Artist description Pop classics with strong vocal and lyric content. High quality music performance

Music Style Pop Rock

Musical Influences Stevie Wonder/Steely Dan

Similar Artists Steely Dan

Artist History ART HOUSE RECORDS UK HOME PAGE CLASSIC POP MUSIC Buy direct from ART HOUSE UK: TEL +44 01202 485091LUTHER: funkygroovy artcd1/artcas1 LUTHER: Pop Art artcd2/artcas2 CONCERTS Robert Luther BiogRobert Luther (vocals), Paul Beavis (drums), Steve Smith (keyboards), Pat Davey(bass) and Simon Wood (guitars) have worked together for nearly twenty years invarious guises. Last year (1998) they re-formed in the present line-up as a vehicle for Luther's songs and the Luther Band's high quality pop-rock performances. Classically-trained Luther writes with an orchestra in mind using a Pop Art approach to composition:- using popular themes within a classical context. With the five-piece group he sings his original and catchy songs in a pop-rock format and with the level of performance usually only expected in a classical context. This is the fascination of Luther: pop songs written by a classical composer and played on contemporary instruments; a sort of funkier Gershwin, except Gershwin didn't have fuzzy guitars. Robert Luther has two albums out on Art House Records (tape and CD),"Funkygroovy" and "Pop Art". A new album "Pop Art²" will be released early May; allare available in good record shops. Pop Art in the Art House 10 Classical Compositions by Robert Luther-Smith ROBERT LUTHER: POP ART; 1. If I Loved You 2. Thank You 3. Love Is TheReason 4. I'm Worried 'Bout You Babe 5. Love Is The Reason (Reprise) 6. One TrueLove 7. Work 8. You're A Woman 9. I Never Believed 10. If I Loved You (Dub); All titles composed Robert Luther Smith MPRS. Executive Producer Robert LutherSmith for Postmodern Productions; Vocals and rhythm guitar Luther; Keyboards and backing vocals Steve Smith; Drums Paul Beavis; Bass Pat Davey; Guitars Simon Wood; Art House Records 1998; artcd2, artcas2. Released October 30th 1998. Independent distribution. All copyright Postmodern Productions; Available in all good record stores. "...his fidelity to classical principles of composition, that is, his use of large-scale structure rather than local thematic events to achieve his most profound effects..." Douglas Johnson on Beethoven (Grolier, 1993) "The rise of independent production has been accompanied by diversification of subject matter, with close attention to the interests of specialised audiences. This trend, which began in the 1950s as an attempt to capture the "art house" audience and the youth market, is evident today in the success of martial-arts, rock-music, documentary, black-culture films" (ibid). Music has also adopted such "niche" marketing: viz. new-age, country, punk, rock, funk, hip-hop, soul, the more artschool-oriented "BritPop" and so on. If Pop Art is fine art, then Pop Art in the musical genre is classical music that takes popular themes as its subject-matter (or "inspiration" as some would call it):- love and sex, cars, politics, movies and art (most not getting past the first two) including the musical sub-types mentioned above themselves. This has made for an exceptionally rich resource-pool. Pop is an industrial and urban culture that is generated by industrial manufacture for mass consumption. RLS (born 1955) experienced an early PR confusion inasmuch as he was referred to as a "pop" singer or writer when in fact he was classically-trained. Like Gershwin, he came from a comfortable background and studied music privately, in RLS's case from the age of seven. He sees no purpose for having qualifications for their own sake, other than to leave that question answered:- he took a degree course in psychology, obtaining a first. He is a member of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the Performing Right Society (PRS) and has several other formal qualifications. He values true science as formal logic and argues that music is both art and science but predominantly science, and thereby easy to accomplish once the rules are learnt. The most arty or cunning part of the work, he argues, is finding the strong irony that all lyrical content, whether musical or verbal, demands; only life-experience can really give that. That is most neatly expressed in "Lord Have Mercy" (on Funkygroovy) where he sings "Ain't got much money, ain't got a hope". It's not true, he's being ironic. It is a reflection of what people in ordinary life think and sing about. He just places himself in situations where he can later sing those lines with most poignancy, social realism in a sense. Consequently, he followed an Orwellian early career as social anthropologist, much to his family's genuine concern, gathering social reality for his compositions. RLS commenced live performance in 1973 in the format of a "pop group" and toured variously. 1999 represents the year in which he gives his first orchestral performances, thus blowing his cover once-and-for-all. In practice he works as a fine-art "pop artist", meaning that he uses popular culture (i.e. mass-produced, commercial tunes) as a source for his work, in exactly the same was as the greatest, (if not the most colourful) of Pop Artists, Richard Hamilton (CF "Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956; or Paolozzi's "I Was a Rich Man's Plaything", c1947). RLS sees Beethoven as the first modern musician that utilised all the same notes as in use today, but Beethoven used historical and Romantic themes. Early music hall compositions, say from the 1880s on would represent the first echt pop music (i.e. the music was commercially published, as records are today) with Gershwin as one of Pop Art's earliest musical exponents:- a formally-trained purveyor of popular (mass-produced) tunes. Chopin does not qualify, he adapted peasant tunes:- the primary academic Pop Art source must be mass-produced. In that way RLS is extending the definition of Pop Art to music: using pop music themes to extemporise and /or re- (or de-) construct into classical structures. In that sense the pieces are collages, they are re-constructions of the event . As Mozart said, amateurs borrow, professionals steal (paraphrase). But RLS does not simply provide a copy, but parodies the "abstract impression" that a particular genre evokes naturally (principally nostalgia, "homesickness", melancholia, Brazilian "saudades") but places it in a different, even paradoxical, context:- a classical, or strategic, context. That is to say that he reproduces the sentiment that the genre evokes, plays and records it in documentary style (i.e. as ethnologist) and then, whichever genre is being parodied (or "acted out" e.g. reggae in "If I Loved You"; heroin-culture in "Love Is The Reason") places it within a structured or "classical" form. Put another way, music is a universal language and that language is just "dressed-up" in different socio-cultural clothing (rock; soul; reggae; beat; funk; classical). As with Funkygroovy, all his work is evocative of time and/or place, each tells a particular story. Each is a page in a pop-up book, each an instalment of fantasy, one in a collection of short stories. And rather than telling one long story (aka "evoking one musical theme"), he tells lots of individual stories within one book:- he expresses various musical themes within an overall or strategic context. In that sense a live performance by Robert Luther is like a musical, West Side Story, or a comic opera, like Brecht. However that is a high-blown characterisation. In the end Luther is a burlesque (he went to a lot of farces with his grandparents when he was young), a parody of popular culture as it exists in the new music-halls (discos) of non-stop dance Britain and the Global Dance Nation, interrupted only by the regular and gruesome movie insights into drug and gangland culture via the film/tv industrial complex. Shut-up-shoot-up-and-dance! Just say no! But, in the meantime...categorisation, being the new unisex monarch divested of prejudice by catering for every taste (in true variety-show tradition), is left to listener. Luther can't be judged on any particular song, only on the nature of the exploration the listener is being asked to undertake with him. Bon voyage! And so on... ©Wheeler-Smith Assocs. UK 2000

Location Christchurch, Dorset - United Kingdom

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