All my updates for free over on my Patreon
My Patreon is here and I post regular updates to everyone that follows me, including the free tier. Please sign up and consider becoming a Patron over there Thank you, S.
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy 'Good To My Girls'
Off topic post for a song I’ve been listening to a lot this week. This is Will Oldham, aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy singing his version of a Matt Sweeney number as the last song of his concert in London at the start of December.
I was lucky enough to get to Will’s concert in Frankfurt a few days before this. It was a magical evening and, whilst I’m disappointed not to have found a recording of that show, this from a few nights afterwards is a wonderful listen. His songs, words and performances have been an enormous influence and source of joy for as long as I can remember making music.
The complete recording of the London show is available at Dimeadozen here and the photo above is from the Frankfurt show. Click through it for the original post on Instagram.
Bandcamp Friday for Ukraine
Bandcamp Friday, a day where the platform waives it’s payment fees and 100% go to the musicians and labels is here once again. This time I’ve decided to donate any sales I get to United Help Ukraine in an effort to do something.
I feel very uncomfortable taking up space on social media to promote anything at the best of times but at least this way I feel it’s valid.
I have a lot of albums, singles, live recordings and EP’s on Bandcamp and I’m also discounting the option to buy the complete catalogue of over 80 releases by 75%.
I certainly don’t have a lot of money but I seem to have made a lot of music - please head over to my Bandcamp page and pick up something if you can.
Thanks everyone,
S
Recent Apple Music playlists
I realised I hadn’t shared what I’ve been having on repeat for a few months so here’s a couple for you. No particular order to these, I just make a little list each month for myself and save them.
July 2021
August 2021
September 2021
October 2021
202106 Music Playlist
Also lots of Becky Becky but they don’t seem to be on Apple Music so go and listen to them here instead.
202102 Music Playlist
Thought I might start with posting some of what I’ve been listening to each month.
This mostly from a few car trips through the south of Germany the last couple of weeks and certainly lots missing and no full albums, which is what I usually listen to. Random then.
It's my birthday and I now have a Patreon
I now have a Patreon page and I urge you to come and support me. From here on in I’ll be making and posting more music and images there and I hope that a small number of you will want to be involved with it.
I have a large catalogue of work that I’ll make available to everyone subscribing and every month I’ll make something new. This last year I have made 10 releases and also a couple of full albums, with many occasional bits and pieces along the way. I make digital and physical releases and send them to anyone signed up. It goes on, with somewhere to put it.
There are a number of options for subscribing and it’s still new so I’m completely open to suggestions and what anyone thinks is fair for the work that I make. Please let me know if you have any reason why you wouldn’t, or you would but something isn’t right.
It’s not for everyone, I get that - but there has to be a better way than all of us throwing all our time, energy and work into the void of social media. Perhaps this is just the same, I’m willing to suck it and see.
More soon then, thanks everyone and I wish you a happy and healthy start to the new year.
Stephen
ps: for everyone signed up for my Bandcamp subscription - I thank you and salute you and promise you that you won’t miss anything. Whatever I make for Patreon I’ll post to you too, and vice versa.
pps: it really is my birthday
Julia Laura 'SPAWN OF HELL'
I’ve been recording Julia Laura’s second album for Woodland Recordings over the last year or so and we’re finally ready to begin sharing some of what we made. Here’s ‘SPAWN OF HELL’ over on her Bandcamp page:
And here’s the video she put together:
I also made her first release with her, have played shows together and she’s writing new songs all the time. More to follow for sure. Go listen.
Stephen
ps - new album from me coming in two weeks, news in a few days.
January blues
Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet.
My right shoulder hurts a lot when I move my arm and of course when I play guitar so I’ve been writing a lot, putting together the next release (end of the month, more soon) and trying to organise some concerts. I hope to feel a lot better by the time the first comes around at the end of the month. I mean, I can play but it’s uncomfortable.
I also have tennis elbow in my left arm and you can imagine how much tennis I play.
In regards the booking shows thing - I would really appreciate some help or ideas with that.
Anyone else have the January blues heavy as a fucking mountain or is it just me?
Bag, laptop, hard drives, unreleased music and videos stolen
As some of you may be aware my rucksack was stolen last weekend after my concert at Kolibri near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. I had a lovely gig with a great crowd and a few hours later when most of the guests had left i was told to bring all my bags into the main room and we sat outside the venue chatting and apparently keeping an eye on the front door. Not so well as it turns out.
Suffice to say when I popped in to use the toilet I noticed right away that although my suitcase and guitar were right where I had left them my rucksack was not. Felt immediately sick. Inside the rucksack were the following
• Apple Macbook Air laptop. Kind of old but with a few weeks work that I hadn’t backed up yet. Also expensive to replace.
• Three external hard drives. Probably the worst thing lost - two were full of a brilliant collection of films and tv shows I had spent years collecting and were invaluable on long train rides and the other had six years of live recordings and videos I had filmed since coming to Germany. This included a couple of videos I had just edited for songs from the new album, stuff from my trip to Naples with my mother earlier this year, a session recorded just that morning on a boat in Flensburg and dozens of other concerts mixed and ready to be made available at some point in the future.
I know, I know - I backed things up but then I took the backup along with me and even kept it in the same bag as the original copy. Noob move.
The music / videos one is password protected - so that’s essentially worthless.
