This Circus Life

"This is essentially top notch Pop Rock. Indeed Falling Star may be the best Crowded House song that isn't by Crowded House. Those Neil Finn comparisons shout out heavily here. Despite the direction changes  throughout the album, everything here centres  around great Pop."

Don Valentine at ‘I don’t hear a single’  Review February 2021

"Chiming acoustic guitars, cellos, tinkling pianos and banjo underpin plaintive storytelling of life’s secrets and surprises. Each song is a life vignette; a short film you may have already seen, or surely will, delivered with an acoustic/electric mix of real instruments and beautiful harmony. Go immerse."

​Turn Blue Records review February 2021

This Circus Life were formed in 2019 by songwriter Charlie Mear. 

Charlie spent much of the 80’s and early 90’s playing bass in a series of bands that came close to success, but that ultimately failed to break. Tired of being broke he entered the advertising industry and went on to work all over the world with brands including Sony Pictures, the BBC, MTV, The Chart Show, Budweiser and Heineken in a career that even included a two-year period producing music-fitness TV shows in India.

 He then entered a painful seven-year period where he experienced the devastating loss of two family members, the end of his marriage, the loss of his home and then becoming virtually bankrupt after his Advertising Agency went bust.  

 But more was still to come. In the middle of all this tragedy life got a whole lot stranger as he became involved in a series of misadventures that saw him running a covert mission to Spain disguised as a 70’s rock star, spending the night in a disused theatre in Moscow, flying to New York and getting romantically involved with a former model, changing his identity after receiving threats from an armed ex-con and deciding to take up stand-up comedy but getting booed off stage at The Comedy Store after less than a minute. 

 The final straw came when his bicycle (his only form of transport at the time) was stolen and he was forced to walk six, dark miles home in the rain. That dark night of the soul led to the epiphany that music, as it had always been, was the answer and the idea for This Circus Life was born.

 The band’s latest release is a mini album called THE LAST MAN STANDING.