The ever industrious Dr Brian Hinton MBE (to give him his full and well deserved title) has taken it upon himself to write a fairly thorough account of what I’ve been up to over the past 44 years and post it up in the superb ‘Stick It In Your Ear’ magazine. If you click on the logo to the left it will hopefully take you directly to the piece. Thanks Brian!
Stick It In Your Ear
January 30th, 2012 · Uncategorized
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Jackie Leven German dates cancelled
September 17th, 2011 · Uncategorized
It’s with great sadness that I have to announce that the forthcoming German dates that I was scheduled to perform with he great Jackie Leven have had to be cancelled. The legendary Scot has been admitted to hospital, more than this I do not know. I send him all my best wishes and hope he makes a quick recovery. So I’m very sad not to be making my debut in Ansbach, Munster and Essen, let’s hope the tour gets rescheduled before too long.
UPDATE 20/11/2011
As you will no doubt have heard, after a brief respite, Jackie Leven has sadly died. RIP
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Live Launch Dates
August 10th, 2011 · Uncategorized
Despite being in a severe state of renovation, the current owners of Farringford, Tennyson’s former Island residence, have agreed to allow us to launch the album there on Sunday 18th September. Tickets will be £8.00 and will soon be on sale from Waterstones in Newport and from reception at Farringford 01983 752500.
Two days later on Tuesday 20th September I shall be returning to the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell to repeat the performance for a London audience. Doors are at 7.30 and support will come from JC Grimshaw (with myself on bass) and the Binary Band, I shall be on at 9.30. Tickets for that are £9.50 in advance, £12.00 on the door.
And the following day I shall be off to Germany again for 3 dates with the mighty Jackie Leven.
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In The Word
August 10th, 2011 · Uncategorized
Very, very chuffed to have a track from the new Tennyson album included on the covermount CD of the September edition of The Word magazine. They have chosen Little Birdie which I’m not sure is the best choice as it doesn’t exactly scream Tennyson, indeed I put it as the first track on the CD to wrong-foot any expectations of wordiness, it being a trite little nursery-rhyme pulled out of context from the great poem ‘The Princess’. However, I concede that it’s probably the most immediate track on the album, so let’s hope it does the job and gets people interested in the album.
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Michael Kiwanuka
August 10th, 2011 · Uncategorized
Last year I was asked by Paul Butler of the Bees to contribute some double bass to a session he was producing for an up and coming singer/songwriter called 
Michael Kiwanuka. He turned out to be a lovely bloke with a gorgeous voice and an obvious gift for writing gentle but soulful tunes. So much time has passed since then that I’d all but forgotten about it, but this month sees the release of an ep featuring the track I play on, I’m Getting Ready. I gather that production of the album has been given to someone else so I probably won’t be involved in this project any further but I wish him every success.
You can hear the single here:
http://www.burgoblog.com/2011/07/26/michael-kiwanuka-im-getting-ready-stream/
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Olivia Keith Portrait
August 10th, 2011 · Uncategorized
Whilst at this years Larmer Tree Festival I renewed my acquaintance with the delightful artist Olivia Keith. Not only did she produce an impressive painting of the Gramophone Party performance of which I was a part but she also did this sketch of me performing solo which I am really taken with. You can see more of her work here:
http://www.oliviakeith.co.uk/
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Tennyson album finished
April 3rd, 2011 · Tennyson, Uncategorized
I’ve just sent the recordings off to my label along with the freshly printed album cover (left). Oh happy relief! It’s been nearly two years since Dr Brian Hinton cornered me into putting Tennyson’s poems to music for the bicentenary of his birth (Alfred’s not Brian’s). I’d originally planned to record them immediately using the Four Good Reasons and an assortment of Island voices, but life intervened. Eventually I got around to recording them alone at home, doing (almost) all the playing and singing myself, the exceptions being Mari Persen’s beautiful voice on Sweet and Low, Donal O’Riain’s mimicing of birds on the fiddle on the opening track and Doug Lang providing a suitably militaristic bit of bodhran playing on Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s been a fairly lonely process with little of the joy of collaboration and none of the reassurance that a second opinion provides. It also leaves me without the perspective that distance gives, I’ve no idea how it sounds on first listen, I only hear the rattle of nuts and bolts that hold it together. I think it will challenge the listener, whereas I would never consider including seven minutes of just vocal and bass on a ‘regular’ collection of songs, here it seemed appropriate to capture the loneliness of the obsessive stalker who narrates ‘Maud’. How it’s received I think will depend on how the listener comes to it: compared to a spoken word collection of poetry it’s a roller-coaster, whereas compared to the usual collection of three and a half minute songs it might appear a little sedate. My hope is that it breathes life into Tennyson’s words and that the listener will be surprised at how contemporary his voice sounds and how relevant he is, all of life is here: birth, death, love, hate, beauty, madness and lots of sea.
