2 Comments Written by Rachel Service on August 3, 2009 – 8:00 am

For someone who was banned from signing at his primary school, and never made it past the glory of Grade One recorder, musician Ed Cox has clearly not taken his early musical criticisms to heart. ‘My voice took ages to break and it did it really slowly and embarrassingly. The teacher took me aside and said I shouldn’t sing. So I mimed for a year. The next year, that teacher had left, and then I got told off for not singing so I started again.’

Since the shonky start at primary school, Ed is now a musician who’s had a cameo on Groove Armada’s ‘Soundboy Rock’. He was keen to develop his electronic inclinations with a friend who he had good hunch about:  Amber Taylor-Groves. Together, Ed and Amber make electronica duo Heads.Hearts - pop-soul songs that are dangerously catchy.

‘We want to make electronic soul music’, explains Ed. ‘We want to be Ike and Tina meets Dave and Annie – but without the domestic violence.’

Amber had a much more encouraging upbringing than Ed’s ill-fated recorder and choir practice miming. After auditioning for the ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ at school, the music teacher invited her to join a funk band. After spending the next ten years singing live across the UK fine-tuning her craft, she felt a draw towards working with Ed.

‘As soon as we met – as soon as I heard the way he sang, he played, even the way he moved, I just thought he was fucking dynamite’, says Amber. I knew only good things could come of this.’

And good things have. Together for less than a year, Heads.Hearts have achieved a heck of a lot. They’ve supported Hot Chip, written an albums worth of material, have invitations to play Brighton Pride and the Royal Vauxhall Festival. In fact, they had pretty much written and recorded the bulk of their debut album before their first live show.

So what makes Heads.Hearts any different from the loads of electro-pop musicians out there? Their tunes are dangerously catchy and stick in your head for ages – but most importantly, they’re recreated live – rather than pressing buttons on a laptop. Ed’s nerd like fascination with keyboards and Amber’s multi- talents allow the duo to not only put on a stellar performance, but really do the recordings justice with technical know how.

‘I was always more interested in the music in my head and I’d never felt like I’d managed to articulate that until I worked with Amber’, says Ed. ‘We always said we’d do something together and working with a great vocalist [like Amber] immediately makes your music better.’

Head.Heart’s single, ‘Qualified’, is available independently through Momentum exclusively as a digital download.

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