, Radiohead, Coco Rosie, Joseph Heller,Nick Cave, Franz Kafka, The Beatles, The Fence Collective, King Creosote, The Pixies, TS Eliot, The Rolling Stones, Hunter S Thompson, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nick Drake, Slint, The Band, Otis Redding, Max Romeo, The Last Poets, Charles Bukowski, Michel Haullebecq, Skip James, The Breeders, Aretha Franklin, Hubert Selby Jr, Sebadoh, Elliot Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Milan Kundera, Joy Division, Albert Camus, Bruce Springsteen, Gang Starr, James Joyce, Roots Manuva, Saul Williams, Allen Ginsberg, WH Auden, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, The Leeches, Arthur Cravan, Dylan Thomas, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, The Kinks, Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allen Poe, Nirvana, Joanna Newsome, Modest Mouse, Honore de Balzac, Michael Bulgakov, Johnny Cash, The Sonics, Royal Trux, Vladimir Nabokov, Violent Femmes, Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, Alexander Solzenitsin, Herman Melville, PJ Harvey, The Cure, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Beck, Jim White, Cat Power, Joseph Conrad, VS Naipaul, Dante, Kicks Joy Darkness...
Sounds Like: Sanskrit read to a pony
Record Label: Unsigned

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