The album is due to be released in late summer and the provisional track-listing is as follows:
1/ Little Birdie (from ‘Sea Dreams’)
2/ On A Spiteful Letter
3/ The Splendour Falls (from ‘The Princess’)
4/ The Poet’s Song
5/ Maud (an extract)
6/ The Charge of the Light Brigade
7/ Sweet and Low (from ‘The Princess’)
8/ The Sailor Boy
9/ The Voyage
10/ Crossing the Bar
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Bespoke Songs from the Larmer Tree
August 15th, 2010 · Music, Uncategorized
As the Literary Laureate at this year’s Larmer Tree Festival, I gave myself the task of writing two songs a day about people at the festival. Each day at noon I’d appear on stage in the Lost Woods, sing a few songs and ask for volunteers to come forward from the audience. I would distribute cards with questions on to the audience and get them to recite these aloud in the form of an interview. In this manner we got to know the volunteers. After getting them to sign apiece of paper that said they promise not to take legal action I would then retire to my van (our spacious tent was blown away and ripped to shreds on the first night) and compose in time to perform the new songs that evening.
It was a truly enjoyable experience and a genuine pleasure to have met the volunteers and their friends/families. The songs were a complete surprise to me, where normally songs take on a life of their own, here they took the shape of their ‘owners’. I sat down with JC this week and did some very basic recordings of the songs. Here you go:
Lewis Enwistle
Lewis was my first volunteer and a gift for a songwriter. A giant of a man from Aylesbury, people called him LEW, both a shortening of ‘Lewis’ and an anacronym for ‘Large English White’ which is an alternative name for the Aylesbury Duck. At the age of 27 he was married with 4 children and involved with the military, but divorce led him to change his life completely and now he writes poetry and as a geologist unearths unexploded bombs for a living.
Alistair Park
A woodcarver who I’d helped out earlier by helping him repair one of his giant slugs. The highlight of his life was climbing the tallest tree in Australia, half way up he became terrified and shook terribly, but he overcame his fears and reached the top 200ft up. His most treasured possession was his carving knife and, unable to drive he was slightly ashamed of being completely dependent on his girlfriend Sandra to get him around.
Sarah Creber
A lovely girl in her teens, she was fairly shy but insisted she was very loud at school. We learned a few minor facts about her, including the fact that she was in love with her friend Charlie (oops, I wasn’t supposed to repeat that), but nothing prepared us for her answer to the final question ‘what is your ideal job?’……..
Debbie Orcheston-Findlay
Debbie used to work in personnel at Ottakar’s (not payroll as I claim in the song- but it sounded better) so I knew her a bit, we always had a bit of a joke on the phone, accusing each other of being on a permanent tea break. However I found out all sorts of interesting things when she volunteered to have a song written. Her heroine is Joan of Arc, she’d like to speak French, her favourite smell is Jasmine, she’d like a red sports car and longer legs, she believes that we are put on the planet to procreate, her favourite song is Barry White’s ‘My First, My Last, My Everything’ and her nickname is Baish- as in vivacious Debacious. At work we called her Debbie ‘O’.
Emily Jane Moyes
Emily was working at the Larmer Tree after taking a year out after school. In that year she’d been teaching in Vanwatu (what rhymes with Vanwatu?) which is west of Fiji, where she climbed up a waterfall which she said was one of the highlights of her life. She was a vegan who sought happiness in life and believed that after death souls come together in a state of Nirvana. She had a very beautiful Arthur Rackham tattoo on her very beautiful back and a very nice philsophy which I open the song with….
Panda
Reluctant to reveal too much, although she did show us her breasts which the band Tunng had signed the night before (after 18 pints her boyfriend Tim said). Amanda (her real name) wished she had continued as a dancer and singer, she’d worked with some big names but wouldn’t tell us why she stopped. Now she was a social worker and she last cried watching a film about child abuse called ‘Precious’. Her favourite smell was the sea, her hero was her mom who lived in France. She described herself as loud, dizzy and quirky.
I’ve had some nice pics sent from Lewis including this of the drawing that Olivia Keith the artist in residence did of the process. She drew Lewis being interviewed on on half and then came back later that evening to get me singing the song I’d written. She even got the little girl holding up my lyrics.
And this of the man himself showing just how Large this English White is (I’m over 6ft)
Radio Feature
June 14th, 2010 · Blood Fish and Bone, News, Uncategorized
If you haven’t already come across this great online radio station I’m sure you’ll soon be a convert.
A fine selection of music, full on unexpected treasures.
One of the DJs Adrian, recently interviewed me for a show which has just been posted. Please go and give it a listen, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the whole show.
Evermine back on sale
June 10th, 2010 · Evermine, News, Uncategorized
For one reason or another 2005′s Evermine never got a UK release so I’m very pleased to be able to now offer it for sale on CD AND Vinyl from the website shop.
Whereas Songs Without Words was a collection of old songs recorded by the newly put together Four Good Reasons, Evermine was written intentionally for the band. Alongside the original material there are covers of Tim Hardin’s Misty Roses, an interpretation of a Mauriac poem ‘L’Ombre’, originally recorded by Juliette Greco, and of course a Jacques Brel song translated by myself and Mrs A ‘The Tender Hearts’.
Written in a week (whilst recovering from an op), recorded in a week and self produced, this was a response to the constraints of money and time that we were facing after the first album.
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