andrewcferguson

writer, performer, musician, wine drinker

Category Archives: progress reports

New Collaborations

2 Comments Posted by on August 18, 2017

I written before about creative collaborations, and how, basically, I’m a bit of a slut when it comes to them. I’ve never really seen writing or making music as a solo activity – especially the latter; and some of the things I’m proudest of in my output have happened that way: for example, the poetry pamphlet I did with Jane McKie, Head to Head, back in 2008.

Now I’m pretty much set on a musical journey (apart, perhaps, from more novels and a travel book) collaboration comes more naturally. Playing in bands kind of means you have to work as part of a team, and I never weary of hearing any song – but especially one of my own – tried out for the first time, and, sometimes on the first, the second, or maybe the third run through, something clicks, you reach the end, and you look at each other with that look that says, we had something there!

Recording is a different process from rehearsing or playing live, of course. I’m really looking forward to finalising the tracks I’ve been working on with Mark for the Isaac Brutal acoustic EP, of which more soon. But when it comes to solo work, up to now the collaborations have been few and far between.

And then two come along at once. I’m very chuffed indeed to have been asked to play guitar on a track by a new friend, Audrey Russell – let’s hope my playing is up to it! No such anxieties, however, with Norman Lamont‘s abilities. He came over recently, brought his electric guitar and effects pedals, and within the space of a brief evening, had laid down a beautiful, haunting contribution to a track I’ve had on the blocks for quite some time.

Here’s the result. It’s definitely going into my next solo album, although by the time I get that finished I may have tweaked it. If I do, it certainly won’t be to take out Norman’s contribution!

In the meantime, as with all my solo work, it’s free to download, but if you do, please think about donating to a refugee charity.

[technical glitch – I’m waiting to upload an updated version of this. If you can’t wait, go to my Soundcloud site]

(Incidentally, if you haven’t heard Norman’s music before, you’re in for a treat – and he offers free stuff on his site)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Wrong Box is Coming!

2 Comments Posted by on March 12, 2017

No, not the story of a logistics breakdown by Yodel, but news (for those of you who I haven’t reached yet by other social media) that my novel, The Wrong Box, is to be finally published on 20th April. Here’s a pic of me with a proof  copy:

Image may contain: 1 person, glasses

You can pre-order it on Kindle or as a paperback on Amazon. There’ll be a couple of events in April/May: best way of following progress would be to join up to the Facebook Group, or follow me on Twitter (@andrewcferguso4).

Incidentally, if you know of any book groups that are looking for this kind of thing, and would like the author to turn up and talk about it (either virtually or literally, depending on distance); or any other book festivals or the like I could promote this at, please let me know!

Here’s the blurb:

All I know is, I’m in exile in Scotland, and there’s a dead Scouser businessman in my bath. With his toe up the tap.

Meet Simon English, commercial property lawyer, heavy drinker and Scotophobe, banished from London after being caught misbehaving with one of the young associates on the corporate desk. As if that wasn’t bad enough, English finds himself acting for a spiralling money laundering racket that could put not just his career, but his life, on the line.

Enter Karen Clamp, an 18 stone, well-read wannabe couturier from the Auchendrossan sink estate, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Council misdeeds and 19th century Scottish fiction. With no one to trust but each other, this mismatched pair must work together to investigate a series of apparently unrelated frauds and discover how everything connects to the mysterious Wrong Box.

Manically funny, The Wrong Box is a chaotic story of lust, money, power and greed, and the importance of being able to sew a really good hem.

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Songs in a Scottish Accent 6: Never Forget Who We Are (Slight Return)

2 Comments Posted by on October 23, 2016

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And so, at long last, my solo album/vanity project, Songs in a Scottish Accent, is finished. The box of newly-printed CDs arrived yesterday, and test plays on the home and car audio confirmed that, yes, it’s me groaning out of the speakers.

Go to my page on the album now, and you’ll see that it’s free in return for a contribution to a refugee charity. Not that I’m going to check up on you, of course: stop me and get one next time you see me at a gig or wherever, or write to me and I’ll post it to you; after that, it’s on your head which charity you give to, and how much.

On the page itself, I go into why it’s Songs in a Scottish Accent. Why a refugee charity though?

That explanation’s bound up with the creation of the track I’m putting up below, ‘Never Forget.’ I’d been aware, as most people must be by now, of the spiralling refugee crisis in North Africa and Southern Europe for some time now. However, as I said in a previous post about this track, the trigger for me writing the poem was the sight of English football fans rampaging through a French town, attacking locals and being generally racist and unpleasant.

