Story

From the beach fires of San Francisco, via the vistas of the Sierra Nevada to the Welsh mountain hideaways of ancient princes, the Forgotten Pharaohs debut King of Mirrors is a worldly wonder, crafted by a classic rock journeyman. Born in Frome in Somerset but raised on the sounds of the American west coast, frontman Christian Pattemore is the archetypal man out of place and time; a Laurel Canyon dreamer from 1973 materialised amidst the ancient landscapes of rural Wales.

“It wasn't what everyone else was listening to, by any stretch,” he says of the Crosby, Still and Nash, James Taylor, Doobie Brothers and Neil Young records that his parents and drama teacher introduced him to as a child. “But it just felt like that's a path for me. It was like an affirmation. I grew up in a rural environment as well, so it was all very pastoral music. It's very much a part of my musicality.”

Hiding his rich tenor voice under a bushel of self-consciousness, Christian initially became a regular session bassist around the West Country scene. And upon meeting his partner and moving to the Welsh countryside of Powys in his twenties, he found much synchronicity between the sepia Americana of his youth and the lush mountain landscapes of North Wales. Encouraged to start singing his own songs, he played solo singer-songwriter shows around the region, showcasing his unique melding of classic west coast folk, heartland rock and American blues with the pastoral psychedelia and working-man experiences of his Wye Valley idyll.

Between shows, he made a living as a handyman on a lavender farm and further fed his Seventies Laurel Canyon obsession by taking a second job in a record shop in Hay-on-Wye. “I never took pay,” he says. “Instead I got as many LPs as I could by artists like Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, Little Feat, Steely Dan, anything Seventies Laurel Canyon, to learn more about this amazing music.”

Working the land provided Christian plentiful inspiration for the songs he was composing out in the wilds. “For six months I had to cycle to the lavender farm which was 10 miles over the mountains,” he recalls. “I've done that in all sorts of weather. A lot of the lyrics on ‘Carousel’ and ‘Bryn Yr Hydd’, I remember writing about me riding in a hailstorm over the mountains to get to work to earn some money. It's a proper Victorian existence, but it's character building and I'm glad I did it.”

Such natural talent naturally finds the sun. One fateful school sports day, Christian’s croc flew off as he crossed the finish line as winner of the dad’s egg and spoon race and landed at the feet of a fellow parent by the name of Alan McGee, the music industry legend behind the Creation and Poptones labels. “He looked at me and he goes ‘okay, that kid’s got some fight in him, I'm intrigued’,” Christian says. A demo changed hands, and so began an association that would span the coming decade.

Projects came and went – a low-key solo album “to test the water”, a collaboration with a producer friend under the moniker Thieves of Time – before things fell into place during a writing session at Alan’s London flat around 2018 which resulted in a stirring canyon ballad called ‘Drive’, about finding strength in the personal in a world gone mad: “foreign nations go to war, turn the light off, you can do no more”. “I don't do the politics thing but I was so upset about the Trump administration,” Christian explains.

An attempt to record the song with Christian’s family friend Mark Gardener of Ride floundered creatively, so Alan passed the song to Killing Joke bassist and celebrated producer Youth. “The original version was six minutes long and Youth goes ‘it sounds like Zeppelin but it needs a chorus’,” says Christian. “He just took it onto another level, raised the bar completely. He said to Alan, ‘Chris has got an album in him and I want to do this’.”

Meanwhile, accompanying Alan on a 2022 Cast tour reacquainted Christian with the band’s guitarist Liam ‘Skin’ Tyson, whom he’d previously known through Robert Plant camp connections in Bath. Recognising a fellow rock soul, Skin agreed to join Christian in Forgotten Pharaohs, adding volcanic riffs and primal fire to his songs at sessions in Wales and at Youth’s studio in the Sierra Nevada, near Granada in southern Spain later that year. “Working on the songs with Christian was very easy,” Skin says. “Like discovering some great lost music that I missed, but really we created something brand new.”

“This album sounds like a record from 1974 that got forgotten about,” says Christian; a dusty supergroup collaboration between CSNY, The Band and Steely Dan perhaps, remixed for the modern day by Queens of the Stone Age. Certainly the crackling power and rich imagery of King of Mirrors – along with its expert Laurel Canyon style layering of blues, folk, rock and dark psychedelia - have a timeless, pan-Atlantic quality. ‘Carousel’, an elemental voodoo blues, seems to transpose Christian’s blue-collar struggles in Wales to a metaphorical US Civil War setting. “The ‘frontier town’ is actually Hay-on-Wye because it’s a border town,” he says. “The ‘ten years crawling through the trenches’ is literally working in the trenches on a lavender farm. It's about my life in Wales, and what I've had to live through. It’s very authentic. When I'm writing about things it’s like synaesthesia. You play a chord and it just tells you what to write. I don't question it too much.”

Similarly, ‘Bryn Yr Hydd’ sets Christian’s personal hardships to a gritty Southern bluegrass rock while also referencing “sleeping kings on the mountainside”: Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last sovereign Prince of Wales, who took refuge in a cave in the hills near Christian’s home the night before his death in battle against Edward I in 1282. And the Americana funk ‘Cable Bay’, in which Christian builds a ceremonial pyre on the titular Anglesey beach to “illuminate the night sky, pay homage to the past”, was inspired both by meeting a druid woman in the bay while on tour with Youth (who’s also a druid) and a pilgrimage Christian and his family made to the American West Coast while making the album. 

“I was visualising things I'd seen in my recent past, like the bay at Cable Bay and all the surfers,” he says. “And then I imagined the place in Oregon where you had people on the beach with campfires and it’s an amalgamation of the two. It is about paying homage to the ancient and being respectful. It’s exercising the past, saying, ‘Okay, this is good, let's move forward’ and casting out your fear. It’s about being intrepid.”

Christian is fearlessly personal throughout: “They’re vignettes of my life at a certain time over the last five, six years,” he says. ‘Chameleon’ is a self-portrait of the unconfident performer “trying to balance my normal life with the alter ego”. The lustrous Sixties acid blues ‘Yes I Believe’ is “a spiritual journey song” about unrequited love and elusive soulmates. ‘Soul on Fire’ and ‘Life to Burn’ concern his compulsive passion for making music: “I can’t deny myself doing music. I can't shut it out because it's a healing mechanism for me”. And ‘Giving the Best Away’, the euphoric, soulful piano ballad that closes the album in a cascade of plush Seventies harmonies, confronts his innate fear of failure. “If you look at it straight ahead, [the protagonist] is being a pain in the ass to his missus or something,” he says, “but it's probably about managing expectations.”

Failure for King of Mirrors, though, doesn’t seem an option. This is the record that galvanised McGee and Youth to launch a brand-new label Creation Youth, with Forgotten Pharaohs as the first full-length release. “It’s early stages but there is a lot of buzz about it,” Christian says. “It's very exciting. it's a real honour.” For this musical visitor from 1973, his time has finally come.