By Keith Walsh
Julian Shah-Tayler is a very busy man. When he’s not touring the world with Depeche Mode tribute Strangelove, or with his David Bowie act The Band That Fell To Earth, he’s in the studio creating his uniquely infectious brand of electronic music under the moniker The Singularity.

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and composer, Shah-Tayler trained as a classical pianist as a young boy in Wales, only to move to London after graduating with a philosophy degree from York University. It’s in London he picked up the electric guitar for bands Magic House and drinkme. It’s only when he moved to Los Angeles in the early 2000s that he got back into keyboards and began releasing albums under The Singularity brand.

Cover Story
Despite success with his original music, including a Golden Trailer award for work with Lana Del Rey on a trailer for Disney’s Maleficent, music on Breaking Bad and Grand Theft Auto 4, and recent Grammy consideration for “End Of The Line” off Elysium, there’s something about covering other people’s music that lets JST approach creating music from a different angle.

I asked him what about covering his favorite artists excites him? “I mean, what isn’t exciting?” he says. “We can choose the greatest songs of all time. I mean, no matter how good I think my own songs are they’re never going to be as good as “In Your Room” by Depeche Mode, which is one of my top songs of all time or “All Is Full Of Love” by Björk.”

It’s no accident that JST’s cover of “In Your Room,” along with Strangelove’s cover of “Sister Of Night,” are on an album that reached number one in Germany last year, Music For Constructions: A Tribute To Depeche Mode. “That’s one of my most streamed songs on Spotify and various places,” says Shah-Tayler. “I think it’s a good version.”

It’s more than good. Shah-Tayler’s “In My Room,” along with the rest of his work, bears the stamp of a passionate and musically articulate powerhouse who is comfortable shifting between genres and instruments. His covers collection, Something Borrowed, features a variety of electronic pop tunes, as he transforms gems by artists ranging from Prince (“Sign O’ The Times”) to INXS “Never Tear Us Apart, Alive And Kicking”), from The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“Maps”) to Nine Inch Nails (the vulgar“Closer”) and even Bob Dylan (“Just Like A Woman”).

There’s a song on Something Borrowed, “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush that Shah-Tayler recorded in 2018, a few years before it gained massive popularity for the second time, when it was featured on the TV series Stranger Things. Rewind a decade or so when Shah-Tayler was in band called AdamAndEvil with his former bandmate from London, Scott Fairbrother. Now relocated in Los Angeles, they were commissioned to do a cover of “Running Up That Hill” in a fashion similar to the version by Placebo, which was released in 2003, getting lots of attention almost twenty years after Kate Bush’s 1985 original.

Shah-Tayler told me, of Bush’s original from 1985’s Hounds Of Love: “It’s a bit of an easy one to target because obviously it’s her biggest song, but I’ll tell you that the actual provenance of that is….he and I were commissioned to do something for our projects at the time which was similar to the Placebo version,,,because I would never have chosen that that song necessarily just because it’s so popular. So we did a version and then I took the bones of that when Scott and I stopped really producing anything with AdamAndEvil and I reworked it significantly to make my own version…I’ve deliberately not listened to the Placebo version since the first time he played it to me with that commission from the fashion show.”

Playing Favorites
Shah-Tayler told me that, in a similar fashion to how he does remixes working only from the vocal stems and deliberately avoiding the original, he preferred to work on his version without influence from the sounds of the previous iterations. Of the renewed popularity of the tune due to Stranger Things, Shah-Tayler says: “I love the song and I love the fact that Kate Bush would have made a bit of money from it because she’s one of my favorite artists of all time. In fact, she’s number one –my favorite artist.”

Wait, isn’t David Bowie your favorite? “David Bowie is close to Kate Bush in terms of imagination but he didn’t do that,” he says. “She did that. David Bowie had a team of geniuses around him. Kate Bush was the genius. She made all that sh$t. Prince was the genius who made all that sh$t. Prince is sat there on his own doing all this amazing sh$t. Nobody will ever come close to that. The genius was the same, but David had a team.”

Incidentally, Shah-Tayler has a cover of Bowie’s “Loving The Alien,” a rewarding funk pop reimaging of the original from Bowie’s 1984 album Tonight.  

About Kate Bush, Shah-Tayler continues. “I’ve just listened to the whole podcast of Nick Launay where he’s talking about working with her doing The Dreaming, and it is all Kate Bush. Like, every idea in there, all of it is comes from this one crazy person who is the leading musical genius of our era. She’s brilliant. She’s a genius. There’s nobody who comes close. ”To sum up his passion for the legendary British artist, Shah-Tayler unapologetically explains: “I’m the biggest Kate Bush fan you’ll ever come across.”

Shah-Tayler tells me there’s more where that came from. “I’ve got hundreds of covers that  I haven’t put on the album,” he says. ”When a song touches me or – a lot of those ones on Something Borrowed were for Eva, actually because she likes those songs.” (Eva Strangelove is Shah-Tayler’s girlfriend who sometimes uses his music in her burlesque shows, and whose likeness is on the artwork for Something Borrowed.). Shah-Tayler continues: “So I made a cover version and shared it with her because you know, I’m busy writing songs for her and then she said ‘oh, I like this song.’” Jokingly, Shah-Tayler, who is monogamous and devoted only to Eva, adds: “So I do a version of the song she liked because that’s the way I try and seduce my women.”

Elysium Interview with Julian Shah-Tayler on Synthbeat.com
Julian Shah-Tayler and Arden Leigh Revisit Bowie’s Labyrinth
Julian Shah-Tayler Link Tree
Eva Strangelove On Instagram

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