Tiscali Showcase - David Ford

Armed with defiant melodies and words, David sallied forth with some tour-de-force stage performance, armed with guitars and a loop-generating machine that built up layers beneath him, as if a whole charged up-for-it band was playing, unseen, in the wings. Through the latter half of 2005 and then 2006, he toured Britain, Australia and Canada and America. His experience of playing the latter was especially poignant and character building. After Columbia's American arm licensed his album, he began by playing SXSW a total of four times in March 2006, during which the legendary Elliot Roberts (Neil Young's long-standing manager) saw him twice and demanded another copy of David's album 'for Neil'. After his New York debut, Bruce Springsteen's manager was in the audience and subsequently invited David over to Bruce's rehearsal room the next day. An East coast tour with KT Tunstall was followed by an invite by Robert de Niro to play his NYC 'film festival' launch party alongside Elvis Costello and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint. A four-week southern-state and west -coast tour with Gomez followed before David made his USA television debut on NBC's nationwide Carson Daly Show. More sell out shows and an appearance at Nashville's prestigious Bonnaroo Festival followed, as did dates in Australia, North America again (at Canada's first V Festival, the Toronto Star described David as, 'sounding like a hurricane in a nursery... we witnessed the greatest performance of the whole weekend.' Tours with Aimee Mann and Ray Lamontagne followed before playing his third Carson Daly show, where he debuted a tune called 'Song For the Road' to incredible and immediate acclaim from the viewers.

And yet, 'Song For The Road' epitomises the troubadour's dilemma; acclaim and reward followed by an empty hotel room. 'Travelling around and singing songs,' David declares, 'I absolute love with all my being, and in many ways I wouldn't have it any other way. But you can get lonesome and melancholic. I got married a couple of years ago, and almost instantly had to spend so much time away from home. I'm prone to bouts of homesickness, missing home and my loved ones.'

Coming back to Eastbourne with the task of making a second album, David worked alone again in his cellar, but slowly realised that some of his new songs required more than DIY magic.

David brought in highly regarded record maker James Brown (Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Ash) to co-produce five of the tracks alongside him. After James went back to the States, the production team of Kevin Bacon and Jonathan Quarmby (Plan B, Get Cape, Ian Brown) were recruited to bring their mixing skills to the final four tracks.

'My first album was basically bedroom demos with ideas way above their station,' he says. 'This one sounds more like a record.'

In broadening the sound whilst not diluting the grit and character that shaped that first album, this body of work has a new momentum that will satisfy old fans and entice newer ones too. But for all its range, Songs For The Road won't overwhelm the listener. 'I don't like long records,' says David. 'It's the same with live shows; I don't like anyone playing for over an hour. I always want my records to be looked at as a complete body of work, with a beginning and an end and movement between, like you've experienced a journey.'

There is one last, but very salient, point. If the listener experiences a journey, as does David, sometimes those trips are the same, and sometimes they're quite different. Though he is never less than forthright about his views and his feelings, Songs For The Road is by no means a catalogue of coruscating confessionals. He's a storyteller too, which is a side to his work that's been much less publicised. 'A lot of the time, I get accused of writing very personal songs and laying my heart bare, when in actual fact, it's not always me. I'd hate to think I was as whiny as the character of these songs! If I only wrote about me, I'd probably end up with a massive spew of cliche, which would be massively uninteresting, so sometimes you have to empathise, to put yourself in another's position.'

So David will be hitting the road again, either with a band made up of his local friends The Late Greats, who he's played with before or solo, but either way, he'll be taking himself and his characters for another walk along the line between, elation and despair, pain and gain. But if anyone is going to sing about these truisms, let it be David Ford,