Lost and Later Songs, new album released Friday 14th October, bandcamp pre-orders available tomorrow.

Congratulations are in order: we have twins. A double album, twice the fun or, depending on one’s point of view, twice the torture. What began as a harmless enough pastime to while away quarantine, grew arms and legs, scuttling this way and that and all at once. Never mind. We must roll with the chaos. Always.
Imagine a band as a lockdown experiment. The luxuries of rehearsal rooms and recording studios are out of bounds for the foreseeable. Under strictly controlled conditions of self-isolation, you must adapt or die. Adapt is better. Your modus operandi is now home recording and file sharing. It will be, and even more so than usual, a steep learning curve. Never mind. At least self-isolation means you can’t strangle your fellow band mates. In common with much of modern life, you are now of the virtual variety. All your friends are holograms, stranded on Planet Zoom. Connection is intermittent, communications more static than signal in a series of garbled transmissions to mission control.
It was mission control I really felt most sympathy for.
Producer Colin Elliot’s unenviable task was to stitch together our unpromising parts like an alt-pop Dr Frankenstein, until finally, on the stroke of midnight, high up in a draughty bell tower in a lightning storm…aargh! We created a monster. Here monster, nice monster…maybe it’s friendly.
Featuring twenty songs recorded during the lockdown conditions of 2020-21 (including our first ever recorded cover version), “Lost and Later Songs” goes out into the world on Friday 14th October and will be available for pre-orders tomorrow at a click near you. More details then.
I do like release dates. It is like liberation day. And, the way I see it, once a song is out there it is someone else’s problem.
I’m losing connection. Over to you.

Biff Smith A New International October 2022