It has been so long since the last entry that you would be forgiven for thinking that I'd lost interest in the whole thing - here are highlights of the many things that have kept me from the blog of the last couple of months:
1) Me and Lexi got married! A very happy, if quite wet day was had by all in late July. Here's a picture of it.
2) Betika were lucky enough to be invited to play at the Vale Earth fair on the lovely island of Guernsey. Possibly the best festival we've ever played at, and certainly the best we've ever been treated. Massive thankyou to Barney, Toupe and all at the festival. Some video was shot and will be posted shortly, in the meanwhile, here's a picture of that (courtesy of BBC Guernsey)
3) Those of us in Betika who also play in Sancho have been helping Paul Hanford out with his latest batch of recordings - drums on my part, with guitar from Chris, trumpet from Martin and Caz singing. Apparently the record is nearly finished, but I don't know what Paul's plans are for releasing it are, I'd imagine it'll be early next year before it goes public.
4) I've been working once again with Monkey Head Transplant, a band I last played with way back in 2001. We (that is Mooro, Skott, Klive and I) reconvened following a chance encounter between Klive and I at a Betika gig in Lewisham last year. Our first gig in six years was at Dutch Husband's album launch last week. Here's a song from it - "To Hell with the Architect". I'm not usually the singer in MHT, this clip just happens to be of one of the two songs where I have to juggle lead guitar and voice.
5) Work has begun in earnest on the next Betika album. We're trying to work out a method whereby we can acheive the near-impossible and capture the energy of a live performance in a hi-fi studio way. Preparation seems to be the key, so we're making lots of recordings of rehearsals, the idea being that we will make all the changes to the songs in pre- rather than post-production, which is what we did with "Halflove", so the actual recording process should in theory be very quick, relative to the months we spent tweaking things and re-recording songs for the last album. By the end of the process, I'd grown so sick of hearing the songs over and over again that I couldn't bear to hear any of those recordings for about six months and the words and music had long since ceased to hold any meaning for me. I'm very keen to avoid a repeat of that.
6) As soon as we get the new songs on tape (or more probably a hard disc drive, which doesn't have either the ring or the romance of the older medium) Chris and Imogen are leaving us to spend some time seeing the world, starting in one of my favourite places, Japan. This as you can imagine will leave a gaping hole in our ranks (also Dutch Husband), but it is a hole we will find a way to fill, hopefully in a new and exciting way, though we have no idea what that might be yet. If you play bass, guitar or other "lead" instrument (keyboards or violin could work), and think that you might like to be involved, do get in touch. There's not really any money in it, but conversely we're pretty much self-sufficient so rehearsals and gig transport won't cost you anything. And you'll get into to lots of festivals free, and we try to do a short tour of nice places once a year. A car would be a good thing to have.
