Most songs I write initially on the piano. I love the immediate emotional feedback you get from the resonating wood and strings coming straight back at you. Late at night, when everyone's asleep, I'll suddenly get up from the dark side of the room where I have been huddled for a while, snuggled up wine in hand, thinking, worrying, reflecting. I'll realise a sentence, a word. It has a feeling, a chord, a note, a run of notes. Simple to the point words - 'you're gone' or an acknowledgement i'm totally heartbroken, I feel i've just stopped altogether but knowing that i've no choice but carry on 'picking up the pieces'. Some songs on this album are years old! Ideas and experiences can stand the test of time. I rediscovered a recording of Kiss The Wind from a studio where I'd programmed in the original strings and horns plus played the actual monochord. I re-recorded the lead vocals and sat with co-producer Larry Lush who fiddled and twiddled knobs and dials filtering and sweeping here and there, creating a luscious windy contemporary soundscape. I've often driven up the motorway for hours. Monotonous driving listening to ambient instrumental music in the rain, wipers swishing to and fro rhythmically and part of my mind drifts (tho the other part is the functional brain with eyes fixed on the road) to what's going on in my life. Where has it gone? What can I do? I sing along phrases and the concept of the song is there. I'm off the motorway, at the final junction of the road almost at the door. It's all there shaped in my head now, but there is no resolution to my situation, it's not black and white. It's all shades of grey. I'll sit and reflect in my space - cocooned and safe. Sometimes too much space can be scary, lonely. Sometimes space can be freedom, clarity, expansion, infinity. I wrote this at a time I was alone a lot. I'd also read an article about the sculptor Barbara Hepworth whose many pieces were hollow circles and ovals and she said something like the nothing within becomes a something as it is defined by the outer shape (of her sculptures). I like that. I could contain my emptiness. I could be an oval outer cocoon of nothingness that could protect me. I wouldn't be seen to exist any more, I'd be invisible and have no matter and I wouldn't matter to anybody anyway.? I haven't seen Angels directly. I do feel some cosmic co-incidence though sometimes that makes me smile and think i must be doing something right. I ultimately have positive faith in life, people and the planet though which pulls me through the bad times. When i was really tired, run down and ill working in the city, I came home one time for the holidays to my village, the Sunday before Christmas when the small chapel choir (most of which I was related to) were out Carol singing round the hillside. It was clear winter cold Derbyshire air, dark and starry. The funny and lovely thing about this hillside chapel is that everyone loves the harmonies so much (Uncle Harold had a fantastically deep, deep bass voice) not many are left singing the main line. My favourite of course is to let rip as a Soprano at the high bits in O Come all Ye Faithful. It's so heartwrenchingly liberating to go for it big time with 'Sing Choirs of Angels' descant. It's the ultimate Christmas epiphany. Singing is such an expressive thing, releases and makes good the soul. I don't know if it was the full moon, the high of the letting go after being cooped up in an office in London, but the sound produced that night seemed to be more than the sum of it's parts. I could swear I could hear extra 'voices'. Were they the ghostly relatives of the hillside past (my great grandfather was the founder of the Chapel and Choirmaster) joining this merry band from the heavens? Was it the harmonic overtones produced from this perfectly formed wall of sound cutting across octaves and resonating harmonies? Not sure, but it made me feel good, made my hair stand on end as I sang with Christmas gusto spookily transfixed by the dark night and the huge full moon. The moon and stars are so far away it doe
