Wreckless Eric - Leisureland (2023)

As Wreckless Eric he needs little introduction – he wrote and recorded the classic Whole Wide World and had a hit with it back in 1977. Since then it's been a hit for countless other artists including The Monkees, Cage The Elephant and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Eric’s version featured in the 2022 Expedia / Superbowl / Ewan MacGregor travel ad, and the Cage The Elephant version is the new theme tune for the podcast Smartless. As Eric Goulden it's a little more complicated – a musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer, he didn’t like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he’d been given to hide behind, so he crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground. He went on to release twenty something albums in forty something years under various names – The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric. Eric’s three most recent albums amERICa, Construction Time and Demolition and Transience are widely praised as his best work. His albums encapsulate pop, bubblegum, garage trash and psychedelia – lyrical and sonic journeys, pop explosions, epic voyages, Polaroid snapshots.

This new album, Leisureland, marks a return to his more ramshackle world of recording – guitars and temperamentally unpredictable analogue keyboards, beat-boxes and loops in conjunction with a real drummer, Sam Shepherd, who he met in a local coffee shop in Catskill, New York. He was delighted to find that Sam lived around the corner and could easily drop by to put drums on newly recorded tracks. The recording methodology may have been Contemporary American but the subject matter is almost entirely British. It also contains more instrumentals than any of his previous albums.