Fran May..

Singer Songwriter Producer...

Fran had been working internationally as a photographer since 1978.

Her ability in the creative image business proved an easy crossover with the creation of music, as many parallels could be drawn in both the visualizing of the storyboards for each song and the visualizing of the sounds. Similar skills are required for visualising imagery and working in post production with Adobe Photoshop or working with Logic for music.

Fran also discovered that she is synaesthetic - a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Fran 'sees' sounds as coloured patterns and mark-making in her minds eye and can communicate her sound design via visual representations.

With Richard Newman, Fran works as a singer, song writer and producer.

 

Fran May and Richard Newman have collaborated together to produce a three album set, which will be supported by three fine art photography shows in London Galleries.

The first album is titled ' Emotional Exorcism'.

This is a cross-arts project between the rock music art form and fine art photography.

The album will be released concurrently with a fine art photography show of images by Fran May at the Royal College of Art, October 18th-24th 2012.

Fran May attended the Royal College of Art for photography, where she won the Vogue Prize for portraiture and the Minor Travel Scholarship for her dissertation on current Photographic Philosophical Theory.

Fran May was taught by John Hedgecoe, Michael Langford, Tom Picton, Fred Dubery, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Bill Brandt, Alan Jones, Philip Jones-Griffiths, Fred Lammer, Paul Overy and James Wedge.

Fran May has collaborated with producer, writer and journalist, Richard Newman.

Richard Newman wrote the book about the making of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, has written and presented his own Channel 4 documentary on the origins of the London Blues Rock scene, and while in his early twenties, produced albums featuring Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight, two of the people, who along with Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner,  started the whole of the London Blues Rock scene in a room upstairs at the Roundhouse Pub.

Along with Keith Scott, the piano player, in the late fifties and early sixties, this was the well spring that eventually flowed through the Marquee Club, the Ealing Club and the Station Hotel, at Richmond,and that provided a context for The Who, The Rolling Stones, the early Cream, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, to emerg; and we all know where that stream led to next.....

 

 

 

 

Richard Newman..

Songwriter and much more...read on..

• In the early 70's Richard put together a number of seven hour live radio shows for Capital Radio in London, featuring Alexis Corner, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Long John Baldry, Geoff Bradford, Brian Knight and John Joyce.
• Shortly after this, Richard produced and mixed a series of albums for the "Black Lion" jazz label.
• At the end of the 70's, Richard put together an album featuring Brian Knight that included performances by Peter Green and Charlie Watts plus saxophone from Art Theman and Dick Heckstall Smith as well as Geoff Bradford on electric lead guitar.
• In recent years Richard has had a major interview with Peter Green which was published in Guitarist Magazine, and also wrote a feature on the London Blues scene.
• Richard wrote and presented his own television documentary "Living With the Blues" for Channel Four.
• Richard wrote the book "The Making Of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells". He also wrote, along with Dave Laing, a book about the Cambridge Folk Festival.
• Richard has just released a CD called "London Life" which is available on iTunes and features songs about London, some of which were originally filmed by Thames Television in the early seventies and others were part of a demo session which Richard did for Pete Townshend of The Who, who encouraged him to write songs about Battersea, where Richard grew up.