• Current diary. I write lyrics for my songs in my journal first, mostly whilst travelling. I also tend to fill it with contacts and random personal thoughts along the way. This isn’t worth anything to anyone else I’m sure. Paper and ink, straight to the recycle bin. But I lost a bunch of ideas and all the next big hits for sure.
• Nintendo Switch and many games and all my save files. Mother fucker.
• House keys, headphones, 100€, bag of sunflower seeds, biography of Virginia Woolf. Flotsam and jetsam basically.
For what it’s worth the rucksack looks like this:
I don’t expect to see any of this stuff again and I’ve already started making plans to replace things I need to carry on working in the way I have been, with a little more security of course. But, as is often the case with this sort of thing, most of what was stolen is worthless to anyone that has it. I get that you can sell the games console right away and perhaps wipe the hard drives and get rid of those for a few euros each. The laptop is password protected and has other security enabled but I guess someone will buy it and do something with it. The bag is quite tasty and in good condition I suppose.
Anyway, had a nice little trip up north - met some fine folk and had some lovely shows but this whole thing made a very distracting time of it. I recorded half a dozen songs on the boat in Flensburg that I hoped to share with you but they are really gone. I do have some live recordings still on my audio recorder and I will post some music in a few days.
For now this is a belated moan and perhaps a call out for anyone in that area to keep an eye out for a rather anonymous looking black rucksack with a book of depressing lyrics inside. Who knows.
From the lovely people at Fritzen.
I’m in Stuttgart today, getting set to leave for Thun tomorrow morning where I will play in the beautiful Schloss Hünegg. Details about that here - please come if you can, I need a lift.
Stephen
Painting
Details of a painting made in 1998 whilst I was living in Ireland, photographed in 2005 after it had been stored in the old cottage for a few cold winters and many wet springs. Peppered with mould and mildew - most of what I made there was scrappy and messy but the damage here was a bit of a shock. I took these photos and then made a big fire for this and the rest.
I had graduated from Fine Art at Exeter a month or so before and then my father and I drove the Land Rover across Ireland, onto the Rosslare / Fishguard ferry and down through Wales to pick up what I had made and accumulated in my years before. I drove with the horse box behind us, a nerve wracking experience for me and I once begged him to take over after we took a wrong road and I was expected to make a 180 turn in a narrow cul-de-sac. I was cautious and painfully slow but we made it fine and in time. I’m sure we watched a film in the little cinema on the ferry, can’t remember what it was now but I recall the motion of the boat in the dark room threw my inner ear right off and overboard.
After just a night in Exeter, and with the box stuffed, we drove back up and across and then the next day I unloaded it all into the broken cottage and naively thought my adult life as a painter had begun.
A week later I had painted over and scrubbed one piece from my degree show exhibition work and took these photos as a threat to all the others.
Somewhere I have slides and reasonable photographs documenting the 5 years or so of paintings I had made but here so long after I just have these things to hand. Bit weird looking at them and kind of embarrassing but it is what it is, or it was what it was. I don’t know, sometimes people ask.
Has obviously been a bit of a slow couple of weeks for me but I’ve been working on recording music for other people and beginning to write again. Next week I get to play shows in the north of Germany and looking forward loads.
Have nice days - I always appreciate you saying hello if you’re out there.
Stephen
Moving
I’m moving house this weekend - not leaving the town I’ve been living in for the past couple of years and only relocating a little further up the street - but moving my camp and my sleeping place just the same. It seems I have somehow accumulated a lot of objects which I’ve spent the past few days trying to pack into weak, tired boxes. I was advised not to move them, but the time it would take to sort through everything is so much more than the minutes it takes to simply pack them into the boxes. It’s books, leaves of paper, boxes from valuable phones and audio devices - non specific stuff for the most part. I thought I was simpler than this.
Aside from this physical move I’ve also been moving digital materials from one place to another - building a basic site here that I hope to be able to manage and call my home on the web. I’ve done this before a few times but in recent weeks, and for reasons unknown to me, Facebook has flagged my web site as being against their community guidelines and simply erased hundreds of posts, photos, videos and messages from their Facebook and Instagram platforms. I am bewildered by this and am trying to get the flag removed, but in the meantime I think I would rather spend my efforts keeping anyone that’s interested in my music updated through other channels. Simpler channels. Things like a mailing list and this blog. So here we are.
I appreciate it doesn’t have the bells and whistles or the sheen of social engagement that we’re used to - it’s less public and perhaps less sexy to some people. But I’ve never been so comfortable with the constant twice a day posting habits that I’m told is essential for ‘putting your music out there’. I like to write these songs, I like even more to go and play them to people. I’m not educated in social media marketing but in recent years, and in weird flashes of delusion, I’ve often believed that I could be. It’s not true and it doesn’t come easy to me.
Like everyone I used to keep a blog. Over on my Tumblr there’s dozens of posts I wrote when I first started playing concerts in Europe. I’m going to transfer them over here soon, people have told me they used to enjoy reading them. That means the world to me as they were fun to write and even more fun to live.
Anyhow, I’m rambling. I had some clever idea about how I was moving and this is a new home and all that, but it’s not really. It’s just the stuff that’s necessary to making work but I hope it can be a bit quieter and more personal.
So, hard sell - please join my mailing list . I will send emails every month or so, it will include music just for you, news about shows and the such and I like it very much when people write back to me.
Otherwise, please check back here every now and then. I’ll post as often as I have half a thought or a scrap of something I’d like to share.
Be well,
Stephen