LOCKDOWN LARKS!

In past years I'd written songs for the bands I'd played in, and then neglected them after moving on to other line-ups.  Lockdown provided an ideal opportunity to dig 'em up, apply the electrodes to their scrawny necks and squirt in some voltage.

 

The extraordinary Jane Williams has sung her heart out, occasionally morphing into those sizzling siblings, the "SONGBIRD SISTERS".  (Sometimes there's three of 'em - Sometimes she's free of 'em.  Sometimes there's four of 'em - Sometimes there's more of 'em).  She too has contributed songs of her own.      

 

Our co-conspirators were necessarily few... When the Lockdown restrictions were eased, Bill Frampton and Joe Trudgeon snuck in with their respective string basses:  Paul Archibald too, with his drums.  Our thanks to them.

 

The essential glue holding all this together has been my friend and close neighbour Heath Gordon, whose ear for acoustic niceties and mastery of arcane digital techniques have astonished me as the toxic weeks festered by.  He turned my box-room into a satellite studio, thus keeping the width of Hatherley Road as our "social distance".  A genius and a perfectionist! 

 

Yearning (track 8) differs from all the others having been produced mainly in Cardiff by Jane who composed and sang it, playing piano and organ, with guitar by Pete Mathison and bass guitar by Anth Caplen.  My saxes were added much later in Bristol, with audio magic from Heath. 

 

Apart from this, I arranged and produced all the other tracks, sang a bit, and played guitar, clarinet(s), soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxes.  Oh, and a bicycle bell (with the bike still attached).  If Jane embodies the "Songbird Sisters", may I be the "Four Horn-men of the Puckered Lips"? 

 

Thanks, too, are due to Dave Daggers for a fun photo-shoot.   

 

                               Andy Leggett - December