News

Gruff Rhys Reveals Album Artwork And Tracklisting

9th Nov 2010

Gruff Rhys’s third solo album will be called Hotel Shampoo and is due for release on 14th February. The title of the record is a reference to Gruff’s unfortunate habit of hoarding mini shampoo bottles and other complimentary hotel products whilst on tour.

Gruff’s collection has inspired him to create an unlikely art installation. Late last week, in a Cardiff gallery, Gruff realised a long held ambition to construct a miniture hotel using his amassed stash of shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, shower caps, slippers and other symbols of his nomadic life as a musician.

Gruff: “In 1995 I began touring the world industrially as a pop musician. A gleaming new cosmos of hotel accommodation opened up for me and in an instant I was seduced by the free product available in the rooms. I hoarded these objects in a rush of mild kleptomania. Every room in my house began to amass these plastic bottles and various, hotel-related things from every continent on earth (except Antarctica). Having never kept a journal these items have become like diary entries, triggering memories of all those buildings and random people I've met and inspiring some of the songs on the album.

As an act of revenge against the colonisation of our house, I vowed to build a hotel out of the items and sleep in it. The resulting Hotel Shampoo creation serves as a monument to the waste that’s produced in our disposable age and to catalogue my transient existence.”

The Hotel Shampoo installation is currently on display at the Chapter Arts centre in Cardiff.

The tracklisting for Gruff’s Hotel Shampoo album are below.

Tracklisting//
Shark Ridden Waters
Honey All Over
Sensations In The Dark
Vitamin K
Take A Sentence
Conservation Conversation
Sophie Softly
Christopher Columbus
Space Dust
At The Heart Of Love
Patterns Of Power
If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme)
Rubble Rubble