The poem’s not meant to be just about that, however – nor is it meant to express a view on the post-Brexit domestic political questions we’re wrestling with in the good ol’ U of K: to be clear, the line about living in the early days of a better nation isn’t meant to express a view for or against an outcome of a second Scottish independence referendum, if we get to that. The ‘we’ of the title, and constant refrain of the poem, can be taken to mean any part of, or the whole of, what generally gets called ‘the West.’

In other words, the poem was meant to reflect my feelings about the whole way in which the West has responded, post 9/11, to Islamic fundamentalism by means which, to me, cut away any supposed moral high ground we might lay claim to. Things like the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay; the ‘special rendition’ missions to render terrorist suspects, not to the law’s due process, but to illegal torture methods; more recently, the frankly incredible way Muslim women wearing burkinis were treated this summer on French beaches.

Those might be described as state-sanctioned: but let’s not kid ourselves. The rise in hate crimes since the Brexit result, to give just one example, shows how people – ordinary people, who could live just down the road – give the lie to any complacency that we in the West are in some way more ‘civilised’ than the terrorist nutters who seek to attack us. Tied in with that now seems to be a general climate of fear of ‘the other,’ whether it be our peace-loving neighbours of a different faith than ours, immigrant workers, or even the refugees currently overwhelming aid agencies in southern Europe.

So what did I do? I wrote a poem. Well, that’ll show them!

Perhaps more constructively, I would like to see the fruits of my artistic labours go towards something positive. I’m very, very, fortunate to live in a rich country, with a well-paid, secure job, with family and friends safe and well. Just a few hours in a plane away, on the other side of the continent I still call mine, hundreds of thousands of people – ordinary people, who could live just down the road, but were unlucky enough to live instead in countries ravaged by war – are risking their lives crossing the sea to the dubious safety of ill-prepared refugee camps, relying on the kindness of strangers.

So, if you lay your hands on my CD, enjoy the words and music, but in return, drop some money into a tin either in reality or online, and help these guys out.

 

(Incidentally, in the previous post I had set the words to a Mogwai track. Someone commented on Facebook that I should do my own music to accompany it, and I have. Thanks, Janet!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Songs in a Scottish Accent 5: A Hidden Advantage of Analog

2 Comments Posted by on October 14, 2016

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, still divides opinion amongst his fans. Burned out by the long creative and recording process it took to produce his masterpiece, The River, and its accompanying tour schedule, Springsteen headed home with what was then a modern bit of tech in the form of a 4-track portastudio (1). He recorded most of the tracks that became Nebraska in a single all nighter: conceived of as a demo tape for the E Street Band, he then caught up on some sleep and went fishing.

Here’s where myth and fact start to merge. The master tape from those original sessions, in cassette form, then sat in Springsteen’s denim jacket pocket for some months, and, at some stage, may or may not have dropped in the river when he went out fishing with his boom box and it tipped out of the boat. Either way, it eventually found its way back to civilisation and Sprngsteen, after trying and failing to recapture the original spirit of the recording with the E Street Band, issued the album from a much rejigged and enhanced version of the original pondweed-encrusted cassette.

Or so the story goes. My own story, about the track below, is a bit more prosaic.

I released the original ‘Scotland as an XBox Game’ on Soundcloud some time ago, but it wasn’t till I performed it one night live to a backing track with harmonica, that my friend and long time creative collaborator Gavin Inglis came up with the idea of an 8 bit remix of it. (2) I sent him the original tracks: he did an outstanding remix, but, being Gav, just wanted to tweak it one last time. Eventually, I arranged a time to go over to his flat and stand over him while he perfected it to his own exacting standards. Then he exported it to an mp3, copied it to a memory stick I’d brought for the very purpose, and I headed off into the night, happy as Larry.

Here comes the really prosaic bit. A short time later, before I’d copied the mp3 anywhere else, I realised I needed a memory stick for a work presentation I was preparing at home. That was the one nearest to hand: I knew it had my only copy of the mp3 on it, but I wouldn’t, I reasoned, be so irredeemably stupid as to lose it.

I wasn’t that irredeemably stupid. What I did do was tuck the memory stick into my shirt pocket at the end of the working day and set off for home, reasoning I wouldn’t be so irredeemably stupid as to forget about it and put the shirt in the wash without taking the memory stick out first.

