Mark Mulholland & Stphane Doucerain

The Scottish singer-songwriter Mark Mulholland and the French drummer and percussionist Stphane Doucerain will be touring in Ireland and Scotland in April/May 2025, to coincide with the release of Marks new album, Fighting with your Shadow, on Ports of Call Music on May 2nd. The pair met in Berlin in the 1990s, when both were working with the former Swell Maps and Jacobites frontman Nikki Sudden. They have continued to collaborate regularly ever since, in bands such as Impure Thoughts and Two Dollar Bash, and also as a duo. Their musical interaction has an intuitive feel that can only come from many years of playing together, spanning a wide variety of styles. The journalist Adam Jenkins, in his review of the 2022 album Revolutions go in Circles for the UK magazine Fatea, said Mark Mulholland is a restless force of nature. I see him like an inverted lightning conductor, plant him somewhere, anywhere, and music flows out of the ground through him and out into the world. Occasionally a musician like Mulholland comes along who appears driven to create and record music that is both globally connective and an immediate response to his surroundings and musical companions. The album, on which Stphane played on most of the tracks, was recorded in Bamako, Paris, Berlin and New York, and also features collaborations with many of the musicians Mark has worked with in recent years, including Toumani Diabate, Tony Allen, Yacouba SIssoko, Vincent Bucher & Baba MD. It reached number 2 on Roots Music Report's Folk Rock top 50 chart, and Seuras Og, in the magazine At the Barrier, described it as one of the more charming records of the year. A pearl of a project, exquisite, an unexpected joy. The types of music he plays range widely, but his distinctive style is always recognisable. As Dave Franklin noted in his review of Somewhere Else, the 2016 album that Mark recorded in California with Rusty Miller and James Finch Jr under the name Rummage, He manages to hop genres at will raw rock, melodic pop, late night cabaret club ballads, chilled blues and country grooves but still come out with a cohesive collection of songs which somehow not only feel at home on the same album but also uniquely and intrinsically his own. Stphane is originally from Paris and, for almost 30 years, has been based in Berlin, where he has been working with many of the bands on the scene there such as Lord Mouse and the Kalypso Katz and Nitro 17, as well as being in demand as a session musician. His drumming and percussion, varied and subtle, powerful or delicate, has been honed over decades playing in a wide variety of bands in Berlin and elsewhere, and perfectly complements all the different facets of Marks repertoire.