Tim Pare
'Trans-Siberian Express'

Release Date: 13th November 2006

Few people can claim to have written an album on the Trans-Siberian Express. But both Tim Pare’s music and his experiences are far from ordinary.

29-year-old Pare’s music was formed by some uniquely demanding places and events. In 2004 he walked away from his relationship, quit his job in Sheffield, sold his house and moved to China to become a teacher. Tim began his own cultural revolution in the Chinese classroom. Tasked with giving English names to more than 50 Chinese pupils, he began with the names he knew best - Bono, Hendrix, Morrison - and three friends called Crosby, Stills and Nash are alive and well and scraping their knees in the playgrounds of Shandong Province right now.  A year later he found himself in front of his first major audience - a group of drunken Russian conscripts in a carriage on the Trans-Siberian Express, somewhere deep in the silver birch forests between Vladivostock and Moscow. These were desperate men in need of distraction. All eyes fell on Tim.

“The train had 30 soldiers from Siberia and 30 sailors from Kamchatka all returning from 2 years conscription,’ Tim remembers. ‘They were aggressive, sexually-deprived, testosterone-flooded killers and they wanted to be pissed all day. They were friendly until they asked us to give them some of our possessions and to buy them vodka. When we refused, they shut one of us in a cabin with three of them until he agreed. We went to sleep sure that we were going to get done over to some degree.’

Tim used his initiative. He swapped a bottle of vodka for a battered 4-stringed guitar from an inebriated sniper and began to sing. The soldiers drew back the knife from Tim’s neck and stopped threatening to kill him. In this respect at least, Tim’s debut international performance was a roaring success. Tim has been invited back to play for the Russian Navy on several occasions since.

Meanwhile back on the Express, the combination of boredom and fear does strange things to a man, and one night out of Irkutsk into a solid 88 hours staring at the flat bogland of the Russian interior, Tim gradually began setting down songs while holed up in a small cabin with an Estonian war veteran. Using his MP3 player to record the rough demos, the basis of "Trans-Siberian Express" was written.

‘All that distance and all that time gave me the chance to look at my own journey,’ he says. “Exorcism” is the decision to go and change the way my life was going. “Shoot to Win” is about falling for someone because of naive belief that they couldn’t possibly be feeling differently. “Looking At Me” is about the realisation that sometimes to love someone is not enough. “Afterglow” is remembering how love and lust can feel, “Losing My Touch” is the way it breaks down, and the end of the journey is “You’ve Got Your Work Cut Out”, the moving on and looking ahead.’

Some part of Tim Pare is still on the Trans-Siberian Express. But mostly, he’s here in Britain putting real experiences to good use in brilliant music.

As those soldiers would probably say: ‘Na zdorovye.’

For further information please call Jenni at Quite Great Publicity on 01223 410000 or email: jenni@quitegreat.co.uk