This goes a long way back. Hungry Ghosts was a band I formed in the 1990s, a trio with Tricia Thom as singer and Stephen Malloch on violin. We were later joined by Sean Doyle on bass and Dave Haswell on percussion. This was our ‘greatest hit’, which actually won some kind of song competition … Read more
Ricky is a song I introduce at gigs as ‘a collaboration with two other writers, neither of whom know they’ve collaborated with me on it’. The first was Jacques Brel (1929-1978 see Jacques Brel on Wikipedia). He called it Jacky (or Le Chanson de Jacky) and in it he imagines himself growing old as a … Read more
A few weeks ago I watched a video on Taxi TV where Chuck Henry, a musician living in California, showed how he makes a living building hip hop and dance tracks, not for the charts, but for TV and films. They’re called ‘cues’ and you’ve heard them in the background of scenes – when someone … Read more
This was a song I recorded ‘between bands’ – the time in the mid 90s between the end of Hungry Ghosts and the birth of the Innocents. I’d sung it a few times live with Polly Phillips but didn’t have the knowledge or skill to record it. The arrangement was almost all down to producer … Read more
This is a strange one. I guess the primary influence here is Momus. Momus is a singer-songwriter, video maker, and author who lives in Japan. He’s actually Scottish by birth. His real name is Nick Currie. During the 80s he released a series of albums which moved gradually from being acoustic guitar based to electronica. … Read more
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/239698988″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] Come With Me was written from my memories of a very hot summer in Edinburgh in 1976, when I’d moved here for the first time (the second time was in 1990). I lived near the Meadows and had a part-time job stacking boxes in a fruit shop before … Read more