From Garageland to Switzerland

It was a l-o-n-g day yesterday, much of which was spent in Andy's garage/studio recording 3 tracks with Mike and Dave to use for getting gigs for our ongoing rhythm 'n' blues project and having a very good time in the process. Volume restrictions meant that we couldn't use acoustic drums (Dave did a fine job using an electronic kit) or our usual guitar and bass amps (Mike plugged his Markbass amplifier straight into the recording gear and I used his excellent Blackstar HT-5 combo which sounded so good that I might well have to get one for myself) and we couldn't record everything live (shame!) but with the backing tracks sounding good it only remains for Andy to put the vocals on and we should have ourselves a pretty good demo. I'll tell you what the songs are when we've finished them- I might even work out how to post them on here...

And it was a good evening too, with an excellent gig from Roy Hill at The Load of Hay. Andy and myself managed to remember 20 or so minutes of songs we used to sing, and Roy played for something approaching 2 hours (!) as well as introducing me to his mate Simon who, incredibly, is tour chef for The Rolling Stones among others. Apparently the stories about Keith Richards only eating Shepherds Pie are all true- Simon makes them to Joe Cocker's recipe and writes things like The Riffmaster in the potato topping. On any other night this would have sounded like a mad story, but on a night where the headlining act began his set with a story about swimming the channel aged 9 with an ironing board in his mouth aged it almost sounded ordinary. Brilliantly surreal and at the same time incredibly perceptive and poignant, if his long-delayed album 'Switzerland' is a good as it promises to be then it might just give him the breakthrough he deserves- let's hope so anyway.