Thursday 18 September 2014

My first album release since 1988

It has been a long time, I know it has. I have reasons for this and they are legion. One of the reasons I gave up music in 1992 or thereabouts was I had lived rock 'n' roll for every waking hour for 15 years and I felt I had to come up for air and experience the world outside my self-created bubble. I was holding down a full time job and writing, playing, rehearsing, recording, organising and touring at the same time. Every holiday I had available from work was used playing at home and abroad so now I wanted to go away, relax and not think of a band anymore. I wanted a less exhausting and less complicated life and I didn't want to be angry anymore.
So I quit, completely and forever, and I found life was good (despite my still being angry at injustice in the world). I lived, loved, laughed, settled down and had a family but the guitar remained in the cupboard.

Unplayed.

I knew that if I played at home, I would write songs and If I wrote songs I would want to play songs and If I played songs I would want to record them and If I record them I would want them to be released and then I'd end up back where I started. So I figured, if I don't play the guitar at home all will be well.

And so it was...until I was contacted in 2004 and asked if I would like to contribute a Neurotics track to a new CD collection called 'The Stortbeat Collective' which I happily agreed, but that then led to a suggestion that I might reform the Newtown Neurotics purely to play the launch party due to take place in November 2004.

I refused and then relented, the reasons for this are quite involved too and because of that I documented my move back into the limelight in a Kindle book called 'You're Always Alone With A Neurotic' which in a nutsell is a A tri-timeline, bi-navigational odyssey. 50 blogs of hate, self loathing, death, rock ‘n’ roll, politics, the War On Terror, anxiety, illness, frustration, hope, happiness and the exhilaration of being a cult punk rock star. This can be bought from Amazon by following the title link. 

I then played for a number of years with a fine reformed Newtown Neurotics to play our old material but stayed away from writing new songs. Eventually after I had wrangled out as much fun as I could from that, I then decided to do something else.

That something else was to play, not only solo but acoustically too.
I started playing at home
I started writing songs
I started playing live
I then wanted to record those songs
I then wanted to release those songs.

So after all those years, here I am with a new set of songs and I am now attempting to record and release them on my own label Cruel Binary (freshly created) by the beginning of November.
I hasn't been easy and I don't know if I'll make my deadline but I am working like the devil to try to.


I am now a full time musician and I celebrate my 60th birthday this year, what a fitting way to do that by releasing a new album.

It is called Jenga Society
It will have a single released from it called 'It's Christmas Time!
Strange eh?
Yes it is, you heard it here first.

1 comment:

  1. Good news ! fan since the beginning

    I look forward to hearing the new tracks

    ReplyDelete

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