Latest Music

Killing Time

Nic Norton and Alice Morell

The new album by Nic Norton and Alice Morell - Killing Time - features trumpeter Marvin McFadden, who plays with Huey Lewis and the News and has performed with jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald.

The album, written during the Covid lockdown, also includes pianist Jen Austin, from the Orkneys, who was a member of BBC Folk Award’s nominee Fara.

The title

The new album by Nic Norton and Alice Morell - Killing Time - features trumpeter Marvin McFadden, who plays with Huey Lewis and the News and has performed with jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald.

The album, written during the Covid lockdown, also includes pianist Jen Austin, from the Orkneys, who was a member of BBC Folk Award’s nominee Fara.

The title of the album is from the song Lucia about the daughter of writer James Joyce who after showing great promise as a dancer in 1920s Paris developed mental health problems and was confined to an asylum for the last 40 years of her life, dying in 1982 at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northamptonshire.

McFadden plays flugelhorn on the track, recorded in the US by Huey Lewis and the News founder Johnny Colla. Austin plays on four tracks including the first single to be released Tell Her (due out on 27 November), an indie rock song about a passionate friendship between two students at Leeds University.

The album Killing Time is being released on Sunday 3 December 2022 on CD, Spotify, Amazon, Bandcamp etc.

‘Independent music at its best’

Described by music magazine Fatea as “independent music at its best”, Nic Norton and Alice Morell provide an eclectic mix of songs and styles.

Nic Norton is a writer who provides a rich selection of story songs and ballads, which wonderful singer Alice Morell brings to life with support from the superb violinist Mollie Narayn-Barrow.

The band is inspired by such great songwriters such as Jacques Brel, Elvis Costello and Suzanne Vega, and took songwriting courses with Chris Difford (Squeeze), Michelle Stodart of the Magic Numbers, Kathryn Williams and Sam Parton, of the Be Good Tanyas. The new album also includes songs about obsessive love featuring actors in the Wizard of Oz, a plastic frog and a dark tale of ghosts and church bells.

The band works with producer Paul Keeler and has brought together a fantastic assembly of musicians including pianist Jen Austin and Norwich Blues banjo player Robin Evans.

Their first albums “Last Orders” and “Smoke and Mirrors” included songs about a fake medium, an office ghost, a bullied boy who become a famous tomato grower, a US mortuary, an encounter with a Hell’s Angel and the devil, and a music hall artiste famed for his farts.

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I would recommend it for the quality of the writing and performing. It's an album you'll want to listen to and the more you listen to it the more you'll see in it.” - Tony Birch

Fatea Magazine

A very special album” - Kerry Devine

— The Folk Show, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire