Very pleased to say that after a magical week in Studio Humbug (an old water tower on Queen Victoria’s Osborne estate), the new album is pretty much all recorded. We made good time and recorded much more than an album’s worth of material completely from scratch, and we all had much more fun than men our age should be having. The whole thing was a breeze, largely down to the talents of Rob and Jim Holmes who did an amazing job of making sure that everything was recorded with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of quality. The band featured a whole host of Island talent, Paul Butler from the Bees came and played (among other things) kora, piano, trumpet and sitar, JC Grimshaw was his usual brilliant self on mandolins and guitars, whilst the magical Jake Rodrigues also made it down for a few days to add some accordian, banjo, ukelele and guitar. Drums and other percussion was provided by the legendary Rupert Brown, I handed all the bass playing duties over to Rafe Spencer who did a much better job than I could ever do and Dave Godby shone on a vast array of instruments such as pedal steel, lap steel, oud, and hammer dulcimer. As if that wasn’t enough I even got the great Brian Sharpe to put down some guitar and vocals, Donal O’Riain did some fiddling, and Barklay McKay and Mari Person will also be making their contributions remotely via the wonders of technology.

Provisionally entitled ‘Up Here’ the album is due for release in October. I can’t let you hear any of the recordings until then but here is a demo I did at home of one of the songs that will undoubtedly make it on to the finished version.