Remember "Come on England"?
Neil Murray - Singer Songwriter
Neil Murray - Lawyer
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Talk about an elite group: City lawyers who have performed on Top of the Pops. If you held a gathering at a pub, could anyone come? Neil Murray could, and thanks to Mesh, we'd get to be there too (serving drinks, probably).
Mesh is a trusted network spanning the arts and business worlds. Its members include full time successful creative professionals and business professionals with creative second lives. You've met lawyers moonlighting as a hip-hop artist, a dance diva, and now a singer-songwriter.
You've been involved with 16 album releases in the past 14 years. Pretty prolific! There seems to be a good bit of humour in most of them. How do you describe music, style and ethos of The Hamptons?
Er.....Surf 'n Girth - middle aged dudes still trying to ride the wave, I guess!
Lawyers earn a living playing with words. We like to take a ribald look at life sometimes, and are blessed with the ability to lyricise it. Work's hard enough so not taking the extra curricular stuff too seriously gets us through the night. I'm just grateful that I have the other stuff and, unlike so many with the guitar in the attic, am still singing and playing.
As for the music, Tony Parsons wrote of the first album: "Sounds like David Bowie singing the early Beatles and frankly what more could you want?" I rest my case.
Almost everyone reading this has heard the 2004 Euro anthem, "Come on England!" How did it come about that you guys got to replace 'Eileen' with England?
We were on an Internet CD site and the guy running it said he had the nephew of the Dexies drummer (now dead) who wanted to do it, and he thought The Hamptons were the only one of the 2,000 bands he had on his site that had the wit to get it done - which may have been right, considering some of the stuff I heard on the site from the Great Unsigned!
Fortunately it coincided with a three month sabbatical from law, otherwise it might have been difficult. Nice negotiating with the record company though! We never made a bean out of it, by the way (them flag waving Page 3 girls, they don't come cheap). The Great Rock and Roll swindle strikes again!
It must have been something else having a Number Two song. What was the best part about it?
Being on TOTP and asking my kids whether they wanted to stay at school that afternoon or come up to the BBC and be on the show waving England flags - though I'm sure my lad's pic of him and the Page 3 girls is now completely worn away.
Was it hard going back to work after that?
No, it was great to receive all the feedback from clients. I think there was an element of collective basking. (Funnily enough it wore off shortly after we were knocked out, as ever, in the quarter finals! No danger of that this year!)
Though the week after I saw the single in the bargain basement at Woolies....ho ho...
And lastly, what accounts for the American influence running through your band? Your band's name, mentions of Aspen and Malibu. Do we need to fear losing you to the other side?
The other side? I've got a few more albums to do before I pop my clogs!
A bit arbitrary really, though I did marry one, whose family had a house on Long Island (hence the band name) - songs of Wall Street folk choppering out for the weekend with their girlfriends...
"No, no, no, don't touch that lever please!
My helicopter means the difference to me
I know you only meant to please
But lives can be lost in the squeeze."
...and so on...
You've been involved with 16 album releases in the past 14 years. Pretty prolific! There seems to be a good bit of humour in most of them. How do you describe music, style and ethos of The Hamptons?
Er.....Surf 'n Girth - middle aged dudes still trying to ride the wave, I guess!
Lawyers earn a living playing with words. We like to take a ribald look at life sometimes, and are blessed with the ability to lyricise it. Work's hard enough so not taking the extra curricular stuff too seriously gets us through the night. I'm just grateful that I have the other stuff and, unlike so many with the guitar in the attic, am still singing and playing.
As for the music, Tony Parsons wrote of the first album: "Sounds like David Bowie singing the early Beatles and frankly what more could you want?" I rest my case.
Almost everyone reading this has heard the 2004 Euro anthem, "Come on England!" How did it come about that you guys got to replace 'Eileen' with England?
We were on an Internet CD site and the guy running it said he had the nephew of the Dexies drummer (now dead) who wanted to do it, and he thought The Hamptons were the only one of the 2,000 bands he had on his site that had the wit to get it done - which may have been right, considering some of the stuff I heard on the site from the Great Unsigned!
Fortunately it coincided with a three month sabbatical from law, otherwise it might have been difficult. Nice negotiating with the record company though! We never made a bean out of it, by the way (them flag waving Page 3 girls, they don't come cheap). The Great Rock and Roll swindle strikes again!
It must have been something else having a Number Two song. What was the best part about it?
Being on TOTP and asking my kids whether they wanted to stay at school that afternoon or come up to the BBC and be on the show waving England flags - though I'm sure my lad's pic of him and the Page 3 girls is now completely worn away.
Was it hard going back to work after that?
No, it was great to receive all the feedback from clients. I think there was an element of collective basking. (Funnily enough it wore off shortly after we were knocked out, as ever, in the quarter finals! No danger of that this year!)
Though the week after I saw the single in the bargain basement at Woolies....ho ho...
And lastly, what accounts for the American influence running through your band? Your band's name, mentions of Aspen and Malibu. Do we need to fear losing you to the other side?
The other side? I've got a few more albums to do before I pop my clogs!
A bit arbitrary really, though I did marry one, whose family had a house on Long Island (hence the band name) - songs of Wall Street folk choppering out for the weekend with their girlfriends...
"No, no, no, don't touch that lever please!
My helicopter means the difference to me
I know you only meant to please
But lives can be lost in the squeeze."
...and so on...
- To find out more about The Hamptons and buy all of their records, visit out their website.
- To buy "Come on England", visit iTunes.
- To see where those Wall Street bankers are spend their weekends, click here.
- To get to know Mesh better, sign up for their next event, on Friday the 25th of January at the Adams Street club.
