'nother gig

Just a quick note to say that I'll be playing The Stone Trough at Kirkham Abbey on Sunday. Should be very nice indeed, come down if you're in the area.

What's this? A gig you say?

Yep, just a quick update to say that I'll be supporting the awesome Bosscaine and Johanna at the Fulford Arms on saturday 24th september. Music from 8ish and it's free to get in. Job is very much a good 'un.

Some days are better than others...

... as U2 famously sang.
As you may have noticed from the lack of updates and gigs recently, I've not been doing much on the music front. Load of stuff going on at work and home and basically just devoid of inspiration.
So last night when I had some time I just sat in front of the machine and did this:

Tonight however I sat down and did this:

Sorry it's side on, didn't think of that when I took it and don't know how to change it. There's not really much to watch anyway....
Hell, I know it's not much, but considering I came up with the first verse and chorus in one run through and the next two verses on the fly I reckon it's a positive sign.

I've got some stuff going round my head but, somewhat ridiculously given the amount of music stuff i have around the house, I'm currently devoid of a decent way of recording it.
I'll sort it out when the house move happens, in the meantime I'll try and do some more stuff like this.

This too shall pass

Many good things have happened for me in the last few years (You might not guess this from the lyrical content of my songs, but it's true), one of the main ones being my being picked up by Soup Records.

Thanks primarily, I think, to a bit of a funny gig where I ended up being sandwiched between two nu-metal bands, I got invited down to sleepsafe to play some demos.

I've not exactly been prolific since then, recording one EP and one album, but it can be pretty tricky trying to balance the studio with a full time job that has, at times, been very demanding.
But I am very pleased with what we've wrought; I think we've managed to capture the in the recordings the sounds I had in my head. And that, after all, is what we're trying to achieve.

So it's a great shame that Soup Records will shortly be no more.
I am afraid that I shit you not.

The studio carries on life as a commerical entity, as do the promotion and live sound engineering parts of the massive conglomerate (or Andy as we liked to call him ;¬) ) but the label is no more.

In the end we were just never able to buy the kind of advertising required to make the commercial production of CDs a success. We didn't sell enough CDs, so we couldn't buy the ad-space, so we couldn't buy the reviews, so we couldn't sell enough CDs...

The music business, as I have mentioned before, is changing. There is a future there, but it's not going to work like it did in the past, and a business model based on shifting physical units is no longer viable at the small scale.
For the record, this has fuck-all to do with "piracy". Just thought I should I get that out of the way.

Things move on, I'm still writing music, I'll figure out a way to keep recording music, but it won't be on the scale and quality of the last few years - that's beyond my budget, hopefully you'll keep listening to my music and between us we'll all keep enjoying all kinds of music because that's what human beings do.

So raise a glass to the late, great Soup Records, cheers!

YAMDAC and what this site is for.

I think this site has been a bit confused to date. By which I don't mean that the content of the updates are confused, that's a reflection of my state of mind and I spend most of my time confused.
What I mean is that this site has been serving as both my music site and my blog, and this hasn't made for either a coherent website or been particularly relevant for those visitors who are only interested in the music and couldn't give a monkey's about my other rambling posts.
So from now on this site will solely focus on the music (gigs, new recordings etc) and I have started a new blog that will cover all the other stuff that's previously on here along with a few other things around cycling and design, which are additional areas of personal interest.
The new blog is called YAMDAC, please come and join the conversation.