Colin Vearncombe

26th May 1962 – 26th January 2016

We’re deeply saddened to announce the death of Colin Vearncombe (aka Black) earlier today, Tuesday 26th January 2016. Colin never regained consciousness following a road traffic accident sixteen days ago. He died peacefully surrounded by his family who were singing him on his way.

His wife Camilla and his three sons paid tribute to the staff at the Intensive Treatment Unit of Cork University Hospital saying; “Colin received the best possible care from the expert and highly professional staff there and we are deeply grateful for everything they did”.

The funeral will be a private one, but we will be holding a memorial service for him in Liverpool in the near future as we know there are many, many people who will want to celebrate Colin’s life and work.  The date and time will be announced in due course, along with details of a charity to which any donations in memory of Colin can be made.

No need to laugh or cry
It’s a wonderful, wonderful life

About Colin

Colin Vearncombe enjoyed mainstream success in the late 1980s under the name Black when 'Wonderful Life’  became a massive hit worldwide. The album of the same name, released in 1987, had similar success, reaping commercial, critical acclaim and in the process selling over two million records worldwide with Comedy (1988) and Black (1991).

In 1991 he launch his owned independent label Nero Schwarz. 15 albums followed in the intervening 25 years. His most recent album, ‘Blind Faith’, was funded by a popular crowdfunding campaign.  Released in the summer of 2015 it received glowing reviews across the press, including 4 stars in The Guardian and showed the Liverpool born singer was back to his creative best.

“Blind Faith is an album by a man very much in control of his gifts”

The Guardian ****

You can see the video’s to the double A single Womanly Panther / When It’s Over from the album Blind Faith released last year at :

Womanly Panther : www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE_aqSuMUdM

When It’s Over : www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCrazqCE3II

In the past three years, Vearncombe had made a successful return to touring, having completed five headline tours in the UK as well as across Europe.  His most recent TV appearance was in November 2015 when he recorded a Catalan version of Wonderful Life as a fundraiser for the Catalan telethon La Marató de TV3. His recording has helped raise over seven million pounds for the charity.

You can see the performance at :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWhAklVviqc

Links :

Web : www.colinvearncombe.com

Facebook :  https://www.facebook.com/blackakacolinvearncombe

Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_(singer)

Wonderful Life video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNNTKZ4hEyw

Wonderful Life Website: http://wonderfullife.info/

Full online biography

Colin Vearncombe, otherwise known as Black, was born in Liverpool on 26 May 1962, in the week that Elvis Presley’s Good Luck Charm was at number one. Like many nascent rock musicians, it was a viewing of Elvis’s movie Jailhouse Rock that fired his youthful imagination and spurred him on to miming in front of the mirror with a cricket bat for a guitar.

Black’s first (and poorly attended) gig was on New Year’s Day 1981. The debut single Human Features was issued on local label Rox records and quickly sold out of its
initial pressing of 1000 copies.1981 also saw Colin introduced first to local rock’n’roll demi-godhead Pete Wylie and his manager, Pete Fulwell. The fruit of this meeting was the second Black single, ‘More Than The Sun’, released on the Wonderful World Of . . . label. By now, Colin had befriended David Dix from The Last Chant, who became his new musical partner. They attracted the interest of WEA Records (through Wylie and Fulwell’s Eternal label), but the liaison proved frustrating. The only releases were the single ‘Hey Presto’ and a re-recording of ‘More Than The Sun’ which led to the record company dropping the act during the promotion period for the single.

After a year or two of musical and personal darkness and finding himself homeless (but not friendless), Black wrote & released the single ‘Wonderful Life’ on the independent Ugly Man label. It only got to number 72 in the charts but the phone started ringing and resulted in a two-album deal with Chris Briggs at A&M.
In June 1987, Black achieved his first UK top ten hit with the single ‘Sweetest Smile’, to be followed up by a slightly reworked version of ‘Wonderful Life’, also entering
the top ten. Wonderful Life applied the domino theory to the singles charts of Europe and beyond, each country falling for its subtle melancholic charms.

All was not simple though.

“Once you’ve had a hit, it’s hard to write another song without having that in the back of your mind,. For a long time, I would find myself
hearing ‘I like it, but it’s not Wonderful Life”, says Colin. “It was surprising how little of the pop star life was as I had imagined it. I was frustrated by how few of the people in the music world I respected. Maybe I just didn’t go to the right clubs. I’ve never been a great schmoozer or networker and the idea of setting out to meet a
certain type of people is anathema to me. The highlight was meeting Roddy Frame, and he looked as pissed off as I was. It was two years of disappointment – I didn’t have any wild sex, I’m not a druggie, so I was just digging a hole for myself.”

‘Wonderful Life’, the debut album, eventually sold well over 1.5 million copies and was followed by the sardonically entitled ‘Comedy’. ‘Comedy’ was critically acclaimed, but failed to repeat Wonderful Life’s commercial success. Colin says:

“The problem is that when you have a hit, people’s expectations build up. Commercial expectations are a particular kind of matrix of possibility and impossibility. You need to be clear of what you’re doing and why and be ready to defend your corner. A&M thought they had something as strong as the first album in Comedy, but when the first single from the album wasn’t a hit, they panicked.”

