The Oxford songwriter could never get a demo he could call his own. So he built the skills to make a whole album instead.
For years, John Goldrust had a problem that would have ended most music careers. He kept recording demos of his songs, in music shops and professional studios around the country, and he kept walking away with nothing he could use.
The recordings, he says, ended up being played to other musicians to show off the businesses’ own gear and services. The songs were his. The benefit was not. Eventually he stopped asking and started learning to do it himself.
By then he was already a familiar figure in British underground music. Based in Oxford and working mostly away from London, Goldrust spent years forming bands, writing, playing solo and carrying ideas between the scenes in Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh and Brighton.
He describes himself as the one who starts things. Several projects he set in motion have run for more than two decades, he says, though his name rarely appears in the credits. His own term for the role is “Underworld Magician”.
Like A Phoenix, released on 2 October 2026, is what ten years of doing it himself produced. It follows this year’s EP Travellers In Timing and stands as his first album.
The title suits the backstory, and so does its alternative name, Songs Of Experience. Written across the decade it took to record, the songs follow an independent artist chasing a record deal and trying to work out what life is for along the way.
The subjects are large: good against evil, the search for a present-day Holy Grail, the meaning of relationships, spiritual awakening and personal freedom. What ties them together is a plain question about how to stay human, and do well, in a hard modern world.
The way it was made matters as much as what it says. Goldrust recorded, produced and mixed the album in his own studio using what he calls organic methods, in deliberate contrast to the polished, machine-made sound he hears across the industry.
Keeping that character while meeting today’s technical standards was the hard part. The mastering took six weeks of back-and-forth with one of the UK’s leading mastering engineers.
There is more to come. The Blue Album, also titled Songs Of Innocence, is due later this autumn. It reaches back to the ten years before Like A Phoenix and gathers his solo singer-songwriter live recordings, which went unreleased at the time because of personal difficulties.
Heard as a pair, the two records cover the before and after of a long, rough road. Goldrust hopes that together they take the listener somewhere time stops mattering.
For an artist who once could not get a usable demo, two albums in one season is quite a reply.
Like A Phoenix is out now on Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud and YouTube.
Find John Goldrust at
