Chuck Prophet

Event information

California singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer Chuck Prophet has released a new collaborative album with Cumbia group ¿Qiensave? called Wake The Dead through Yep Roc Records. An extraordinary and unlikely pairing, Prophet and ¿Qiensave? blend seamlessly together as the collection dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music, which consumed and comforted Prophet during a recent bout with stage four lymphoma and subsequent recovery.

Chuck has also announced a run of fifteen UK shows, marking his biggest tour in several years, for early 2025, with Chuck joined by both members of ¿Qiensave? and James DePrato and Vicente Rodriguez from his band the Mission Express. In support, they shared the album’s lead single and title track Wake The Dead, an anthem that reckons with forces beyond our control while learning to let go, a recurring theme at the core of the album.

‘I never want to be a downer,’ stated Prophet. ‘This record doesn’t shy away from darkness, but it always feels hopeful. When I was growing up listening to The Clash and their flirtations with reggae, the thing I remember most is how the music hit me, how it made me feel. The more you listened, the more was revealed, but on the most fundamental level, those records just felt good, and that was really important to me with this album.’

Prophet’s fascination with Cumbia music began after experiencing a weekly Cumbia night at a local haunt of his in San Francisco’s Mission district. He quickly became obsessed: collecting old vinyl from Latin America, studying its origins, DJing, and loading his friends up with new mixes every time they came to visit. After he was diagnosed, he had a lot of time to just sit and listen as he went through treatments. ‘I was going through a tunnel,’ he recalls. ‘It was dark. But I had music: music to play, music to listen to, music to get me out of my head. Music was my saviour.’ More than any other genre, Cumbia served as a faithful musical companion and reprieve during his immunotherapy and chemotherapy.

Once he was finally feeling better, Prophet started driving out to Salinas on a regular basis to jam with a group he’d fallen in love with called ¿Qiensave?, a band of brothers from the Central Coast farming community. The sessions came together on a whim, for the sheer fun of it at first, but Prophet soon invited the band to back him up at a couple of live shows, and the immediate reaction from audiences made it clear they were on to something special. Prophet and ¿Qiensave? hit the studio soon afterwards, where they blended with his longtime backing band, The Mission Express, to track the heart of Wake The Dead live on the floor. It was chaotic at times, cramming as many as eight musicians into the same studio space, but they prioritised gut feeling over sonic perfection and allowed the undeniable energy of the performances to guide them.

The result is a profoundly adventurous celebration of life that balances hope and fear in equal measure, a rich and exultant meditation on what really matters from an artist who always manages to find the light, even in the face of the most oppressing darkness. Prophet approaches the style not as an academic or historian, but as a fan with a voracious appetite and an insatiable curiosity. The songs are intoxicatingly rhythmic, all but demanding you move your body while you listen, with arrangements that blur the lines between tradition and innovation, between past and present, between cultures and countries. There are flashes of rock and roll, punk, surf, and soul, all filtered through the streets of San Francisco and wrapped up in the rich legacy of a genre that traces its roots back hundreds of years and thousands of miles.

Tour support comes from Our Man In The Field. 'I think of Our Man In The Field as kind of a character and not really even me,' says Alex Ellis. 'Something like a Jack Kerouac or an Albert Camus. A writer and a correspondent, a roving reporter but more like a TV version in the ‘70s; Hunter S Thompson but less guns and LSD. Mostly, I don’t want the listener to think about the songs as being mine or about me, it’s more about the story and the characters in there. They’re always about real people and hopefully that makes them relatable.'

Last Dance, the first single to be released from Gold On the Horizon, harkens to the sonic aesthetic of early Johnny Flynn and Ondara while Ellis sings of friends who went through a traumatic breakup. In the song, one romantic partner asks for a quiet departure from the relationship ('If you’re leaving in the morning / Go before the sun comes up') while the other requests another chance at redemption ('If you’re leaving in the morning / Can I have one last dance'). The emotional push and pull is offset by the band’s bright, upbeat, sophisticated indie-folk feel, crafted by a country fiddle melody, groovy backbeat, oscillating synth line, and Ellis’s warm and comforting vocal timbre.