Category Archives: Music

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.

We’re strangely irrational creatures, aren’t we? On Saturday I travelled about 80 miles to a gig with my function band, Eight to the Bar. It was in a British Legion hut somewhere near a cliff on the north Devon coast. The engagement was never going to be economic – the band has only recently got good enough to charge for gigs, and even more recently have most of them realised they should. So we only charged 200 quid (for our 8-piece) for 3 hours of solid work.

Yesterday afternoon I drove over to play some tenor sax in a newly-formed band. It was a 50 minute journey to the rehearsal, but I’d decided it was worthwhile because the keyboard player is a guy I grew up with and we’ve not met up for – we reckoned – 45 years. We went our separate ways across the wide world, and now find we’ve providentially ended up in the same neck of the woods in the west country.

I’ve posted another new song on the website front page. It’s a few innocuous soul-inspired thoughts on creation, evolution and alchemy and replaces the previous ditty (so if you want to hear that or any of its predecessors, tough). As I’ve said before I’ll put the whole album up at some stage, but maybe later than planned as some of the material may be diverted for another project.

Just to say I’ve replaced the song on my website front page with this new offering. This is You Ain’t Gonna Take My Home, which was another of those originally conceived for a film score. It’s about an  elderly, poor, man being visited by a bureaucrat telling him he’s going to be reallocated to some kind of new accommodation. But we don’t all lie down and submit… As before, this should stay up about a month , and I’ll aim to put the whole album online when it’s finished in the New Year.