Another Sweet taste of success; Cardiff singer-songwriter Stephen Black has worked with a wealth of South Wales musicians but, as Matt Thomas discovers, he's now heading back out on his own.

Byline: Matt Thomas

STEPHEN BLACK has certainly got a busy time ahead of him.

The Cardiff singer-songwriter is taking his natural brand of performing on the road with gigs in London, Manchester and Bristol during the next few weeks as he launches his new album.

"Touring's great," he says. "There's nothing better than playing a show, going to sleep, waking up and driving to the next one, getting ready to do it all again.

"You don't have to worry about anything else, just getting up and doing it."

His second album under the Sweet Baboo banner is being launched on Thursday in Cardiff, but if you take a close enough look at recent albums from the likes of Cate Le Bon, Euros Childs and Spencer McGarry, it's likely you'll find Black's fingerprints.

"I can't really think of a better way to spend your time, than making music with your mates," he admits.

"It's not like I feel any great drive to do it, apart from the fact that I love playing bass, which I do with Cate and Spencer. And really the whole Euros Childs thing, it was just a case of me hanging around and pressing record."

Le Bon is even joining him on the road as he plugs his new album, Hello Wave, which was recorded in less than a week.

"Well, I ended up doing it pretty much live," he explains, "which gave it a very different feel to the first album (Mighty Baboo).

"Also there was more of a band situation, my brother, my housemate, Spencer (McGarry), a couple of the guys from Frederick Stanley Star played on it.

"But it wasn't really planned out, we didn't have a lot of rehearsal time. It's got a spontaneous feel to it because of that which is quite different.

"Mind you, the songs had been about for a year or so by the time I came to record them which meant that I had a pretty good idea of how they should sound."

As if penning and recording an album of sweet swooning country-pop wasn't difficult enough, Black decided to create a series of 10 videos to accompany the tracks.

"Actually it was a very pleasant couple of days," he says.

"It all came about when some of the label guys were telling me I needed to have a bigger web presence so I decided that making a load of films would be the easiest way to bulk up the website. So another one of my friends who makes films, Ryan Owen, came over and we put together these 10 short films.

"More than anything it'll be nice to look back on these in 20 years' time or whatever and have some sort of an artefact, so to speak, of the album."

Another process that Black says he finds, if not exactly easy then not entirely stressful, is the writing of lyrics.

While the average listener might think that the plaintive, witty half-rhymes of his records are the result of hours spent slaving over a hot notepad this is not, he says, the case.

"Generally, if I can get some words together in about half an hour, I'll be happy," he says.

"If I had to take ages working over the words, I wouldn't really be comfortable performing them.

"I want things to be natural in that respect."

Hello Wave is out now on Businessman Records

CAPTION(S):

After helping out several of his musical mates, Stephen Black is touring to promote his own album