Category: music

  • Music Minds Charity Album

    Really happy to have contributed a cover version of one of my favourite Ronnie Lane songs  to a wonderful album raising money and awareness for mental health charities that will be released next month. Here’s a video with details about the album, artists and charities: The album, 40 songs deep, features some extremely well known…

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  • Read All about It

    Well maybe not all, but a couple of mentions I’ve enjoyed recently. The first is from the gig in Liverpool where I opened for Bennett Wilson Poole a couple of weeks ago (go and see them, listen and enjoy. Superb band breathing new life in to the Byrdsian jangle) and you can read it here.…

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  • Shake It Make It & Don’t Fake It

    My second solo album is now available from my Bandcamp site (still on iTunes and Spotify too and all the others). High resolution downloads available – name your own price. I hadn’t listened to it for a long time and I’m pleased with how it sounds, lo-fi yes, but it kind of suits the songs…

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  • Liverpool Friday 11th May

    Quick post to say I’m playing the wonderful 81 Renshaw Street, Liverpool venue on Friday. I’m opening for the superb Bennet Wilson Poole who fans of Americana/Byrds/Petty will absolutely love. Im on at 9 pm for 40 minutes and I’m doing all guitar songs going from Old 16 Tambourines songs right up to the here…

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  • Skin & Bone Acoustic Collection

    It’s hard to remember a time when there weren’t acoustic guitar slingers on every street corner en route to the back rooms of pubs around the country to play their bedroom classics at open mics and sessions, but at the time I recorded the songs on this collection, it was difficult for the budding James…

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  • The Sunny One

    The Sunny One I think this is my favourite of the many songs I’ve written with Brian Chin Smithers. For years Brian and I got together once a week to write songs and we must have written, though a lot were never finished, a couple of hundred. My recollection is that it was usually a…

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  • Easily Read

    The thing I like doing more than anything is reading, I can waste, if that’s the word, days with my head in a book. I wrote a song about authors and writing, the real life and the imagined one. The song can be listened to below after the lyrics and I love the bass clarinet…

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  • It was 100 years ago today

    I’m ‘enjoying’ the tv programmes commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution of 100 years ago as I’ve always been fascinated by the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. I tend to think of communist Russia as the experiment that never was; communism by name only, mafia tyranny in reality. It’s a complex history and a revolution…

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  • This is a Cold War 

    Here’s a live video of This Is a Cold War (the song’s from the second Cold War EP) I recorded on my phone while practicing at Silver Lining Studios last week. I had my own practice room until recently so it was nice to spend a couple of hours going through songs old and new…

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  • Cold War Child

    When I was recording my Cold War EPs (see here) I wrote a lot of songs, many I never finished, considered not good enough or thought inappropriate in some way. I was going through the CW hard drive and found them and on listening back one or two aren’t bad. This one is ok I…

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