Always

A very intriguing Album. The writing, recording and mixing of this assortment of songs spans well over a decade. A particular era of my life when a number of things didn’t go well for me, a few of which, I only have myself to blame.

The initial sessions for these songs happened in, what was then, my studio near Henley on Thames. This was back in 2002 with a wonderful happy league of musicians with whom I worked regularly and who had initially supported me on my very first ‘Songs of Nick Drake’ tour earlier that year. So the five of us recorded almost an entire new Album of new original songs, plus one by Ralf McTell and another by Leonard Cohen. Having successfully completed the recordings (enthusiastically talked about by everyone who heard them) there was a series of events that compounded and lead to a horrible end to an era - no more joyous recording sessions. Matt, our trusty Bass player, flew off at short notice to join a tour with Heather Nova, James the immaculate drummer, with nothing less than a ‘Steve Gadd’ feel, suffered an unusually upsetting blow on the relationship front, Jerry, a tragic family loss and Richard, Pianist and Hammond player just became absent and disinterested, started his own studio in London and has fought under a different flag ever since. So, to add to this, returning home in the small hours from a concert in Southampton, I find a note on my pillow telling me that she has run off with her University Tutor, (his name was Mark- bless his cotton socks) She does love me, but it’s all over between us.

So I move with my entire studio to a House near Canterbury, which I had already bought together with Mark’s new girlfriend, and thus, during the fallout from this and the consequential years of life that followed, nothing more was recorded onto the master tapes of this Album.

Much later, in an entirely different chapter of my life, now in Wales 2015, I unpack a box of tapes and put one into the surviving tape machine, playing through the surviving studio monitor speakers, and i thought WoW! That was good! I hope all of those musicians have benefited by catching one of the four strong winds of fortune; we were something of a sinking vessel back then.

So with the patient help of Jake, who had, during the previous year meticulously recorded my Dylan Thomas Album. I set about revisiting these wonderful recordings. They were dislocated from their time in history, so I had to give them a new spirit, a new sense of purpose. The end result is an Album that I am both happy with and sentimental about in s schoolboy kind of way - was it ever meant to happen? Did it ever really happen in the way the way that I remember and enjoy in my heart. Most of the original recordings have been preserved exactly, a couple of them like ‘Imaginary Friends’ and ‘Festival’ have been embellished. The songs that have been added during the 2015 sessions are ‘Pantomime Horses’ and ‘Always’ written by Pablo Neruda