Category Archives: Music

No posts in over a week! That’s partly because the stuff I’ve been reading doesn’t really suggest anything of public interest . (I did a quick study on a dozen or so reasons why Matthew 16 isn’t about the Papacy, but there’s no reason to blog on that either.) But the main reason was my preparing for a double concert with my saxophone choir yesterday – lunchtime on Lyme Regis seafront, with the echoes bouncing off the famous fossiliferous cliffs, and the ice-cream shop next door presenting us all with refreshments at the end. And in the early evening we played at a village music festival with a less peripatetic … Continue reading →

Last week the saxophone choir of which I am a small part took part in the Devon Performing Arts Festival in Exeter. It’s astonishing how playing a Queen number for three minutes before judges was so much more tiring than belting out rock for a paying audience for 2 hours was, in my other band, the weekend before. We were pipped to the top place in our section by a senior school sax group led by the same director as ours, which doesn’t surprise me as they were awfully good.

A good many years ago I owned an interesting guitar built by a guy called John Bailey, who made guitars for Ralph Mc Tell, Gordon Giltrap, Roy Harper, Robert Plant and other folkies and rockers on the London scene in the 60s. He also mader the first flat-back bazouki for John Pearse and a mandolin for Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. John died in 2011, some years after he retired to Dartmouth, and I had a chance to converse with him a year or two before. Interest in his work seems now to be picking up. So I’ve done a set of webpages documenting this particular guitar’s 44 … Continue reading →

Whadya know – I have my own Wikipedia entry. Well, not my own, exactly. It’s actually in the entry about luthier John Bailey, who admittedly isn’t that well known. And it’s in a paragraph by Gordon Giltrap in which he mentions in passing that I bought a Bailey guitar off him and later sold it back. Unfortunately Gordon spells my name wrong. But you can link to it **->->->->HERE<-<-<-<-**, and use the search engine’s “find” function, and  there, about half way down … my very own encyclopedia article. What’s the betting some sad atheist comes along and deletes it?

For those of you who are interested (or haven’t had a CD forced upon you) my new solo album Bumpy Music is finally up on my website. I think you”’ agree it’s pretty different from the previous album, 14th Century Marmoset since I had some songs to use up and was missing doing rock.

Part of the reason for paucity of new posts over the last week or so is writing and recording a new (and rather odd) song, now called Miserere. I’ve stuck it up on the website in case you’re interested. That now completes the album, so at some stage I’ll put the whole thing up on the site, but I need to get a CD sleeve etc sorted out for “the UK market” (ie both my friends) first.