Bio
With half of us based in London and the rest of us in Toronto, the Flowers Of Hell are a trans-Atlantic rock orchestra made up of 16 or so experimental independent musicians. We mix orchestral and rock instrumentation while mainly creating wordless pieces that explore the meeting points of classical and blues-based music. Our name comes from the old blues ideal that the pleasure of the listener is born from the misery & toil of the musician.
Our second album, Come Hell Or High Water (due out in the UK and Canada in March/April ’09), has somehow turned out rather epic. It took a full year of work and involved recording 30 musicians in over 40 sessions that we pulled together in London, Toronto, Prague, Detroit, & Abilene, Texas. A lot of the people on it have been members or sideplayers in acts vastly larger than us, including the Patti Smith Group, John Cale’s band, Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, British Sea Power, Bat For Lashes, Broken Social Scene, The Earlies, Guided By Voices, The Clientele, Primal Scream, Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, Tindersticks, The Early Years, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra amongst others. But we’re certainly no supergroup – we’re more of an amalgamation of sideplayers with a few mainmen brought in as guests.
The Flowers Of Hell was started by Greg Jarvis as a studio project in 2002, expanded into a live band in London in 2005, and extended across the ocean to Toronto in 2008. Released in the UK and Japan, our 2006 self titled debut received critical praise for creating classical tangents from The Velvet Underground & Nico and the late Spacemen 3/early Spiritualized sound. It was produced by Tim Holmes of Death In Vegas at the Contino Rooms with guestwork from Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom. In 2008 the full four parts of our track Opus 66 were released by the Awkward Silence label on a split EP with former Spacemen & Spiritualized bassist Will Carruthers.