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 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’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 [...]

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 [...]

Last year during the Air tour in the USA, I was discussing with JB & Nico the fact that Moon Safari was 10 years old in 2008. Its always easy to look at something like that and feel melancholy, retrospective, maybe slightly negative? For them, they’ve gone on to produce other great work; but Moon [...]

I’ve just finished a recording session up at our studio with Jules Maxwell - he’s producing my new album. We got really stuck in this week, digging out the sessions from last year and trying to make sense of what’s been done and what had to be done. Jules is just amazing - with such [...]

I am starting to record some guitars. I couldn’t find a pick anywhere… until I remembered my friend Richie brought me a little present from Paisley Park… he snaffled it off Prince’s music stand in the studio!!

No wonder they sound funky.

I hate the whole concept of social networking, the building block of “Web 2.0″ - the way we use the internet now. Actually, while we’re at it, the whole “Web 2.0″ thing is starting to get a bit dull, but I’ll post about that on my company blog (G-RAFF BLOG) in due course. I don’t [...]

Saturday morning, and a right stormy one it is too. I love these northern skies, especially with the view from my mum’s house where you can look right out over the town and the sea… Christmas is over, and I always feel a bit weird in the days that follow - like no-one quite knows [...]

I downloaded the Radiohead record last night. What did I pay for it? Nothing. I thought to myself, “I’ll check it out, and if its good, I’ll pay something at a later date.” And I will - I’ve been working this way with shareware for a while now and have honoured my self-made agreements with [...]

I had another hat on last week - presenting Guitar Rig for Native Instruments and helping Apple show the amazing new Logic Studio at a couple of workshops. I say workshops… that was something of a misnomer, as demonstrated beautifully in Liverpool, when a poor kid came up at the end and said, “I brought [...]

I got an email from Foy Vance today that just said “FOX CAKE (which is our pet way of saying “for f**k’s sake”) POST WILL YE” plus three hundred exclamation marks. After hosing myself, I decided to respond - with a great and unexpected riposte - by, eh, posting.
Yes it has been a long time. [...]

So here I am, back in London. My garden is in full bloom and really beautiful. The mayhem of New York City seems a long time ago, as once again the strange accordion of time pushes and pulls its dusty old bellows pumping haunting melodies into my soul. The last post was definitely the low [...]

The lights of Las Vegas are starting to glow in the dusk. The blue MGM Grand is towering in the distance. There’s the Bellagio… planes flying in overhead, bringing the adventurers into this twisted adult Disneyland in the desert. Its one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been… nothing in my brain nor my heart [...]

Such a miserable day is not conduisive to taking long walks in Milan. The sky is a mottle of stained greys, rain hardly even having the energy to fall. I decided, looking at the map, that Stazione Centrale was close enough to venture towards, perhaps with the vague notion of picking up something to eat [...]

When your tour bus bathroom has a heated floor, crocodile-skin print wood-panelled walls and a porthole revealing a virtual aquarium, you just know things are going to be OK.
In the past, I have come to associate tour buses with the curious perfume of nicotine-infused cushions and portable toilet fluid, a foul and heady concotion [...]