Relations with the label became increasingly strained and after the third album also failed to repeat the success of the debut, Black and A&M parted company.The fourth Black album, ‘Are We Having Fun Yet?’, was released on Colin’s own Nero Schwarz label in 1993 and licensed in 19 countries. Once again, it was a critical success and although it sold well in Europe it was virtually ignored in the UK. Colin explains:

“There were some good songs on there and although some lacked focus it was enough to take me to the next step. It got a really good review in Q but it didn’t do well enough to stop me falling below the radar in the UK.”

There then followed a long hiatus, in which Colin took time out to think long and hard about what exactly it was that he wanted to do with his musical career. Colin’s passion for song-writing was eventually rejuvenated in 1998 by a weekend workshop in Devon hosted by Squeeze’s Chris Difford. The result was album number five, ‘The Accused’ in 1999, his first release under his own name.

“I’d spent six years without releasing a record or working on one. I was depressed without realising I was,” Colin admits. “I had started recording some solo demos and then realised I was half way through a record. I had finally stopped thinking about Wonderful Life and so I released it as Colin Vearncombe rather than Black.”

This kick-started a period of intense creativity. Late 1999 saw the release of album six: ‘Abbey Road Live’ – a collection of acoustic performances recorded live at the famous studio. The album marked the beginning of a new way for Colin to tour andperform his music.

“I didn’t have the budget to do a band tour, and I realised the thing I was most scared of was doing solo shows”, says Colin. “Once I started, I was surprised at what could be done. I found a way to perform solo by asking myself how Neil Young might do it and going from there. It’s good to keep myself on the edge of fear!”

2000 brought album seven, ‘Water on Snow’, followed closely in 2001 by ‘Live At The Bassline’, recorded in Johannesburg with South African musicians.

Early in 2002, Colin set himself a goal to write thirty songs in three months and to record them in as simple a way as possible: one take, no overdubs, bare songs, solo performances. It quickly became clear that spending another three years re-workingand re-recording the songs with a band was a non-starter so throwing caution to the wind all thirty songs were released in 2002 on one double CD, ‘Smoke Up Close’. The debate among the loyal fan base was intense but love it or hate it, here was an example of a real songwriter getting down to the bare bones of what making music is all about.

There followed a touring period while Colin experimented with different musician line-ups and instrumentations, sometimes performing with a full band and sometimes paring everything down to a solo level, alone with a guitar (and occasional harmonica) on a stage, up close to his audience.

For his next studio album, ‘Between Two Churches’ (2004), Colin worked with musician and producer Calum MacColl and a mix of of South African and British musicians. Unlike the solo work that had preceded it, it was a coming of age album, reflecting the journey of a performer and songwriter who had travelled a long way over a career that already spanned almost twenty five years, only to return to his roots to start again.

“I’d come a long way both professionally and personally but I didn’t really know what I’d created until we put the final track order together,” says Colin. “This story emerged and it was probably what I was subconsciously trying to tell all along. That was when it became obvious that it should be a Black record.”

2007 saw the release of a compilation of songs spanning more than twenty years that had been originally released both under Colin’s real name and his professional one.

“We called it BLACK:CV as no pun is too obvious for its use in our organisation” says Colin.

An extensive full band tour of the UK on a double-bill with The Christians facilitated the recording of the tour live album ‘Road To Nowhere’. Always interested in communicating as directly as possible with his fans, Colin had been experimenting for a number of years with free downloads and direct to fan releases. In 2009 he wound up with more than two albums worth of new songs and a question mark over how to release them. The response was ‘give to get’ – give away one album in digital form, ‘The Given’, in exchange for an email address and then sell a second one, ‘Water On Stone’, exclusively to members of the Blacklist (puns, obvious, see above).

In 2011 the compilation album, ‘Any Colour You Like’, featured 16 tracks chosen by the fans. It was after releasing this as a download only that Colin decided to take astep back from song-writing and recording, in order to concentrate on painting and writing poetry.

His first published book of poetry, ‘I Am Not The Same Person’, was illustrated with his own paintings, many of which had featured in an exhibition of his work in his adopted new home in Ireland. Now living on the far South West coast of Ireland, Colin immersed himself in the vibrant local artistic community of film-makers, musicians, poets, artists and writers.

“I wasn’t missing London or the music business at all,” says Colin, “The business had changed so much that I wasn’t sure if I either needed or wanted a place in it anymore.”

However, once a musician always a musician and a re-connection with his long-time musical sparring partner Calum MacColl led Colin to consider touring again. In the autumn of 2012, the two put a new live show together and set out with some trepidation to see if audiences were still interested. Interest there certainly was and over the next two & a half years, Colin toured the UK & Europe three times. With a renewed enthusiasm for touring came inspiration for writing & recording. Colin released two new EP’s and began an intense period of co-writing with MacColl.

A strong belief in doing things for and with his fans, the people who had supported him since the first days of his career, (witness his constant conversations on social media) Colin wanted to involve them in the new album. April 2014 saw the launch of a Pledge Music album campaign through which his supporters have been given backstage access with videos from the road and studio, interviews with the musicians, acoustic versions of new songs, resulting in a developing closeness between fans and artist. The fans have loved the Pledge process (“this is one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever been involved with”, “It’s been a fantastic experience being part of this journey with you, Colin”).

With the project having raised 240% of it’s original target, the album ‘Blind Faith’ (aptly named after the faith Colin placed with his fans), is ready for release.

For further information please contact tony@manillapr.com