CHRIS T-T – BIOGRAPHY
One of the great underground artists of our time.
JON SNOW
Outstanding, indispensable genius. A modern-day William Blake. Music so unfettered it never had mornings to slip.
SUNDAY TIMES (Top 5 Album Of The Year twice)
Active 1997-2017, Chris T-T was one of the UK’s most consistently praised underground songwriters and performers. Chris made ten solo albums, including a trilogy about London: The 253 (2001), London Is Sinking (2003) and Capital (2008); influential political protest records 9 Red Songs (2005) and – a decade on – 9 Green Songs (2016); as well as composing new musical settings for A.A. Milne’s children’s poems on Disobedience (2011).
Over 20 years Chris clocked up more than 2,300 live shows around the world.
In March 2017 Xtra Mile Recordings released a Best Of double CD collection and announced that Chris T-T was giving up recording and performing. His final concerts took place on 2nd and 3rd December, 2017 in London.
Having given up making music under the ‘Chris T-T’ name, CJ Thorpe-Tracey now writes, speaks, travels and makes radio. He is married and based in Brighton, UK.
A national gem of a songwriter.
THE INDEPENDENT
Away from music, Chris has written for Dark Mountain, Louder Than War, ecnmy.org, Brighton Independent, NME and New Public Thinkers and for four years wrote a weekly column on the arts for The Morning Star. He spoke at TEDx Brighton, DOTS Conference, Louder Than Words (Manchester), Great Escape Convention, War Of Words (Norwich), SOAS, Boring Conference (London), How The Light Gets In (Hay-on-Wye), Brighton Digital Festival, Interrogate! (Dartington Hall), AIM Music Connect, Leeds Uni, Falmouth Uni, Middlesex Uni and many others.
Beautiful songs.
CAROLINE LUCAS MP
Emerging from roots in late 1990s lo-fi and London-centric psych-folk, Chris T-T first gained acclaim for sarcastic, city-obsessed urban alt/folk music. Later he developed into an influential figure of UK song, straddling psych-pop, punk and English folk, inspiring a generation of successful home-grown artists.
Chris played shows around the world with artists such as Ben Folds, The National, Frank Turner, The Divine Comedy, Elbow, Tom Robinson, Bellowhead, Walkmen, Delgados, British Sea Power, Carter USM, Robyn Hitchcock and many others. He did stints as piano accompanist for Tom Robinson, Jim Bob (Carter USM), Tom Williams and Frank Turner.
He performed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square for Anthony Gormley’s One & Other project; re-soundtracked live cult Japanese film Battle Royale for The Halloween Society at Soho’s Other Cinema and composed music on commission for the National Trust, World Health Organisation and Natural History Museum.
He completed artist residency stints with The National Trust, The Royal Pavilion & Museums, Leeds Beckett University, Arts Residency Thailand and others. Through summer 2016 he was the inaugural National Trust Creative Fellow at The Workhouse, Southwell.
A veteran of online activism and an early adopter of social media, in 2010 Chris T-T instigated the #IAmSpartacus global Twitter meme and many of his satirical and political memes have gone viral. Chris was the first person ever to mention Jeremy Corbyn by name on Twitter.
In 2011, Chris took his one-man show Disobedience to Edinburgh Fringe, setting A.A. Milne’s 1920s childrens’ poems to new music. In 2012, his blog entry criticising the Olympics Closing Ceremony, Not Just Shit But Dangerous brought 65,000 readers to this site in two days.
