Charlie Hole is one of the most exciting young singer-songwriters around nowadays. Tackling relatable subject matters for all audiences, the Bournemouth-born-and-raised musician with a brave and honest voice has already been coined by Rod Stewart as an emerging talent with a gift for writing ‘beautiful songs’. After a chance meeting with well-respected guitarist and producer Jim Cregan (Rod Stewart, Katie Melua, Family), the pair began working closely together, with Jim mentoring Charlie and teaching him about the world of songwriting while always pushing him to develop his own style and sound.
Ordinary Men is the fifth single from the upcoming Charlie Hole album Beautiful Decay and shows a bit more of his blues influences.
Some words about the song:
“I wrote the song around the idea that evil acts can be committed by ordinary people, and over history those people have tended to be men.
The song focuses on a few examples of evil in our world, starting with animal cruelty, in the form of bull fighting, moving through financial crises and how we take advantage of the poor through immoral and unscrupulous financial schemes, and it moves on to religious war and racism as forms of evil that can be, and are committed by seemingly ordinary people.
The song is probably the most political on the album, but I wanted to focus on humanity and the humbling idea that we are all, under the right set of circumstances and societal pressures, capable of falling into these various vices, and that morality can be a transient and malleable process that may form a varying consensus over time.
We all fall into the comforting trap of believing we are fully in control of our own beliefs, but what I wanted to explore in the song was the idea that we are all in some way sociological constructs of the times we live in, the society we are born into, and the products of the influences we surround ourselves with. By pure accident of birth we are pre-destined to hold certain values, both good and bad, and it’s worth reminding ourselves that born into a different age we may hold completely different beliefs from the ones we currently hold, and this is true of all people.”
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