Yup. As some of you will have seen from Facebook or Twitter, I was that irredeemably stupid. Cue more demands on the Gavster’s precious time, one more tweak from him, and, at long last, voila! Scotland as an XBox Game (8 bit remix).

As a story, it lacks the romance of the Springsteen one: no fishing trip, just two trips through the fast coloureds wash was all it took to kill the memory stick and its precious cargo. The key thing to note here, really, is this hidden advantage of analog, although to be fair I wouldn’t have fancied submitting the Boss’s precious master tape to the tender mercies of the Tricity Bendix 1000 spin cycle either.

Anyway, here it is. I love it because it’s nothing like anything I would have come up with myself. With or without a fishing trip.

(1) He also took his engineer home with him, which is less romantic than the idea of him doing it all by himself, but then, he was a major recording star by that stage. Wouldn’t you?

(2) I had no idea either. Gav sold it to me on the basis that it would be ‘lots of bleeping noises.’ I trusted him implicitly, and so should you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Songs in a Scottish Accent 4: the wrong kind of cricket

2 Comments Posted by on September 12, 2016

If you think of yourself as ‘alternative’ in any sort of way, there are sometimes moments when you realise just how far you’ve swum against the current and out of the mainstream. On such moment happened to me recently, when two art teachers, one of them wearing a maroon pork pie hat, called me ‘weird’ to my face. Here’s how it happened…

Some songs come to me with just the basic tune on acoustic guitar and keyboard. Others, usually late at night when I’m about to fall asleep and then forget them, are fully orchestrated – sometimes quite literally. Most are somewhere in the middle, and it’s a case of knowing what to put in and leave out instrumentally. Usually leave out, to be honest.

As soon as I had the basic riff and lyrical idea for ‘Prophets on Instagram,’ though, I knew the type of vibe I wanted on the track. And that included crickets. It was to be a bluesy, doomy kind of stomp, and the background noise of the Gryllidae family was part of that. Lanois used them on Dylan’s ‘Man in the Long Black Coat,’ on the album they did down in New Orleans (1), ‘Oh Mercy.’ Lucinda Williams, too, had them on some of the tracks on ‘Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.’ Probably partly through the movies, there’s a specific sound of crickets that conjures up a Southern Gothic night of humid, portent-filled dread for me. And I thought I had a means of getting it.

My go-to place for sound effects is Freesound, but I always prefer, if I can, to create noises of my own and load them up there for others to use. It’s a great sharing community, of the kind that the Net used to excel at. Whilst the Scottish Lowlands aren’t really natural habitat for crickets (or indeed cricket) I had, on recent visits to Pets At Home on our friendly neighbourhood retail park, heard them singing. We were there to restock the Redoubtable Mrs F’s aquarium (there’s a separate post to come some time on the tale of more-than-a-bit pregnant female guppy) but, on hearing the crickets, I conceived Plan A, which was to record them in situ.

Needless to say, next time I was there with my trusty Zoom H4n, not a chirrup was to be heard. While the RMF went to have her water tested (the aquarium’s that is, not hers) I went to look at the crickets. The crickets looked out at me, from their little plastic boxes containing little cardboard crenellations. I had come to understand on previous visits that nobody actually kept crickets as pets. Oh no: instead, people that keep reptiles as pets need them as a live feed for their little darlings. I was about to head up towards the fish again when I caught sight of the ‘reduced to clear’ section of cricket world, and wished I hadn’t.

It would appear that reptiles aren’t over fussy about just how live their food is: for a bargain price, the reptile lovers could take home a boxful of half dead, clinically dead, and dying crickets, grasshoppers, locusts and the like. Like all convenience foods, it seems, crickets and the rest have a shelf life. They waved their mandibles and antennae at me, pathetically, and I felt a twinge of sympathy for the wee critters. I mean, it’s not much of a choice, is it, getting snapped up by some bearded gecko or left to peg out under the unforgiving striplights of a retail shed?

Which partially explains why I ended up buying a full price box of brown crickets. ‘Oh,’ said the tall girl behind the till, ‘What is it you’ve got?’ Meaning of course, which reptile was awaiting a live dinner, its basilisk eyerevolving slowly in anticipation?

‘Err, nothing,’ I felt compelled to say, before launching into a probably over-detailed explanation of why I needed them. Just outside the store, we met two of the RMF’s work colleagues, the aforementioned art teachers. Again the explanation; this time, the reaction I described at the start. I considered a cheap rejoinder about the hat, but resisted.

