Fink
City Winery Nashville Presents Fink live on Sunday, February 16th at 7:30pm
Fin Greenall is an enthusiast. Rather more so than you might expect, in fact, from someone with more than ten albums under their belt. This is someone who's lived a life-and-a-half of hard graft and hard gigging in electronic, acoustic and even pop music already - that enthusiasm bubbles like someone half his age discovering the buzz of musical and cultural engagement for the first time.
Fin, currently a Berlin resident, was born in Cornwall but found himself growing up in 80’s Bristol, in the midst of it’s famous cultural explosion. "It was an epic place to grow up," Fin says. "The Rare Groove revival, the outdoor rave scene, pirate radio - you'd see Massive Attack driving around, you'd see Tricky in the clubs, you'd have your mind blown by a DJ playing 'LFO' one moment then by seeing Horace Andy... I was skateboarding too, I was right IN it, and we were so, so proud to be from this place with its own thing”.
After signing while at college to legendary rave label Kickin’ Records and discovering that Electronic music wasn’t some kind of magical dark art – in fact it was achievable with no experience and a student loan – he was introduced to the concept of London, the concept of DJ’ing for real, and the record label Ninja Tune Records that he signed to in 1996.
Mid 90s London was a "thrilling place to be", the music industry was on the up, and he grabbed opportunity with both hands. He worked major label publicity jobs by day, and DJed, went clubbing and hung with the Ninja Tune crew by night. "I just automatically got drawn to what they were doing," he says, "because they were the one advancing what it could be: not just two decks but three, four, with multiple DJs at once, VJs, projections, art, international gigs in Rome, Budapest, Paris, Montreal and Berlin as well as residencies at the now infamous “Blue Note” club in Hoxton. It was just incredibly exciting."
Records followed, first for Ninja's experimental sub label N-TONE which gave Fin leeway to swerve from jungle to easy listening and back, then Ninja Tune proper, and the Fink Mark 1 sound fell into place. There was still plenty of spacey electronica present – but this was far truer to Fin's West Country roots: the swing and soul of Bristol music were shot through the 2000 album Fresh Produce, which remains a sparkling example of classic Ninja downtempo funkiness.
All this time Fin was DJing internationally, hustling at his day job, and generally enjoying "the clothes, the music, out every night, and everything else that you want when you're in your 20s." But, it transpired, this wasn't sustainable. "I was burning the candle at both ends," he says, "trying to prove something to myself, picking up some bad habits, but looking up the DJ tree and not really seeing anyone I wanted to be. At the same time I was looking at my job and thinking, 'do I really want to climb that ladder and be the CEO of something?'"
His escape came through songs. As a hip beatmaker he'd find himself asked to produce up and coming singers, including a then unknown, teenaged Amy Winehouse. Rather than just provide backing tracks, he found himself writing with her, and as with production a world opened up: songwriting wasn't a "dark art" either - it was a skill to learn like any other. One of the tracks from this session was released without permission on her posthumous “Lioness” album. Meanwhile he was rediscovering his dad's records, and deepening his own love of acts like John Martyn, discovering "something honest, something filterless" about acoustic music and live music. Gigs by acts as diverse as Radiohead, System Of A Down and 80s folk legend Dick Gaughan turned his head: "this was what I wanted, not the same club spaces night in night out, week in week out."
So he gave it all up, and scraping by on savings and tiny gigs, the album that would become 2006's Biscuits for Breakfast was slowly fomed in his attic, with 3 mics and no budget, honing a sound that still had that Bristolian low-slung groove - a little beatbox here, some Hammond organ soul licks there - but with all electronic elements discarded, and the songs paramount. But Ninja Tune stuck by him - in fact it was them that pushed him to fully trust his songwriting; he'd imagined he'd combine beats and songs but Skev and Peter at the label told him that if he wanted to "go singer-songwriter" it should be all or nothing.
From there, it was step-by-step, bit-by-bit, gigging and hustle. Songwriting became "a kind of psychoanalysis - where I hadn't really spent any time on myself in that relentless period of my 20s - and the more I did it, the better it worked for me!"
2009's home-recorded “Sort of Revolution” was "the break even album", 2011's “Perfect Darkness” upped the creative ambition and solidified Fink as a player in the sync game, and 2014’s “Hard Believer” record led to world tours, festival seasons and the life of a road-worn troubadour. As a songwriter he picked up 3 BMI song-writing awards for this work with John Legend on his “Evolver” record, including co-writing his #1 single “Greenlight”, and contributing tracks to his “12 Years A Slave” soundtrack, and working with Ava DuVernay on her screen debut “Middle of Nowhere” and the Oscar winning “Selma”.
3 critically lauded studio albums recorded with legendary producer Flood (Depeche Mode, U2, Nick Cave) followed after he heard the demos for Fink’s Blues project - “Sunday Night Blues Club”(2017) , “Resurgam” (2017) and “Bloom Innocent”(2019), along with their associated world tours, set Fink as a stalwart of the Indy scene, with a worldwide fanbase whose loyalty in unparalleled.
In the world of Sync, he has had so many TV shows and movies it is impossible to count – from True Detective, Suits, The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul, Lie To Me, Teen Wolf, Blacklist in the TV world to Til Schweiger’s “Honig Im Kopf”, Will Smith’s “Collateral Beauty” and Lasse Halstrom’s “Dear John.”
2023 hasn’t been quiet either – after signing a landmark deal with Sony Music Publishing Germany after 30 years as an independent artist – Fink has found himself writing and producing the soundtrack to the Dutch Documentary film “All You See” (Dir. Niki Padidar), a moving and haunting exploration of the immigration experience of young girls. He has also produced the OST to Ubisoft’s “Prince Of Persia – The Lost Crown” with the contemporary Iranian producer and composer Mentrix, as well as campaigns for La Furla and Levi’s. He also penned the end credit song for Ava DuVernay’s “Origin”.
Oh – and his new album, “Beauty In Your Wake”, recorded in a church in his beloved Cornwall in the Autumn, is released in 2024 accompanied by a tour that, in his own words, “will probably never end!”....the first band to be Co-Produced and recorded by Sam Okell at his new Zennor Sounds studio (Sam won a Grammy for his role in remastering the entire Beatles catalogue at Abbey Rd) it’s scheduled to be released in July with the tour beginning in August......
