Robert Rotifer & Friends + Paul & Pets + DJs Looking Glass Alice

0	LONDON: The Betsey Trotwood
P	Wednesday 11th October, 2023
N	7:30pm

LONDON: The Betsey Trotwood

Wednesday 11th October, 2023

7:30pm

Event information

Album release party for Robert Rotifer's new album "Holding Hands in Petrópolis'', released on Gare du Nord, featuring:

ROBERT ROTIFER & FRIENDS - Amelia Fletcher, Helen McCookerybook, Ian Button, Paul Pfleger & Ruth Tidmarsh
https://www.robertrotifer.co.uk/

PAUL & PETS - Outsider indie pop gems from Austria
https://paulandpets.bandcamp.com/

LOOKING GLASS ALICE - psych pop wonders spin cosmic sounds
https://www.lookingglassalice.com/

Holding Hands in Petrópolis
In February 1942, having fled persecution but lost all hope in the world, the Jewish Austrian writer
Stefan Zweig and his second wife Lotte took their own lives in the Brazilian city Pétropolis. There is a
photo of both of them in bed, dead but still holding hands, that has haunted Robert Rotifer for a
long time. It came to his head again as he wrote “He's not ill”, a sprawling 7 minute song based on the
beat of an old Carousel rhythm machine and the words passed on by Jean-Luc Godard's lawyers after
he left this world last year - and it gave him the title of this album.

Holding Hands in Pétropolis is Robert Rotifer’s 11th record in 23 years, and his first new music since
the all-acoustic About Us album in 2019. Since then he has been involved in a number of projects. He
recorded the collaborative, bilingual Equal Parts EPs with fellow singer-songwriter Helen
McCookerybook, and the album Thunderclouds as part of Louis Philippe & The Night Mail. He
contributed to the Papernut Cambridge album Channel Suite, played guitar and was musical
director to a 14-piece band for a string of televised house concerts by legendary Austrian artist
André Heller, as well as gigging with Fay Hallam in the revival of her 1980s mod soul band
Makin' Time and the rocking post-twee super group Swansea Sound... all of this alongside his day
job as a journalist and broadcaster making radio shows and writing articles on music, arts and politics
for various radio stations and magazines in the German-speaking world.

In the summer of 2022 Rotifer set to work on this new set of songs, calling on friends and
collaborators to contribute. Ian Button overdubbed drums and some mellotron, Fay Hallam
played keys on a few tracks, Helen McCookerybook and Kenji Kitahama added backing vocals,
Amelia Fletcher sang co-lead on “Red Yellow Orange & Green”, plus there were also contributions
from Austrian musicians such as Ernst Molden and Paul Pfleger, uniting the two separate musical
worlds Rotifer has been moving in since leaving Vienna for the UK some 26 years ago.

As a result, Holding Hands in Pétropolis is sonically rich and varied, sometimes even downright
groovy in spite of its inevitably caustic lyrics (“That was the Time”, “Chewing on the Bones of the
Sacred Cow”, “Man in Sandwich Board”), sometimes rocking (“Change is in the Air”), then gentle and
melancholy (“Those Dreams Again”, “Red Yellow Orange & Green”), bookended by its two most
expansive tracks “He's not ill” and “Slipped in the Rain”. The arrangements are both spontaneous and
detailed - sometimes a delicate web of interlinking guitar parts, sometimes stark and spacious. Most
of all though, Holding Hands in Pétropolis is an album about the right to despair, but full of humour
too - a palpably self- experienced assessment of life in a world that defies the inevitability of the
progress we were taught to believe in. Expressing this, Rotifer says, is not so much a career move as “a
means of keeping my head from exploding”.

Robert Wyatt called Rotifer's writing “unique in its conscientious clarity without being simple”, and
Bill Fay has described his work as “both musically and lyrically brilliant”.
Holding Hands in Pétropolis will be available on LP, CD and digital from Gare Du Nord Records
- the label Robert Rotifer co-founded in 2013.