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Welcome to the website of Oliver Shaw, Oxford-based songwriter, performer, producer and frontman of Worldview. Click on the headings above to "view" all areas of his "world", or look below for a lighthearted take on his glory so far.
Onstage at The Jercho Tavern, Oxford, November 2006. A BRIEF HISTORY
However, less disturbing influences began to inform his late teens, including the usual 60's suspects (Beatles, Stones, Dylan), Prince and Stevie Wonder, and World Party, the one-man band project of ex-Waterboy Karl Wallinger, who impressed by managing to single-handedly sound like an entire group, his distinctive and single-minded production and engineering, and his clever knack for echoing (not to say stealing) the best bits of those classics acts (this was pre-Oasis, you see). Oliver soaked all this up while less disciplined, more worldly types were going out, meeting girls and taking drugs (something he is now attempting to atone for), and tried to fashion something of his own with it, with 4 and 8-track bedroom recording gear, keyboards, bass, drum programming and the aforementioned guitar/tennis racket which had first inspired the whole enterprise.
The years that followed were years of actually having a job, honing his songwriting by way of influences such as Elliott Smith, R.E.M. & Mark Eitzel, dipping his toe in the live scene with acoustic, then electric gigs in Oxford, and suffering tantalizing but ultimately fruitless "interest" from labels and the like in the manner of a man being led on by a playful but moody young wench with a fear of commitment. Eventually tiring of these teasing games, he took matters into his own hands and, in addition to an increased live profile at Oxford venues such as the Zodiac and the Cellar, he self-released an album of home recordings, "War Years", in late 2002. This collection reflected his recent singer-songwriterly influences and sought to convey the cynicism wrought by having his emotions toyed with by life and "the ladies" (eg the live favourite "Timewasters"). It sold in what can charitably be described as "modest" quantities but received some airplay on the local Fortnightly Fix radio show, drew favourable comparisons with Elvis Costello and formed the backbone of his live set of the period.
With a renewed enthusiasm for invention and modernity brought about by listening to 10-year old dance records, Oliver then got busy fashioning a new hybrid using up-to-the-minute PC technology. Describing it improbably as "Morrissey meets Basement Jaxx", he aimed to combine his traditional songcraft with loops and danceable beats, hopefully avoiding coming over like an embarrassing "trendy dad" making a fool of himself at a disco. Some of these new tracks can be heard on the Music page, and to perform them live, Oliver assembled a new gigging line-up which mixes live instruments and laptops (though sadly not lapdancers). He settled on the moniker Worldview for performance and propaganda purposes, in order both to distance himself from the current crop of doleful solo singer-songwriters and to give things more of a "band" vibe, though his ruthless control-freakery remains very much intact. A first few Worldview gigs at Oxford's Port Mahon and The Pit in Witney proceeded smoothly, with no noticeable cries of "Judas!" from the assembled audience. Several more followed at venues such as The Corner Room and The Wheatsheaf, as well as some London dates. Worldview now tread the boards once a month or so, with Oliver doing a few acoustic sets here and there to showcase the more "song-y" of his songs (see the Live page for more info and forthcoming dates). He compiled a first Worldview promo album, "Our Condition" in October 2007, which some label or other will hopefully see fit to put out sooner or later; in the meantime he put it on iTunes the following March (buy it via the Music page). He has also become a late convert to the virtues of collaborations, amongst his own Worldview line-up and also in his shadowy Desmond Chancer & The Long Memories side-project, where he plays piano under an alias and wears a fake beard. In August 2008 he launched another project, Starmaker, through which he aims, ideally anonymously, actually to make some money from this music lark by churning out perfect pop songs for the stars of tomorrow, or if not the day after. His generic pop efforts had already met with some success when Carole King-inspired warm-hearted piano ballad "Crazy Life" was included on a promo CD for that February's Midem Music Conference in Cannes which was used as a beermat by some of the industry's top moguls. Hear some of his Starmaker output at the Music page, but don't tell anyone it's him, except maybe Simon Cowell... |
Oliver Shaw found his musical calling at a young age and by an accident of fate; early dreams of becoming an international tennis star found him inverting tradition by prancing around infront of his bedroom mirror with an electric guitar pretending it was a tennis racket. He soon decided he quite liked the guitar concept itself, and promptly set about mastering the iconic instruments of rock. He started, perversely, on a Casio SK1 synthesizer at age 9, attempting to emulate the evocative and naggingly catchy themes which accompanied gratuitously violent and vacuous 80's shows like Miami Vice and The Equalizer. The slippery slope of keyboard-based music led him to embrace, in his teens, the hideous prog of Genesis, the music-lite of Phil Collins and the Scottish bombast of Simple Minds. (In the early 90's, an era when contemporaries were uniformally listening to Nirvana, The Levellers, The Wonderstuff, etc, this surely constituted a kind of rebellion.) 
His decision to forgo the standard middle-class treadmill of University/exams/job/life/wife for the rockstar life initially appeared to have paid off when, at the tender age of 19, he first came to the attention of a few music industry A&R types by way of some humble demos. However, while obviously blown away by the prodigious talent evident in his songwriting and production, they were, perhaps fairly, unsure exactly what to do with the Oliver of these hermit years, who made the young Morrissey look like a loudmouthed teen yob, had avoided all paid employment, and had never really trod the boards live, except with dodgy school rock and jazz bands. At around this time, an associate from one such school band turned up in a new indie outfit called Coldplay, whose Chris Martin Oliver had met by chance in an Oxford pub in early 1999, in his pre-fame, pre-cropped hair days. (However, Oliver refuses to be bitter about any of this, and with local pals and sometime gigging partners The Young Knives now established and Mercury-nominated, he is content to be assured of at least a minor footnote in the annals of rock'n'roll.)
After years of straight-faced zeal, hysterical left-wing political commitment and being far too sensitive and forthcoming to be actually attractive to women, it was time for a calculated bout of hedonism and thrill-seeking (Moby apparently did something similar, but only after becoming hugely famous), and this was reflected in his second, similarly homespun set "Paying For It", unleashed upon an indifferent world in January 2005. The CD saw him return to the more varied influences of his pre-acoustic phase, taking in rock, electropop, soul and even dance, the latter reflecting his new enthusiasm for going out to nightclubs (and standing self-consciously in the corner tapping his foot). The lyrics tackled themes from the Iraq war to stand-up comedy (though not in the same song), celeb culture, and the base pleasures and cheap seedy thrills on offer to desperate, hungry souls. (Some took this to be a socio-political critique of our shallow, self-gratifying times rather than an admission of some very bad behaviour.) He also undertook some acoustic gigs at London venues such as the Betsey Trotwood and the Hope & Anchor, which did nothing concrete to further his career but did get him into the NME and Time Out listings and possibly impressed a few girls.
