Callum Easter – Promises: Video Premiere

Callum Easter is originally from Hastings, Sussex but grew up in Scotland's Dunbar and Edinburgh. After spending three years on a football scholarship in America, where he also learned to play the piano and organ, he returned to the Scottish capital to join rock-n-roll band The Stagger Rats. Three years of touring in the UK and Europe followed, before the group disbanded.  

His solo project came to the attention of Edinburgh's Young Fathers and it's in their studio where Callum spent the next couple of years finessing his sound. Writing and producing everything himself, creating and arranging using an adhoc collection of ancient organs, tape delay and recordings of the rickety old piano in his front room, an album took shape, followed by what became his first release, EP Get Don’t Want.

Several live shows saw a transition from balancing solo multi-instrumentalism to eventually being joined on stage by John Fogarty, who brings a unique take to a performing duo by using the Serato vinyl DJ-ing tool to compliment and enhance the weezy organ drum machines that Easter uses for backing. Occasionally performing with Young Fathers and fellow traveller, Law Holt, Callum achieves full-on live intensity accompanied by a single strobe, flashing in time to the music and reflected from a huge hand-built ‘satellite’ construction at the back of the stage. 

Promises comes from Delete Forever, the second in what will be a triptych of mini-albums that delve into a very personal darkness, a Blake-ian state that involves troughs and peaks of emotional extremes in a domestic environment. The video, which The Skinny are proud to premiere, is Easter's personal apocalypse, wrapped in a pop tune. "It's that outside pressure that you exaggerate in your head that puts you in the lonliest of places. It's a male thing. Often stems from financial uncertainty in a cash hungry world," Easter explains. 

Callum Easter's launch takes place on Saturday 3 June at Edinburgh's Hidden Door festival.