Eric Goulden, aka Wreckless Eric
Photo © Karen Keats
Wreckless Eric is Eric Goulden. He was given the name to hide behind. After a while he realised he was stuck with it. Onstage he hides behind nothing, he tells the truth with big open chords, squalls of feedback, lilting enchantment, bizarre stories and backchat.
His new album “amERICa” out now on Fire Records is enjoying universal acclaim from critics and public alike.
Nothing Eric has to say sounds like it was said by someone else first. Some people can’t take it. Forty years of touring have left him in good shape. He’s coming to town.
His new album “amERICa” out now on Fire Records is enjoying universal acclaim from critics and public alike.
Nothing Eric has to say sounds like it was said by someone else first. Some people can’t take it. Forty years of touring have left him in good shape. He’s coming to town.
- “One of the greatest songwriters ever to come out of Great Britain” - Marc Riley BBC 6 MUSIC
- “amERICa is that rare record. Goulden is grownup, with all of the stereotypical benefits: an air of wisdom, emotional texture, and, perhaps most cliché of all, a seasoned voice. amERICa isn’t complacent or satisfied; Wreckless Eric anatomizes his surroundings with the wide-eyed thrill of discovery. His American flyover reveals simmering cultural disturbances and essential beauty alike.” - Pitchfork
- “Wreckless Eric has always been a pop musician. That is, he writes melodies with hooks in the chorus and fills his verses with quick, vivid details aimed to make you nod your head in recognition. The precise nostalgia and wry yearning he brings to this slice of autobiography rings true, funny and poignant.” - Ken Tucker, NPR/Fresh Air
Wreckless Eric paintings:
a dysfunctional success - The Wreckless Eric Manual
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for Kindle e-reader:
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hardcover 1st edition:
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paintings archive
videosClick HERE to visit Ericland
the official Wreckless Eric blog! |
records 
 
 
 
 
 
Stream the new album...
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plastic play-in-a-day typewriter kodak road sign trip
I started out as a painter but moved into music because it was a more immediate form of expression. After thirty something years in the music business I started painting again and was thrilled by the immediacy of it. You start painting, wait for some magic to happen.I manipulate paint the same as I manipulate sound. Pull it and push it around until it appears to make some sort of sense. Turn it up and tone it down. Or up.
There's really no difference, except for the physicality of it. I painted with noise, I make music with paint. I use acrylic paint – it dries quickly and I like plastic. I come from the plastic generation. When I was a kid people in England didn't know how to pronounce the word plastic. It was a fairly new word, particularly for old people. They called it plarstic and everyone knew it was cheap and nasty.
I grew up with pop. Pop was invented before my eyes and ears. When I was born (in 1954) it didn't exist. When I was eight The Beatles came along. The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds and The Small Faces followed. The world started to move faster – photography, automation, mass production. Here today, gone tomorrow.
I tore the back page out of my sisters folk guitar tutor book and and learned to play every chord on it. Then, in 1972, armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rudimentary chords I left home and went to art college – Bristol Polytechnic, Faculty of Art & Design, Foundation / Pre-Diploma course. 'Arts alright' the school headmaster said, 'as long as it's not charlatans welding bicycle frames together.' I learned to weld and went off in search of bicycles.
I studied Fine Art at Kingston Upon Hull Regional College of Art – 1973-76. Conceptual art was the big thing so everyone was toting a camera, documenting things. Photography was in our blood, we were born to it - millions of dads, mine included, Brownie box cameras slung round their necks, capturing the holiday highlights. Brownies, Instamatics, point and shoot, Kodak moments. Family photo albums... People take pictures of each other just to prove that they love one another... don't show me no more please (Ray Davies) Now photography as we knew it is more or less extinct. Kodak, once such a modern word is the stuff of antiquity.
I love the word KODAK. I love the packaging, the signs. Kodak, Kodachrome, Kodak Ektachrome, Kodak Sold Here. A modern word for a modern world that we were never going to forget.
I make paintings of signs. We see signs everywhere, all the time. I hardly notice them in real life, especially speed limit signs (but that's another story). There's a Dead End sign on the corner of our street. I see it every day, every time I come home: Dead End. I try not to dwell on it.
And I remember my first typewriter. I threw it at the wall in a drunken rage because it couldn't express the things that I wanted to say. I could never type anyway – I produced grubby reams of crooked hieroglyphics studded with tiny holes where the Os should have been. Typewriters - they hold such promise - solid, dependable and at the same time so impossible, improbable, ungainly, unreliable and unrealistic.
I was supposed to say something about myself.
I've been a pop artist for thirty seven years. Made a lot of records, toured the world, wrote a book about it. Now I'm an antique.
There's really no difference, except for the physicality of it. I painted with noise, I make music with paint. I use acrylic paint – it dries quickly and I like plastic. I come from the plastic generation. When I was a kid people in England didn't know how to pronounce the word plastic. It was a fairly new word, particularly for old people. They called it plarstic and everyone knew it was cheap and nasty.
I grew up with pop. Pop was invented before my eyes and ears. When I was born (in 1954) it didn't exist. When I was eight The Beatles came along. The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds and The Small Faces followed. The world started to move faster – photography, automation, mass production. Here today, gone tomorrow.
I tore the back page out of my sisters folk guitar tutor book and and learned to play every chord on it. Then, in 1972, armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rudimentary chords I left home and went to art college – Bristol Polytechnic, Faculty of Art & Design, Foundation / Pre-Diploma course. 'Arts alright' the school headmaster said, 'as long as it's not charlatans welding bicycle frames together.' I learned to weld and went off in search of bicycles.
I studied Fine Art at Kingston Upon Hull Regional College of Art – 1973-76. Conceptual art was the big thing so everyone was toting a camera, documenting things. Photography was in our blood, we were born to it - millions of dads, mine included, Brownie box cameras slung round their necks, capturing the holiday highlights. Brownies, Instamatics, point and shoot, Kodak moments. Family photo albums... People take pictures of each other just to prove that they love one another... don't show me no more please (Ray Davies) Now photography as we knew it is more or less extinct. Kodak, once such a modern word is the stuff of antiquity.
I love the word KODAK. I love the packaging, the signs. Kodak, Kodachrome, Kodak Ektachrome, Kodak Sold Here. A modern word for a modern world that we were never going to forget.
I make paintings of signs. We see signs everywhere, all the time. I hardly notice them in real life, especially speed limit signs (but that's another story). There's a Dead End sign on the corner of our street. I see it every day, every time I come home: Dead End. I try not to dwell on it.
And I remember my first typewriter. I threw it at the wall in a drunken rage because it couldn't express the things that I wanted to say. I could never type anyway – I produced grubby reams of crooked hieroglyphics studded with tiny holes where the Os should have been. Typewriters - they hold such promise - solid, dependable and at the same time so impossible, improbable, ungainly, unreliable and unrealistic.
I was supposed to say something about myself.
I've been a pop artist for thirty seven years. Made a lot of records, toured the world, wrote a book about it. Now I'm an antique.