About this item

As Wreckless Eric he needs little introduction - he wrote and recorded the classic Whole Wide World and had a hit with it back in 1977. Since then it's been a hit for countless other artists including The Monkees, Cage The Elephant and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Eric’s version featured in the 2022 Expedia / Superbowl / Ewan MacGregor travel ad, and the Cage The Elephant version is the new theme tune for the podcast Smartless.

As Eric Goulden it's a little more complicated - a musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer, he didn’t like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he’d been given to hide behind, so he crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground. He went on to release twenty something albums in forty something years under various names - The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric.

Eric’s three most recent albums ‘amERICa’, Construction Time & Demolition and Transience are widely praised as his best work. His albums encapsulate pop, bubblegum, garage trash and psychedelia - lyrical and sonic journeys, pop explosions, epic voyages, Polaroid snapshots.

This new album, Leisureland, marks a return to his more ramshackle world of recording - guitars and temperamentally unpredictable analogue keyboards, beat-boxes and loops in conjunction with a real drummer, Sam Shepherd, who he met in a local coffee shop in Catskill, New York. He was delighted to find that Sam lived around the corner and could easily drop by to put drums on newly recorded tracks. The recording methodology may have been Contemporary American but the subject matter is almost entirely British. It also contains more instrumentals than any of his previous albums.

'The achievement for Wreckless Eric is to have made new music that connects to old music without maudlin nostalgia or huffy defensiveness, refusing to let age dim the passion for the music that means the most to him. In other words, he rocks' - Ken Tucker - FRESH AIR / NPR

'burns like a lost Crazy Horse classic' - Ben Graham - SHINDIG!

'a scarily powerful and forward-moving musical threat' - David Quantick - MOJO MAGAZINE

TRACK LISTING

1. Southern Rock
2. Inside The Majestic
3. Badhat Town
4. Intermission
5. Standing Water
6. Standing Sunday Morning
7. The Old Versailles
8. Dial Painters (Radium Girls)
9. The Tipping Point
10. High Seas (Won & Lost)
11. On The Move
12. Esplanade By Moonlight
13. They Come Free With Cornflakes

14. Zoom (Glittering In The Sun)

15. Drag Time