Rumer has announced details of two exclusive album launch shows in support of her forthcoming new album Into Colour. The Brit nominated and Mojo Award winning singer/songwriter will play the Lowry Quays Theatre in Salford, Manchester on November 3 and Islington Assembly Hall in London on November 6. The dates will be Rumer’s first headline shows in the UK in over two years and her first London performance since headlining St James’s Church. An exclusive ticket presale will go live on Wednesday, October 8 at 10am and will be on general sale from 10am on Friday, October 10. Please go to www.rumer.co.uk for further details.
Rumer’s second album of original material Into Colour will be released via Atlantic Records on November 10. Having gone Top 3 in pre-orders in less than a day, this follows the million-selling debut Seasons Of My Soul and acclaimed album of impassioned covers Boys Don’t Cry, which charted top 3 and saw Rumer perform at The White House for President Obama. The new album’s lead single ‘Dangerous’ is also confirmed for Radio 2’s Single of the Week and Rumer is confirmed to perform on the new series of Later, on top of a selection of dates with Jools Holland for this December.
Into Colour continues a personal journey which has already seen Rumer – born north of Islamabad in 1979 - go from a variety of service jobs and a decade on the unsigned circuit to one of the more surprising crossovers in recent times. She quickly won fans ranging from Elton John to Richard Carpenter, who wrote to offer his “congratulations” for creating something “actually musical, which has been in short supply in recent years." The album began in earnest when Rumer flew from her home of Herne Hill to the musical mecca of Laurel Canyon. She rented a trailer which was backed onto the tumbledown villa of an unconventional family of four (as well as their two pot-bellied pigs, a cat, a dog and a snake). It proved an environment with parallels to her unusual childhood spent in Pakistan, as well the later period spent living in a commune. Energised to write again, Rumer then reconnected with Rob Shirakbari, the long-term musical director to Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Rob was to become Rumer’s producer, collaborator…and eventually, in that great tradition of musical partners, her fiancé. The record was subsequently recorded between the pair’s new home of Arkansas, New Jersey and London’s legendary RAK studios (with most of the rhythm section performed live by Daryl Hall’s band).
The resulting album, ‘Into Colour’, is the Rumer you first fell for, but in a mood you may have not heard her in previously. Musically, it’s more upbeat and sensual, expanding the Technicolour Bacharach sound to further incorporate elements of Philly grooves (Thom Bell, Hall & Oates), Soul (Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye)…and on the thrilling, once-bitten-twice-shy rush of first single ‘Dangerous’, even Disco. Yet the tensions that gave depth to Seasons Of My Soul linger. “When I imagined ‘Into Colour’, I didn’t know what it was, but it felt like a hopeful place to walk towards. In this record you can hear me picking through the debris, and going through each emotion.” What emerged is ultimately a record about compassion: this is the journey from where Rumer was – lonely, burnt out and lost – to where she is now. That same voice you fell for on breakthrough hit ‘Slow’ but cast, for the first time, ‘Into Colour’.