S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

Jacko is on the TV. Mylene Klass is on the TV. La Roux is on the TV.
TV is off…
Sorry for the ridiculous delay in posting - nearly three months. I’m going to adopt the Leo Abrahams model and post once a month… hopefully in that amount of time I can scramble enough hit and [...]

I had a mad couple of nights last week. One of them involved heading up to Foy Vance’s house at 11:30pm to help out on mixing and recording a bit on his new EPs. He had been buried deep in his studio for a couple of weeks, ambitiously trying to record two EPs for release [...]

I’ve decided to celebrate my 13,000th birthday on 15th August. I’ll be on tour, as I’ve made the decision to go on the road with the mighty Brendan Perry, almost 10 years since I went on tour with him last time. It has been a hard decision to reach… when you have a family, and [...]

I ordered some wine through Sainsburys online shopping. A decent enough Chianti - half price - total steal at £4.99. Ordered 24 bottles. When the delivery didn’t arrive I called customer services only to be told that (a) any order of more than 10 of the same thing had to be ordered a week in [...]

I’ve succumbed to Twitter (alarmingly, for both G-RAFF and personal). I actually find it quite lightweight and fun, in the same way I find Facebook utterly invasive. I’ve actually started writing a Flash API wrapper for it, just for a bit of fun on the side. Hopefully, FlashTwitter will make it easier for people to [...]

I heard the news on Radio 4 that John Martyn died today, aged 60.
I’m sure tributes will be flying around all over the place… well-deserved for the most part. What an incredible musician and songwriter…
I was lucky enough to get to play on stage with him one night. Juliet Turner had been supporting him for [...]

Foy Vance was on iChat today… up popped a little blue speech bubble “by the way, post will ya? its been too long”. To which I replied, “I have nothing to say… with so much happening in the world that makes me want to cry or jump for joy, I don’t know where I am [...]

I’m doing a gig this Friday night at St. Olave’s church near Tower Hill in London. Five Ants and Jules Maxwell will be there and we’ll all be doing a few tracks each… and for sure it will be a fine evening.
It starts at 8pm. Its on a donation basis, and any money raised will [...]

bushism_hostile1Its coming down, folks. FTSE100 bombing again this-morning, trading suspended in Russia… Hard to know where this is going to end…
Things are as they ever were under this roof. I’m sipping a cup of tea, sitting scanning through an iTunes selection of some stuff I’m going to put on my new record - possibly even [...]

This is the title of the new album by Brian Eno and David Byrne. It made me relatively pleased to actually check in and see my name in the credits - guitars on on four tracks - link here. It sounds great, actually. Leo Abrahams did a lot of production work on it, so I’m [...]

I had a nice time doing a couple of events for Apple last week, demonstrating Logic Studio - which, and I must promise this is not a partisan or promotion-led comment - is an amazing piece of software for the money. I had to rebuild one of my tracks (Happytown) using only Logic’s software instruments [...]

I’m sitting here in as close to silence as you can get in London, sipping a Knockando Scotch whisky, courtesy of my great friend and business partner Neil in New Zealand. I can’t even remember now why he deemed it necessary to dispatch the bottle my way, but there you go. I don’t drink on [...]

Sayonara Deadweight artwork by Gerry Murphy
Behind me in the kitchen I can hear the BBC voiceovers in China as the Olympics begin… trumpets and fanfares, a sea of applause and excitement.
In a much less grandiose way, I have released my new album Sayonara Deadweight into the ether… and yes, the Chinese numerology of “all the [...]

There’s a faint scratching on the ceiling of our kitchen, and I think it must be mice.
I am up late, trying to gather a few moments of peace and quiet. We had our second baby (Poppy) on 14th June, and ever since, I’ve been up every morning looking after Luka… the days are much longer [...]

Quoth Foy Vance - “…if anything is playing in heaven, this is it. In fact, if its not this, I’m not going…”
What a nice phone call to get last night!! Foy called up on hearing a mix of “Stars And Satellites”, the final track on the record, which we’ve just finished recording and are mixing [...]

I am sitting here listening to a record by Burning Codes aka. Paul Archer and its just blowing me away… like its been around for a thousand years and is honed by years of sea crashing on its rocks. I can’t explain the beauty of it. Its reminding me of my favourite bits of Vangelis [...]

Well, the excellent news from south-east London is that Alan Van Kleef and I finished the mixes for the first 6 tracks of the new album today, and I have to say I’m delighted with the way it sounds. Jules Maxwell’s production has really shaped it into something pretty special - an amazing journey of [...]

I recall a comment on a previous blog post (about what I believed to be the misplaced attempts by UK television journalists to shock us with their reports) by Dr. Andrew Scott, where he finished by saying “let’s not be stone hermits”… a cunning little phrase that said much… a plea not to switch off [...]

Typical… you spend the first four months of the year waiting for some sun, and when it comes, you are stuck in the windowless environment that is a recording studio - well, under normal circumstances, that would have been the case, but Jules (Maxwell - producing the album) and I took to the streets of [...]

My lemon of a MacBook Pro is no more - Apple are finally replacing it with a new improved one - 2.4MHz, 4GB RAM, big video card, 200MB hard drive, a reasonable upgrade from the one I bought over a year ago. Its a happy end to a sad saga, finalised in Regent Street Apple [...]