Macombee & The Absolute Truth

Okay, so as if by magic the Shop keeper appears........ Just like all good Mr Ben stories after a long journey the man turns up and you find a little momento in your pocket, which is just what will happen to you if you click on the copy of the SL Macombee album below, you will be whisked off at hyperspeed to the CD Baby store where you can now buy a copy of Sense Offender, also coming to an I-Tunes store near you soon. This is a compilation of tunes she recorded in both the UK and NZ. A new ep follows shortly of new songs and a brand new sound. But in the mean time -JUST ONE CLICK, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.....Macombee and the Absolute Truth are something to behold. A 10 piece line up with such an array of songs and sounds it's virtually impossible to pin them down. Macombee describes her sound as Alternative, Cabaret. Showtime Punk. The songs are brought to life by a laugh out loud theatricality and amazing 3 and 4 part harmonies to a backdrop of killer grooves and eccentric hooks that make for an epic sound that audiences are going nuts for.Macombee was born on 6th November 1967 Sarah Louise McCombie, in Barnett, Hertfordshire. She wrote her first song when she was 9, a musical when she was 10 and got her school friends to practice it on the school field. At 12 she wrote a piece for the school choir and conducted a performance of it at her school. Home was dysfunctional, she says with a respectable catholic, middle class vaneer through which no one saw. She left home at 16 to join her first band as backing vocalist, Unity Station. She kept quiet about her own song writing abilities because she thought they weren’t any good. Instead she wrote lyrics and melodies to the guitarists songs. Sarah joined various bands in and around Bristol, where she lived for many years. Over the next 15 years she didn’t write any more songs of her own although she continued to be in bands interrupted only by having her children. By the time she was 28 she was alone and pregnant again with her 3rd.Her lodger caught her playing a tiny Casio-tone on her lap singing a song she had written years before. He was blown away and couldn't believe she'd kept her songs quiet for so long. He became her husband and biggest fan and encouraged her to start writing again and get her own band together. "Without his encouragement I'm not sure I'd have done anything with my songs. I got myself a keyboard and began writing songs again. I don't know how the children got fed or got to school on time, but they did, and I had never been happier. Every day I had a new lyric and a new song. There were cheesy bossanova beats taken from the band inside the keyboard. Squeezing every ounce of everything the keyboard could offer me until I could form my own band. I was so happy to finally be letting all this stuff out. It was like the flood gates had opened.” A lot of the songs written at this time found their way onto her Sense Offender album. Which she released when she and her family emigrated to New Zealand in 2007.Sarah’s influences are many and eclectic. Big band music, Ben Folds, the B52’s, PJ Harvey, Ella Fitzgerald, Andy Partridge, Pulp. Old films on a Sunday afternoon, records the lodgers left behind, Led Zep , Deep Purple and Santana, The Police, Marc Almond, Depeche Mode, Bronsky Beat, Gary Newman, The Cure, Eastern European and Middle Eastern music. Killing Joke. It was when she emigrated with her husband and now 4 children, to NZ that things started to really take shape. “After landing in NZ I made a promise to the songs that whatever it was they were asking to be I would do everything I could to make it happen. If they were asking to be huge and ostentatious with frilly bits and bells, then that’s exactly what they were going to get. It became really easy then. I had no choice. It was the songs telling me what to do.”Since then it’s been like magic. Pretty much as soon as she landed Macombee went about gathering her band with a very clear idea of what she was after. She had a vision of gathering a family of amazing musicians together to help bring her songs to life. Ironically this became quite literally the case. Her daughter Poppy is one of the backing vocalists aka Goddesses and her husband Howy is the bass player and until recently, her son Jaz was the drummer. “The kids had grown up with the songs. They knew them and loved them. In a sense the kids have got to know me through the songs. As they’ve grown up and grasped different aspects of the lyrics it’s been pretty interesting what conversations have been sparked by them.The Absolute Truth are a mix of incredible musicians who come and guest for Macombee depending on the show. In the past she has had Waitakere Brass join her on stage. These days it’s the likes of Mike Booth, who also writes the horn arrangements and Finn Scholes, both playing trumpet. You can also find Macombee playing her songs in more intimate settings, with just the piano and her Goddesses. This really showcases her songs in a different way allowing space for the incredible arrangements and harmonies to shine through. A great chance to hear songs from her knock out show and many more that explore a different aspect of her songwriting. “I really enjoy these performances. Something magic happens for us all on these evenings. I love the simplicity and honesty and a chance to deconstruct the songs and experience them in a different way. There’s a great response to these evenings.”Macombee’s songs are intimate and inclusive, dealing with the depths and dilemmas of the human condition. From losing your virginity, drug taking and incurable disease (yes she had one) to death, the establishment, sex and the mystic. She is being hailed as a song writing genius. Her songs are raw and bittersweet. She is quoted to have once said that if Mike Leigh were to write a musical, he’d write songs like this. They depict very candidly what it was like for her growing up in an extremely dysfunctional Catholic family with realism and humour.“absolutely brilliant”, “highly original”, “Avante Garde Big Band”, “Cathartic”, “Groundbreaking”, “Sexy”, “Éxtraordinary, Glen Miller meets the B52’s”Turn up the volume and listen very carefully, this is the new you.

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