It’s hard to remember a time when there weren’t acoustic guitar slingers on every street corner en route to the back rooms of pubs around the country to play their bedroom classics at open mics and sessions, but at the time I recorded the songs on this collection, it was difficult for the budding James …
The Sunny One I think this is my favourite of the many songs I’ve written with Brian Chin Smithers. For years Brian and I got together once a week to write songs and we must have written, though a lot were never finished, a couple of hundred. My recollection is that it was usually a …
The thing I like doing more than anything is reading, I can waste, if that’s the word, days with my head in a book. I wrote a song about authors and writing, the real life and the imagined one. The song can be listened to below after the lyrics and I love the bass clarinet …
I’m ‘enjoying’ the tv programmes commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution of 100 years ago as I’ve always been fascinated by the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. I tend to think of communist Russia as the experiment that never was; communism by name only, mafia tyranny in reality. It’s a complex history and a revolution …
Here’s a live video of This Is a Cold War (the song’s from the second Cold War EP) I recorded on my phone while practicing at Silver Lining Studios last week. I had my own practice room until recently so it was nice to spend a couple of hours going through songs old and new …
When I was recording my Cold War EPs (see here) I wrote a lot of songs, many I never finished, considered not good enough or thought inappropriate in some way. I was going through the CW hard drive and found them and on listening back one or two aren’t bad. This one is ok I …
I’ve been working on some songs, old and new, which are loosely connected by being about England or English places. Of course the subject of England is a hot one at the moment and if you’re like me, you’ll despair of the direction we are heading in. Politically, there are some signs of progressive policies …
