Oli Spleen
The second to last time I saw Nick Hudson was at the start of March 2023. I had booked a two week trip to visit him in Tbilisi Georgia in the hope of performing a gig together and maybe bashing out a couple of Charles Aznavour covers while soaking up the sights and sounds of a culture that was alien and exotic to me. The gig went ahead but, due to the Russian government’s meddling in local politics, we had no time to record. Instead we found ourselves involved in the people’s counter protests. This meant that many evenings of those weeks were spent in clouds of teargas, avoiding showers of rubber bullets and jets of water cannons. That was between sampling the local culture, the food and the wine and getting to know the people of Georgia, as well as exploring abandoned soviet buildings and meeting many of the stray animals that roamed the streets.
I had become close to Nick around 2018 whilst finalising my second studio album Gaslight Illuminations. Nick had come into the studio as the album reached its conclusion, there we recorded a bonus track for the album “The Drug” and a cover, David Bowie’s “Quicksand”. Quicksand would become the foundation stone for a covers album, Flowers for Foot Foot with Nick playing piano and other instruments on the majority of the tracks. We also simultaneously bashed out an album of original songs together, the AIDS themed Night Sweats & Fever Dreams. Both albums were released during the 2020 lockdown, under the shadow of an altogether new pandemic.
Although finished prior to 2020, the themes within Night Sweats resonated with the times the album was released. Nick brought nuclear energy to the mix with his verses to the song “Roman Candles” depicting reckless gay sex in a nuclear reactor. He also brought a Geiger counter and some uranium glass from a nuclear blast site to embellish the sonic soundscape of our track “Destroyer of Worlds”. Nick works like this, he has an uncanny ability to tune into the forthcoming zeitgeist and his latest album On The Eve of Hope appears to be no exception.
I first got wind of this new album when our friend Wolfgang Dubieniec asked me to help on a music video he was making for the second track “A Comet for Joshua”. I had been on Hastings’s Fire Hills in Fairlight that evening, helping photographer Maxine Silver to capture poet Salena Godden as the last embers of the summer sun coated the hills, illuminating the golden gorse. This was the last photo session for the “Poet Town” anthology which was just launched this September the 18th, the day before Nick’s album release.
With the photographs in the bag we retired to our favourite pub The Horse and Groom, known affectionately as “The Doom and Gloom”. There we found Wolfgang, Merlin and Nathan. Nathan was an old friend from my days in Brighton hosting an open mic night called Laudanum & Lavender at The Yellow Book. That night Wolfgang sacrificed a beloved but well worn shirt to make a flaming torch and we watched as Nathan ran up and down the beach trailing flames in his wake. The video for “A Comet for Joshua” was first screened in an exhibition that I was a part of called Sex and Success in Sussex. The song sets the tone for the album to come, a beautifully tender uncertain love song, “I might be in love, I might be in doubt, I might be in denial, but this is the most I’ve felt alive for a while.”
Nick Hudson is an incredibly prolific artist, his last album Kanda Teenage Honey was released just last year and now we have eighteen new compositions. The quantity of his output over the years however, never diminishes the work’s phenomenal quality. Nick’s creations are executed with exacting standards but he works quickly and knows instinctively what will fit any given composition. In the latest album we find soviet analogue synths alongside Wurlitzer, a harpsichord, ondes martinot, electric piano, carillon (keyboard triggered chimes) and more, with Nick playing virtually all the instruments in what he has humorously nicknamed his “queer ACAB harpsichord record”.
This theme is evident in the lyrics of “Diary of a Teenage Arsonist”; “That fire never left me but now it has meaning / Through fears unredeemed / ‘Came apparent my leaning is against those who seek to control and coerce / Remember a cop car is always a hearse.”
This album reeks of the Nick Hudson I know, witty, wry and unapologetically queer. Tracks such as “Lazare” also carry a political charge, whereas others depict Hudson’s desires, loves and sexual conquests. Here the personal is also political, particularly for those of us in the fringes of society. “Soho Malady” laments the loss of youth and of a queer London that has eroded over time.
The very last time I saw Nick was at the start of the new year, 2025. He seemed burned out, utterly shattered from the ongoing protests in Georgia. He spoke of weeks with next to no sleep where what slumber he could muster was thwarted by nightmares of police bashing down his door and dragging him away. The fact that he could conjure up this masterpiece in the midst of such volatile times speaks volumes to Nick’s endurance and true artistry. It seems that he thrives in this environment. These are songs of defiance, they are declarations of love and hope in the face of rising global authoritarianism, forces that seek to crush our spirit and strip all hope from us. In his notes on the album Nick reflects; “Democracy, like love, requires maintenance, care and dedication. It is not merely something you arrive at then leave lodged in stasis – both love and democracy are organic, shifting and porous.”
On The Eve of Hope is a powerful antidote to the encroaching darkness of these times, a darkness that would seek to envelop us all. Let this music serve as a reminder to all of us to keep the flame of hope and love burning within. Brighter times will come! Thank you Nick.
Check out the album on bandcamp.
