text: Campfire Club: Dizraeli | James Riley Tickets, Thu 21 Jun 2018 at 19:00 | Eventbrite
  Dizraeli, The James Riley Band
  "Touching, funny stories of riots, atheism and Englishness… Dizraeli embodies 21st Century folk"- The Independent
  His exploration has taken him to unexpected places: he composed the soundtrack for a new
  parallel-worlds comedy on E4 (Tripped); he toured France with producer and turntablist DJ DownLow; he spent a week in the refugee camp at Calais, giving workshops and listening to the migrants there. At the start of 2016, he travelled to Senegal to study West African music with an albino master, and in a remote fishing village covered in dust and music, he finished six new songs.
  "Folk or hip hop? I don't know, but Dizraeli makes me realise how wonderful it is to hear real English – fluent, witty and arresting" - The Times Saturday Review
  Carrying these pieces home to London in his head, he decided to record them in a completely new way. Instead of shutting himself in a vibeless, carpeted studio where the impulse of the songs would be lost, he would invite an audience of close friends to the basement of a cafe, play live for those friends and record what he played - no editing; no studio tricks: in the words of one of the tracks: "Through the lens to the substance".
  Website: dizraeli.com
  Born of a transatlantic relationship, James grew up in South East London listening to the folk and soul sound of 70s America and wrote his first melody at the age of four. His first guitar, acquired at the age of nine, became the tool for surviving the tumult of a nowhere place, and helped James find somewhere he felt he belonged.
  In his early twenties, he took off, alone once again, hitchhiking and busking through Europe from Amsterdam to Istanbul, writing songs along the way. Back in the UK, these songs became a band, but eventually James had to shed another skin, and disembarked in Nashville, Tennessee. Here he found his producer and they set about making the album which had travelled with him to his maternal homeland, where it could finally get free.