Having spent much of the past few years touring on bass, guitar and keyboards for the great Sarah Blasko, Fletcher release his full-length album. Upon Ayr speaks volumes for Benjamin Fletcher’s musical abilities as he takes the helm in more ways than one for his debut LP. After two years of writing, Fletcher found himself bouncing between studios in Sydney, London and Sweden while he recorded the tunes, and finally in Berlin where the final touches were made. Fletcher displays a vast understanding of different musical instruments on the release as he mans just about everything you will hear. Sarah Blasko even stops by for backing vocals on one of the tracks. A founding member of Bluebottle Kiss and, later, The Devoted Few, Fletcher joined Blasko’s band in 2005 moving to London in 2010 to continue touring Europe and the US with her. This time on the road proved to be the perfect environment for Fletcher to write this collection of pictorial tales in what has been, as he explains, a natural and surprisingly simple process: “What you’re listening to is demos; fleshed out demos. Throughout 2010 I was on a world tour with the beautiful, Australian singer Sarah Blasko. We played almost 200 shows that year and most of the songs on this record were written during that period. They developed in sound checks, in band rooms, in hotels, on trains, in vans, or humming into iPhones. In early 2011, while still on tour in Australia, I got together with two of my mates to sneak into a university studio where a friend of ours had been studying musicology. Our friend’s course had finished months ago but he still had the keycard and security code that opened the doors to the studio. We snuck in around 11pm and would record all night till 4am or 5am, turning off the lights and hiding every 2 hours while the security guard cruised by. We did this for three nights and I recorded the guitar and vocals for around 14 songs.