The first thing that strikes you about any album by Stephen Coates (a.k.a. The Real Tuesday Weld) is the fact that every element in his compositions seems to be drawn from sources many decades old. The second thing that strikes you is that his music sounds completely new.

For Coates, the breakthrough in his professional journey came in the form of a pair of surreal dreams in which he was visited by the legendary English music hall singer Al Bowlly and the late actress Tuesday Weld. These experiences convinced him to focus on a career in music and eventually led to the recording of an EP (The Valentine EP), which would be followed shortly by the full-length When Cupid Meets Psyche. His sophomore album and debut on Six Degrees is a deeply complex and lovely full-length CD titled I, Lucifer. The album is a conceived soundtrack to Glen Duncan's (Coates' friend and former flatmate) book of the same name about the Devil's take on humanity. Coates's follow-up release on Six Degrees, The Return of the Clerkenwell Kid, continued to develop what Coates has come to call his "antique beat" sound, putting modern technology to the task of creating new music out of a kaleidoscopic array of old sound sources. The sound of The Return of the Clerkenwell Kid was somewhat different from that of its predecessor, but the modus operandi remained basically the same and no one would ever mistake it for anything other than a Real Tuesday Weld album.