Chaffinch are pleased to announce that Luke Luke’s Travelling For A Living  CD album will be released on 21st June 2012.

We’re also thrilled with the first review to appear.  A glowing one at that, in The Word:

‘With age, expectations sink. How could they not? You get used to things. You’re harder to surprise. You can’t remember the last time you underwent a full-blown epiphany. It’s a realisation brought into sharp relief by the experience of going to see gigs.  If you see enough workmanlike performances on the trot, you even start to wonder what it would take to hear music so wonderful that you’d be moved to do something really stupid in order to get more of it.  At the 2004 Green Man, I found my answer in Glasgow’s Lucky Luke. In a hot marquee, three skinny blokes in floral shirts and two women in patterned dresses – the bastard progeny of The Pastels in ’86 and Fairport in ’69 – brought their clattering uplift to bear upon a mixture of trad arrs and original songs.  I cornered Morag Wilson (harmonium, vocals) and Lucy Sweet (vocals, autoharp) and and asked when her band might play London.  They had no plans. I put them on myself.  Barely anyone came. I lost £500.  The band stayed at my house. Next day, as I waved them goodbye, they left me demos of their second album Travelling For A Living.  One hour later, I didn’t care about the £500. In my head, I rationalised it thus: when Lucky Luke’s second album comes out to rave reviews, I’ll be boasting about this.

But, of course, plans don’t always go according to themselves.  And in the case of Lucky Luke, there were deals that fell through; there were newborn babies and there were “real” jobs – all of these factors now conspiring to make Travelling For A Living a posthumous release.  There’ll be no more epiphanies in marquees, but here’s a document of a band at the precise point of vertical take-off, where they leave the sum of their constituent parts far behind them.  You can hear it in on Mud In The Milk, where Sweet launches into a narrative about “a wild-hearted girl who cannot be contained by any man” with a gusto that calls to mind the young Kirsty MacColl.  There’s Jackie too, which refracts the ramshackle humanity of old Big Star records through late nights with early Steeleye Span albums.  Wherever you alight on Travelling For A Living, the collision of melody and execution is life-affirming, and no more so than on Morag Wilson and guitarist Simon Shaw’s title track, a lament for the human debris left behind when people throughout history have been forced get on their proverbial bikes in search of work.’  Pete Paphides.