UK band, The Jaded Hearts Club have released , their version of “This Love Starved Heart Of Mine (It’s Killing Me)” featuring Nic Cester on lead vocals. This lost Marvin Gaye song was originally recorded in 1967 a couple of months after “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, but it wasn’t released from the vaults of Motown until 1994 almost 30 years later.

The Jaded Hearts Club are a new band featuring frontmen Miles Kane (The Last Shadow Puppets) and Nic Cester (Jet), guitarists Graham Coxon (Blur) and Jamie Davis, plus Matt Bellamy (Muse) on bass and drummer Sean Payne (The Zutons). “This Love Starved Heart Of Mine (It’s Killing Me)” is the second track the band have released following “Nobody But Me” which had Miles Kane lending his raucous rock ‘n’ roll vocal on The Isley Brothers’ Northern Soul classic.

“Learning to sing a song like this and giving it the respect it deserves meant really studying it with microscopic detail and then trying to forget it all again. The ease at which Marvin navigates his way through all the phrasing is so unbelievably effortless – I loved looking at the work of someone that talented. You really recognize and appreciate the soul of the man.” Nic Cester

“We listened to hours and hours of songs from the Northern Soul/Motown period to choose the right 10 for an album – This perfectly sums up what we are trying to do as The Jaded Hearts Club – to shed light on some of the greatest lost songs ever written.” Matt Bellamy

The band first came together in 2017 when Jamie Davis, a British guitarist living in Los Angeles who previously ran Coxon’s Transcopic Records label in England, wanted to book a Beatles covers band to play at his birthday party. The cost proved to be excessive and the available tribute acts were drab, so Davis had a back-up plan. “I realised I knew a bunch of half decent British musician friends living in L.A. so I thought I’d ask if they’d come together to form an early ‘60s Cavern-era Beatles band.”

If their debut gig was a big surprise, their second raised the bar in dramatic fashion after Stella McCartney asked Bellamy if the band would play her fashion show in Los Angeles in January 2018. They arrived to see an A-list crowd gathered to see them: Quincy Jones, Katy Perry, James Corden and even Ringo Starr were in attendance. And then things took a turn for the unbelievable. Paul McCartney strolled on stage, winked at Davis and led the Hearts through “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Helter Skelter”. In the space of just two gigs, The Beatles covers band had effectively become the surrogate Beatles.

Things progressed in the same way that they had started. They played SXSW; a late night gig in Chicago after Bellamy had completed a stadium show with Muse; supported Roger Daltrey at The Royal Albert Hall in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust; and headlined London’s legendary 100 Club. Expanding their repertoire to cover other classic British rock songs from the Sixties, the 100 Club show was a tribute to Davis’s late father, with all proceeds donated to the Shooting Star Children’s Hospices. The charity further benefited from the limited edition vinyl only album Live At The 100 Club.

Back in Los Angeles, Bellamy and Davis wanted to develop the band further and started working on an album, with Bellamy producing at Red Room Studios in Los Angeles. The band decided to focus primarily on recording lost classics from the world of Northern Soul, supplemented by their raw, soulful takes on some famous standards from the era.

Bellamy and Davis shifted through hundreds of songs as they researched what material they should record for the album. The first taster of the project (with Miles Kane on lead vocals) was a raucous rock ‘n’ roll take on a Northern Soul classic, The Isley Brothers’ 1962 song “Nobody But Me”, recorded in the spirit of The Human Beinz’s cult version that followed in 1968.