Thought I’d drop a quick post letting you all know what’s been going on this week. It’s been rather hectic…
Having performed over 80 shows of The Comedy Of Errors at the National Theatre, our faux Romanian busking band was asked back to play for NT Connections. This is an annual festival of youth theatre which culminates at the National with ten plays performed over five days by ten different companies. So Ian Watson, Simon Parrish and I donned our tracksuits for one last hurrah and took to the streets of the Southbank (and the Cottesloe foyer..) and bothered the general public with loud shouty Romanian renditions of pop songs. It was rather good fun…
On Friday night the Nina Ferro band took over Hideaway in Streatham. This was the first time we’d played the new set live together since Nina toured it in Australia. I managed to get a few tracks filmed and posted them up on my YouTube channel. Thought I’d post my favourite one here just for you. This is Lesson Learned by Alicia Keys and John Mayer…
I’m playing at The Spice of Life in Soho tomorrow night with Nina on a gig featuring our good friend Kellie Santin who’s back from Australia for a bit. You should all come down.
And the final kids show from Lea DeLaria and Janette Mason Boom Boom’s Bow is at Hideaway this Saturday lunchtime. But fear not if you do not have children to bring along; we will be playing a proper show in the evening with our band The Dirty Martinis. Do not miss this show!! We rarely get to play as the Martinis (the next show will be at the Swanage Jazz festival in July) so it’s a great opportunity to see the full band at this fantastic venue.
Hopefully see you at a show soon 😉
ps. For those of you following the progress of the Barnardos Oldie Composers, our very own Anthony Head will be performing Marina Florence’s Cry live on This Morning tomorrow. Remember you can download the EP from iTunes and the Charity Goods website and all proceeds go to Barnardos.
Today is the official release of the Oldie Composers EP. With over 250 submissions, the four finalists had their songs recorded at Maida Vale studios in April (you can check out my photoblog from the sessions) and today sees the release of all four songs on iTunes and the Charity Goods website. I’ve just got home from the launch with Sir Terry Wogan at the BBC and we’re all very excited about the project…
The EP features performances by Anthony Head, FTW, Clare Teal and Andrea Ryder; with a stellar band including Marcus Bonfanti, Nick Mason, Ian ‘Squeezy’ Watson, Steve Rushton, Grant Windsor and Bond. And me on bass obviously…
You can buy a CD of the EP if you prefer from the Charity Goods website (there are a limited number available), but the best way to support the charity is to download from either iTunes or their site. The songwriter with the most downloads will win the Oldie Composers competition so you’ll be voting with your downloading! Although this is a charity EP, so if I were you I’d just download the entire thing…
You can have a listen to the tracks on iTunes (just clickthis link) and grab a copy of your favourites. At the moment it looks as if FTW’s version of Loves Forever is in the lead, but I’d also highly recommend checking out Anthony Head’s version of Cry by Marina Florence and Clare Teal’s Peace For The Child by Maggie Duffy. Not that I want to influence the outcome of the competition, obviously…
Big congratulations go out to all the finalists. The songs all sound great thanks to the sterling work of our producer AD Chivers. And as always big thanks are due to Hellen Bach (@HellenBach) and Norman Macintosh (@BigNormski1) for all their hard work in making this happen. Between them they have raised millions for children’s charities. You should follow them both on Twitter immediately to keep up to date with their various projects and see how you can help.
So please do share this post, tweet about the EP and tell your friends on Facebook. All proceeds from the downloads will go to Barnardos and we need your help to spread the word. Hopefully Radio 2 will be playing some of the tracks over the coming week so you may well hear us on air at some point too. It was an absolute pleasure to be involved with this project and I hope we can build on it for the future to make this a regular fund-raising event for this great charity.
Thought it was about time I drew your attention to this great competition, the final stages of which are imminent.
A little while ago I was approached by Hellen Bach (who works closely with the Children In Need team) and our good friend AD Chivers to be a judge in the Young Songwriters competition for Barnardos. AD had been responsible for whittling down the hundreds of entires and my job was to choose five finalists from the twenty shortlisted for the Scotland and East of England region.
I was astounded by the quality of some of the entries and it really brought home how important a competition like this really is in these times. Many of you will be aware of my Saturday night X Factor tirades on Twitter. The general public are regularly exposed to nothing more than a parade of sub-standard karaoke singers and fed the notion that this is the future of music in our country. Well let me tell you; we have a host of extraordinarily talented young musicians and songwriters right under our noses and the Barnardos Young Songwriters Competition is a great way to give these young people a voice.
It was a great honour to be involved in the judging and I was also able to contribute to the recording sessions for the final four songs at the wonderful British Grove Studios, under the direction of producer AD Chivers. I played on two tracks; Imogen Mechie’s Build My Wings and Bethan Funning’s Spaceships & Moonbeams with some great musicians including Grant Windsor, John Bleese and Ian Matthews from Kasabian.
But now it’s over to you folks…
The winner of the competition will be decided by whichever song of the final four gets the most downloads from the Young Songwriters website. 45p from each download goes directly to support Barnardos. I really do think that this is such a worthwhile cause, both as a charity and as a concept to support young musical talent. Now I don’t want to sway your votes too much, but my personal favourite is Build My Wings, and not just because I’m on it;Â it has hit written all over it.
You can check out the songs of all four finalists at the Young Songwriters website. Please do go have a listen and download your favourite tunes. The competition closes on 12th December and the winner with the most downloads will be announced on the 14th.
