You've got to wake up and live!

16 days 22 hours and 15 mins to go...

Fantastic news, I looked in my mailbox yesterday morning and saw an email from Nick, saying he was feeling better, had dragged himself into work and was back working on my tracks, he said he’d send something over later, which he did, and then I got to speak to him. I found out he has suspected pancreatitis and had a really rough time of it over the last few days. He now has some medication that is doing the job and is now able sleep well at night.
I am so pleased for him and I am so pleased for me, because if feels like the sun has come out from behind the clouds and lit up my life (wait a minute, it actually just has! Oh, it’s gone back in again!)
So, he’s back and I’m back on track, sort of, still waiting for the final artwork to come over from Brazil (yes Brazil, don’t get me going on that one), I am still anxious and that won’t change until I get the artwork through. Also I designed the cover for the Christmas single and I am waiting to hear from the CD manufacturers if the files are ok to print, I’ve never done this before so that could be a problem, (or is that an opportunity?) 
Update: I have just found out that my cover is fine, phew relief!


Wake Up

The first track of our first album, Beggars Can Be Choosers, and it was pretty much the opening number to our live set for the majority of our gigs over the years. The recording of this album was a complete nightmare, we turned up and our engineer failed to show and after some frantic phone calls it turned up he thought it was the following week, incriminations all round but no proof of who was responsible for the misconception. It was so long ago it doesn’t matter now.
It was the height of summer, it was boiling out, and the studio was full of double glazed windows letting the sunshine, turn the studio into a greenhouse, there was no air conditioning and we were not allowed to open the windows because it would upset the neighbours (this was Hoxton Square we were talking about).
The place was an oven and the guitars kept going out of tune due to the heat. We were meant to play blistering punk rock in this sweltering caldron of bad air. I just wanted to lie on the grass outside and feel the cool breeze, (if there was any) on my face.
So exhausting were the recordings that after we had finished, I fell ill and was bed ridden for four days afterwards. The strain was too much, I hated it.
But, we did manage to make a fine album, through blood sweat and tears.
Wake up as a song was a wakeup call (see what I did there?) to everyone to live life fully every day, against a backdrop of a world that is forever telling us we will fail, that trying is not enough, that succeeding is unlikely and that people that achieve great things, achieve them because they are great and not, ordinary people that become great by achieving great things. It is saying always stretch yourself, always strive to be better, get out of your comfort zone and live!!!

It was also very much an expression of finding myself through punk rock, which rescued me from the hopeless morass of nothing that appeared to be my destiny. I realised that the future is there to be made and not an abstract concept that you are forced kicking and screaming into. That was the lesson I learned, a lesson I tried to pass on though this number.

It also had a very large and very good fanzine named after it created by Dave T.

Here’s the song, take a listen…