"When All Goes Wrong" Music Video
"You Are Forgotten" Music Video
Desmond Chancer is the sort of midnight crooner you’d expect to find chain smoking in an empty bar in the wee hours, bawling into a microphone through neglected vocal cords. Fortunately for Desmond Chancer And The Long Memories, however, these aforementioned bars are not quite so empty, and it would seem that many are enchanted by his deep booming voice, charming persona, and marvellous musical accompaniment.
"A trio then took the stage, under the banner of Desmond Chancer and the Long Memories (scheduled for the Oxford Punt in April). Desmond is actually former Big Speakers rapper Tomohawk, but in this outfit he eschews the motor-mouth brilliance and gives us thirty minutes of basso-profondo croon, backed by Oliver Shaw’s (sorry Junkfood Jones’) cocktail-lounge jazz piano alongside the glamorous Anna Soprano’s violin and breathy back-up vocals. The songs offer no concession to modernity, which may be no bad thing; the success of Vince Vincent and the Villains suggests that music that could have been performed wholesale fifty years ago can still do well today. The Long Memories’ musical era is perhaps the thirties (one or two of the tunes remind me of ‘Buddy, can you Spare a Dime?), although Chancer’s vocal emotionalism may be closer to the forties and fifties. His favourite subjects are staples of old country music:mistreatment by women, mistreatment of the bottle, and so recall the doleful Hank Williams, but Chancer’s exuberance and bonhomie banish the maudlin; it’s almost as if his inexhaustible Falstaffian cheer is fighting with the gloom of his chosen subject matter- this creates a strange, laddish cabaret that is partly awkward and partly compelling." - Oxfordbands.com
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You Are Forgotten