Name full of eccentric English charm...

Brighton's indie-folk duo Percival Elliott '“ featuring Olly Hite, originally from Felpham, and Samuel Carter-Brazier '“ have released a new single as they ponder when to bring out the album.
Percival Elliott - Olly at piano - pic by Paul ThurlowPercival Elliott - Olly at piano - pic by Paul Thurlow
Percival Elliott - Olly at piano - pic by Paul Thurlow

The single Forever has just been released via Huffington Post.

“We have been working hard on the album,” says Olly, “and we are going to drop it this year. We are just toying with when exactly to do that. We have got two good singles and two good videos, and we have been overwhelmed with the reaction. We were thinking about releasing the album maybe in March, but it just depends on the wave really. We didn’t expect the first single to get such a good response, and we just want the wave to get bigger and bigger, so really it just depends on that for the album, when the best timing will be.It’s a nice position to be in… especially as the industry is very tough. It is very different to how it was maybe ten years ago in terms of the pros and the cons. The pros now are that if you have got enough nous and are slightly technically minded, you can record your album yourself. It is not cheap to do, but it is actually affordable.

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“But I think the difficulty is that because anybody can do it, it has become a massive melting pot of good and bad. It’s harder to sift through it all in the industry. There is a massive amount of music, and it has become more fluid as well. You can turn music on and you can turn music off. To some extent the value of music has been lost, the old thing of waiting for an album to come out and then going out to get it.”

But with the duo, three years behind it now, Olly feels well placed. He and Sam got together because they both work in the furniture trade and ended up spending hours together driving around.

“When you get to spend a lot of time in the cab with someone, you really get to know them. We just struck a chord. He has got an amazing amount of knowledge, and when you have got eight hours on the road together, you can get through an awful lot of albums. He is a great educator.”

And it was Sam who suggested they adopt the name Percival Elliott for the duo, in honour of Olly’s great grandfather.

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Percival Elliott, born in 1883 was an inventor who created one of the first ice-cream emporiums in Brighton. After discovering a dusty box of trinkets in the back of Olly’s family attic, the untouched time capsule unveiled Percival Elliott’s mysterious inventions, engraved ice-cream paraphernalia, haunted photographs and time-honoured war medals. It all became embedded in the duo’s imagination and musical creativity and thus Percival Elliott was reborn.

“Percival Elliott was an inventor… a failed inventor but I wouldn’t want to use that word. He had an array of things he invented. He had a coffee shop and ice cream shop in Brighton back in the day, and he was just an eccentric chap. It was things like a toffee-apple hammer and a glass rolling pin, bits and bobs like that. I think his inventing was more to do with the things he had in his shop, and we have used the same font that he had on his shop front. I hadn’t heard a great deal about him, but dad found these old pictures in the loft and he sent them to me and I sent them to Sam. It was not like thinking ‘What can we call the band?’ but when I showed them to Sam, he said ‘We have got to use this!

“The name Percival Elliott just oozes English charm. That’s the vibe we wanted. That’s what we are about. We are about true, honest, emotional music.”

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