Back home, the presence of a boxful of rustling insectoid life was considered less than welcome, really on any of our parts. The crickets went into the conservatory while I did a bit of reasearch. This revealed:

  1. Crickets can be fed on most vegetables, including parsley;
  2. They have an adult life span of a few weeks, so even without the intervention of the Lizard People, it wasn’t like they were a pet for life;
  3. Brown crickets are especially favoured amongst the keepers of reptiles, as they make virtually no sound.

Yup. Guess which kind I’d bought.

As an aside, it was amazing how much information on crickets in fact came from sites dedicated to reptile aficionados. Apparently, depending on how many scaly things you keep, you might need entire roomfuls of crickets just to maintain a food supply for them. Hence the desire for quiet ones. It seemed to me a bit ironic that the main sites I was consulting to keep my crickets alive, were in fact dedicated to seeing they were funnelled towards certain death. It gave me another twinge of fellow feeling for the little chaps.

However, after a day or so of watching mounds of home-grown parsley disappear in the box, and not a single sound beyond that infernal scrabbling, I decided enough was enough. It was time for my brown crickets to roam free across the Fife countryside, taking their chances in the local ecosystem – and, I hoped, not mucking it up in the process.

Walking nonchalantly out of the house and past the window of my ever-vigilant neighbours, I took the crickets to the closed off road at the side of our housing estate and had a quick glance left and right to ensure no dog walkers were about.

I looked down at the little fellers, crowded now at the front of their box. They stared back at me, mutely. I appreciated that I was probably sending them to certain death – Scotland in May is probably not within their recommended temperature range – and yet, somehow, I felt I was doing the best I could for them. In fact, I felt like some kind-hearted First World War general about to send his brave boys over the top, knowing that the German machine guns were, as likely as not, still operational.

As such, I felt some sort of pep talk was necessary. ‘Well, boys,’ I said, in a non-gender specific way, ‘I’ve done what I can for you. It’s down to you, now.’

Predictably, the crickets said nothing in reply as they scrambled into the undergrowth.

So there you are. Cricket, the sport: absolutely marvellous. Only game worth a tinker’s curse, imho. Crickets, the insect: best sampled via Freesound.

 

 

 

(1) I feel compelled to tell one of my favourite Dylan stories, which concerns that particular song.

Interviewer:’When you say in the lyric, “people don’t live or die, people just float,” what did you have in mind?’

Dylan: ‘I needed something to rhyme with “coat.”‘

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Coming Soon

Leave a comment Posted by on March 26, 2016

I’ve been neglecting the blog of late, dear reader(s). There’s a few reasons for that, but I hope to raise my game a bit over the coming weeks. Next up, a translation of a Mexican review of Kula Shaker’s new album, K 2.0.

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You’ll Be Hearing From Me (quite a bit, actually)

Leave a comment Posted by on December 4, 2015

Sunday, 29th November 2015

Regular readers of this blog (if such creatures do exist) will know that it’s a bit, well, irregular. I could just use everyone else’s excuse that I’m incredibly busy, but actually, it’s also that I pretty much decided at the get go that I would only put something up when I felt I had something to say. And, as I gaze out on an increasingly soggy Fife landscape this morning (later: snowy), I reflect that I have quite a bit to say at the moment, actually.

The last five years have been a bit up and down for me on a personal basis: a brief tickle from the Grim Reaper (I had a melanoma successfully removed from my arm in 2011) and losing both my parents, my Mum in 2011 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s, and my Dad, much more unexpectedly, in January last year. At the same time, I’ve seen Daughter and Heiress grow up, and I thank my lucky stars I’ve been in a job that entails me being around most of the time to see her do it.

The latest D & H news, in case there’s anyone on the planet who doesn’t know, is that she’s had an unconditional acceptance for Napier University to do English – her second choice, but a strong one, I think. She seems to want to do journalism: the little blighter can write, certainly. No idea who she gets that from. Actually, I do – her grandfathers, both of whom have published books. And her uncle, for that matter.

As anyone who’s lost their parents will know, your world changes afterwards: celebrating big moments like Heather’s exam successes and her uni acceptance, as well as the excitement of buying and doing up a run down flat in Edinburgh (of which more in a separate blog) will always have the sepia edge of regret that you can’t share the news with the ones who’ve gone. I miss them more than I can put into words, as I do friends and colleagues like my buddy Stuart Crosbie, taken far too early by that modern epidemic (so it seems) of cancer.

