About
Keith James
This season, as a small preface to our autumn concert tour I have decided to write this page myself and furthermore to keep it short.
I expect that by now most of you know what both Rick and myself sound and look like. We perform fairly extensive concert tours across the UK every spring and autumn always enjoying our instrumental companionship. www.rickfoot.com Together we have created what I often feel is something quite rare; we seem to have found ourselves in a small but beautiful side stream...
The character of our music has mutated slowly over many hundreds of concerts having first been thrown together by one of life's strange but chaotic twists of fate back in 2002. Our audiences can be as young as early teens and as old as - well old-ish - we play great swathes of dates across the UK; often 50 or so in a season, all in really great arts venues and all to, what seems to be a hidden world of extremely kind and sensitive people.
Pieces of advice and anecdotes that I have picked up along the way
'A good song should last at least as long as a Volvo'
L Cohen
'Never record demos'
Bruce Springsteen
'Never have your hair cut if you are in a bad mood'
Uncle Don
'Don't go back'
Owen Bray
'What do you realise now that you have known all along'
Chris Neil
You must read if you find the right moment in your life
100 years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marques
Daniel Martin - John Fowles
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Moon and a sixpence - W Somerset Maugham
Round and round in my car
In our nature - Jose Gonzalez
Sky like a broken Clock - Kelly Jo Phelpes
Oh Mercy - Bob Dylan
Hejira - Joni Mitchell
Came within an inch of certain death (all involving dilapidated vehicles)...
May 1981 Hampshire
Steering rack broke on Morris 1000 traveller. Drove through a farm gate at some speed, down a bank, within inches of a large tree, straight into a river (full PA system and guitars etc in the back)
Jan 1988 Brazil
Drove a beaten up Series 1 Beetle belonging to a nun in between two enormous USA style trucks on the A1 national trunk road from Porto Alegre (this road, at the time was were one is offered a carriageway for each direction and a middle one for dare devil overtaking in either direction - the poor little Beetle actually touched both trucks by a hair)
Aug 1991 Santorini
Parked a hire Suzuki Jeep in a gravel car park just outside of ia on the island in Santorini, Greece. The gravel car park is a the top of a sheer and vicious drop of hundreds of meters straight down to jagged rocks and dashing waves. At the very moment when I parked the bag of spanners I discovered that the hand break was entirely non functional - I can't bring myself to tell you the rest as it still makes me anxious to this day
