Bio
Singer, songwriter, video artist, DJ, actor, nude model… John Callaghan is a renaissance man in a suitcase. A suitcase he brings to every performance, stuffed with weird and alarming costumes for every song in his live repertoire. John may be famed and feared for the crazed pantomime antics of his auto-karaoke show, but his recorded work demonstrates serious song-craft to offset the absurdity.
John came to prominence in 1998 when he signed to Warp Records on the strength of his homemade video for the MTV hit, I’m Not Comfortable Inside My Mind. After two releases for the label, he parted company with them in 2000.
In 2008, he released his debut album via Uncharted Audio. A year later, his debut single was voted 56th most popular track ever released by Warp in their 20th anniversary listeners’ poll and he was commissioned to re-imagine a track with Autechre for the Warp20 box-set. He followed this in 2010 with a self-disintegrating lathe-cut 7” (limited to 33 copies, each in a hand-knitted cover) on antigen records.
More recently, he’s been focusing on film and TV work, where eagle-eyed viewers may have caught him implanting an electronic chip into Nick Grimshaw’s brain or shouting at Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Fast-forward to 2020 and we find John poised for the release of his career-defining masterpiece, If Every Day Were Like This One.
“Phil Oakey possessed by Syd Barrett’s spirit” – Textura
“A bit like the Warp Records version of Frisky & Mannish” – Time Out
“Eccentric and artfully pop songs that are high on classic pop melody, with plenty of smart electronic concepts and whimsical introverted lyrics. The tunes are all here, traces of Depeche Mode and the Beatles sit easily with Callaghan’s emotive experimentation.” – Warp Records