What I hadn’t expected was the effect all of this would have on my creative life. Back in 2010, I would have called myself a writer, first and foremost: around this time that year, I had finished the first draft of my novel, Buddha Belly (which may now be published as The Wrong Box – you’ll be hearing from me on that presently, too) and Writers’ Bloc was still going full steam. If my memory serves me well, our Unbound appearance at the Book Festival that year had been one featuring words and music. Andrew J Wilson’s contribution featured one Kenny Mackay on guitar, and Charlotte Halton on sax, whilst my own had Mark Allan and myself on guitar, Charlotte on sax, and Kelly Brooks singing.

Looking back, that now feels like a turning point. Kelly and I had started working together on the Venus Carmichael material in 2008, but that feeling of being in a bigger band – however briefly for one night only – reminded me even more forcefully what a blast making music with others was.

How things have changed in those five years. As I explained recently, I’m now in two bands – Tribute to Venus Carmichael and Isaac Brutal and the Trailer Trash Express; my output this year has consisted exclusively of songwriting: my last gig had me impersonating Leonard Cohen, backed by the Brutal Acoustic Division, and my next one will be another musical one, Tribute to Venus Carmichael sharing a bill with Norman Lamont and the Heaven Sent!

It is strange how the loss of my parents seems to have coincided with this. After my Mum went, I stopped writing short stories almost completely, and turned to poetry – for the first time since I was a teenager, more or less. When my Dad died, all desire to write went altogether, for months. My traditional solace of trying to make sense of the world through writing things down just didn’t seem to work any more. What came back, gradually, was music.

I’ve been exceptionally lucky in acquiring, along the way, some really talented people to help and encourage me in a musical direction. Gavin Inglis has always been a close collaborator from the inception of Writers’ Bloc and before: but he was the one that introduced me to the idea that, with a couple of extra bits of kit and some software, you could become your own record producer. His introducing me to Kelly was critical to the existence of Venus Carmichael – a great singer who enunciates every word of my precious lyrics perfectly, she’s also a tough critic of the new material, which ensures you only get to hear the good stuff, once it’s shaped into transmissible form.

Similarly Craig Harkness, known almost universally as Harky, has helped me a huge deal with music production, sound engineering, and just about everything else as I’ve gone on this journey (to use the dreaded phrase). Mark and Kenny are always a pleasure to work with on musical projects involving Brutal and beyond, and now people like Graham Crawford, Norman Lamont, and Martin McGroarty fill out my musical family of fellow travellers, collaborators, and general good chaps with a good ear.

I’ve not given up on writing completely. Writing friends like Gav, Halsted Bernard, Bram Gieben, Jane Mckie, and Kirsti Wishart stay in touch. The aforementioned novel is due out next year. Besides, this blog  doesn’t write itself. Another post coming up arises out of a talk I did recently to some poor souls at Liberton High about songwriting: I did a slide which kind of sums up what I’ve learned about writing generally, and I thought I might work that up.

And so, as I clatter towards Christmas like a carthorse carrying a load of donkey jackets on an untreated surface, I have plans. Before the Venus gig on the 17th, more blog entries, and more solo-project music and spoken word. In the meantime, I suppose all of the above goes some way to explaining why the first of the new Soundcloud tracks below is pretty dark, and the other one a bit slushy and sentimental (well, as sentimental as I get these days). I have something else up my sleeve which might be ready in a week or so if I get the time. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these. As ever, any feedback gratefully received.

music and writing, poetry, progress reports

You’ll Be Hearing From Me (Again)

Leave a comment Posted by on October 3, 2015

So I have two bits of news. Firstly, my novel of lawyers behaving very badly indeed, which may or may not now be called Buddha Belly, is to be published by Thunderpoint. I received the preliminary edits back from Seonaid yesterday, none of which look too scary. I’m actually looking forward to nailing down the final version.

What’s it about? Property lawyer Simon English has been detailed to look after a client, Jimmy Ahmed, during a night on the town. All seems to have gone well until he wakes up hungover, with a blurred memory of the night before, and Jimmy dead, naked, and in the bath. With his toe stuck up the tap.

To solve the mystery of what happened that night, he has to work with Karen Clamp, a conspiracy theorist from a run-down Edinburgh scheme, who has her own reasons for solving the mystery; cope with his senior partner, aka The Rottweiler; decide which authorities you call, exactly, when your client’s dead with his toe stuck up the tap, and whether you can trust them when you arrive. It’s full of sex, swearing, and Sir Walter Scott references, and I reckon you’ll love it.

