30 August 2017
Apologies for being out of touch recently but my typing finger has been rather overworked as I concentrated on finishing the sleeve notes for ‘Songs From the Mirror’ and ‘Suits’. I’ve collected all the various slides and photos and they are now in possession of Mark Wilkinson who is now scanning like a madman converting all the images to digital for the artwork design.
I spent days combing through old fanzines and documents piecing the elaborate history of 1992- 1995 together and to be honest I had to leave out so much, especially from the ‘Suits’ era, as there wasn’t the space.
James Cassidy sent me up his ‘memoirs’ from the period which amounted to around 7000 words. These had to be whittled down and spread between the album sleeve notes as they were an important addition and another great perspective.
In total ‘Mirror’ comes in at around 12 000 words and ‘Suits’ is a particularly hefty 15 000! Basically in the last fortnight I have written a novel!
I’ve sent them out to the usual suspects for review and they got glowing reports. The photos I found really compliment them and I found some fascinating long forgotten images some of which had to be shredded. 🙂
I wouldn’t have believed that so much could have happened during that period and that so many stories were generated.
The documentary for ‘Mirror’ is now being edited by David Barras and Scott MacKay and they are going through reams of footage from my personal video collection and from my friend Henk Tempelman in Holland who filmed a lot of shows over the years.We have, thanks to Henk, a full show from the 1993 Vredenberg Utrecht show that was recorded for the ‘Sushi’ album and we will be incorporating the relevant songs into the documentary. The DVD will take the longest to complete as all the songs for the CDs are now with Steve Vantsis for compilation before going to Calum Malcolm for mastering in early October. Both titles are on line and will be ready for the first week of December.
The T shirt I’m wearing in the photo I had forgotten about till the other day. This was the design given to me by ‘Viz’ magazine after they included me in a ‘Billy the Fish’ strip in one edition. After having already published a photo of me walking naked and carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels outside a venue where the band and crew buses were parked together . It had been sent to them by my ex sound engineer ‘Privet’ Hedge after a particularly drunken night in France playing ‘strip jack’ ‘Trivial Pursuit’ with a couple of local ladies who couldn’t speak English. Needless to say they lost heavily and I decided to strip off in sympathy before heading over to the other bus to get more alcohol.Young, foolish and too drunk to care at the time I hadn’t envisaged the future ‘betrayal’. For the record the young ladies got home safe and unharmed. The band and crew however were badly damaged! 🙂
It was really cool of the ‘Viz’ guys to let me use the image on the shirt and it’s still a favourite.
Mark Wilkinson and Sandy Fearful are working on the t shirt designs for the December tour. I’m keeping this simple and we most probably will have an ivory grey T with the ‘glass with flowers’ image and a black polo with a ‘glass’ embroidery design.
I’m back into clearing the decks again and with the SAS shows in the coming weeks I really need to prepare for some serious ‘Weltschmerz’ application once they are out the way. It’s been an extraordinary busy period this last month and my “heid has been birling” on occasion as there have been some heavy demands from outside the normal day to day circle of routine problems. Dealing with them and keeping focused on the ‘day job’ has been difficult but I’m getting rebalanced again. With the remasters moving into assembly and production 2 massive logs in the jam have been sent off downstream and I have a huge sense of relief.
Next!