I had a foretaste of the kind of star author treatment I can expect (the book’s due out next year some time) last Thursday, when I went to the lovely Suzanne D’Corsay‘s launch of The Bonnie Road, from the same publisher, at Waterstone’s, St Andrews (hence the earlier post about driving home far too fast to the music of Foals, in case you hadn’t worked out the location.) Suzanne and her family, as well as Seonaid, made me feel very welcome: her book is an intriguing tale of witchcraft in late Seventies St Andrews, and I can’t wait to read it.

The second bit of news is, at least for me, just as exciting: meet the new keyboard/harmonica player for the legendary Isaac Brutal band! I’ve known Mark and Kenny, in particular, for a few years now, and collaborated with them on a few music and spoken word projects, but it feels like the next level altogether to be asked to join the band … incidentally, Tribute to Venus Carmichael fans, don’t worry – you’ll be hearing more from her too, soon I hope.

In many ways, it feels like full circle for me. I played in bands at university (not very successful ones, mind) and it was partly an accident of geography – not much in the way of a music scene in central Fife, I’m afraid – that cut me off from doing anything more ambitious than living room guitar for many years, and shoved me sideways towards writing. It was only through the spoken word scene that I began to reconnect with music again, first through the Venus Carmichael project with Kelly, and then other stuff with Mark, Kenny and others. I’m gutted to be missing their next gig by being in Spain – more details soon – but, in the meantime, have dialled in my first stab at a keyboard track for their forthcoming album. The rough mixes are sounding good…

Next up, news of a forthcoming Leonard Cohen tribute night, which will feature Isaac Brutal Acoustic.

 

 

 

 

 

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Andrew C Ferguson’s Virtual Fringe: Leaving the Party Early

Leave a comment Posted by on August 27, 2015

I had my bout of post-Fringe tristesse early this year, on Tuesday night. As has often been the case, it was exiting a show in the Jura Unbound series at the Book Festival, in the late evening, and walking along a deserted Melville Street to where I’d left the car, preparing for the 50 minute or so drive home.

It wasn’t that the performance – Illicit Ink’s show, featuring the excellent Halsted Bernard – had brought me down any. Nor was it the fact that, instead of being part of the performance (as I have been at Unbound before, both with the self-same Illicit Ink and Writers’ Bloc) I was an audience member. In fact, quite the opposite: it has been a pleasure this year to sit back and watch my friends perform the hell out of stuff, when all I had to do was sit and watch.

It was the sense I had of leaving the party early: it was a school night; I was driving back over for non Fringe-related matters the next night; those were the main two excuses. But to be honest, I’ve had the same emotion after performing at the Spiegelbar too. Part of it, I think, is just how lonely that west side of the New Town is at that time, even during the Festival: you go in less than five minutes from the creatively spinning carousel that is the Book Festival at night to a place of solitude and parked cars, gearing up for the long drive back to central Fife.

I think it’s the feeling that, no matter how long you stayed up and how many shows you went to – or were a part of – you would always still be leaving the party early. There have been exceptions, of course. Like the year I was staying at Gavin Inglis’s flat, your man being something of a night owl at the best of times. I never knew a breakfast of Eggs Benedict could actually literally bring you back from the dead, but I found that out the next morning. Or it could’ve been the triple strength Americano. But my money’s on the Hollandaise sauce.

Anyways, mustn’t grumble. This year, as regular readers will know, your blog has been doing up a flat in Blackford, and two shows at Summerhall have been followed by a pleasant stroll down the hill to bed, instead of picking up speed past the Cramond Brig (or Miller and Carter Steakhouse, as it now is) feeling like I’m going in the wrong direction.

Plus I have musical plans for the rest of the year, lots of them. First up is the Venus Carmichael gig on 19th September, which I’ll start promoting next week when all this Fringe hoo-ha dies down. I had come hotfoot from a rehearsal with Kelly for that, via South Queensferry (see below). But there’s more, much more, so stay tuned!

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… in the meantime …

Leave a comment Posted by on February 8, 2015

So I’ve started my review of Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous album, at least in my head, but since it’s been available in all good record shops for 40 years I’m reckoning there’s no pressing hurry.

In the meantime, if you want to hear a rare example of my attempting to sing, rather than speak, over music, my latest Soundcloud release can now be heard…

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