The Greatest Gift and the Lost&Found Project

So it’s finally come to this - an ACTUAL release, into the wild, of one of my original songs.

Why did it take so bloody long? Perfectionism; self doubt; lack of organisation; inherent laziness; Astrological signs urging me to defer the release? Some of these reasons, if not all.

But as my lovely better half has put it, it’s best to seek PROGRESS over PERFECTION. And so here we are, with my latest single The Greatest Gift about to smash it’s way onto all the major streaming services in the UK and beyond…

This song opened so many doors for me way back in about 2007-2008; I’d always finish the live sets with it and coax a little audience singalong out of the usually quite accommodating crowds. I went up to Newcastle to work on a version with a pretty big-name producer in what had been the old Tyne Tees studios. But the version I’m releasing is the original recording I made, with me playing absolutely everything mesen’. I don’t think I could really better that original recording, there’s nothing like the excitement of that first spark.

And herein lies a bit of the backstory as to why it’s only being released now - my own incessant fickleness and the incredible speed at which I move on to my next harebrained scheme/song/adventure. I find it fairly easy to come up with those initial ideas (as any of my close friends will tell you) but find it next to impossible to ever fully finish something. I’ll often fall out of love with a project way before it’s reached completion, and started demoing up new songs for a completely different concept.

So the Lost&Found project is a way of me reconnecting with music I was ‘done with’, had moved on from and was fairly happy to leave in the past. The problem was because I was happy to leave it in the vault, I thought it had no value any more. But as more and more people were asking me about those songs, and why I’d never released them, I realised I didn’t really have a very convincing excuse.

So I’ve been having fun in this 2020 period of downtime and reflection trawling back through these songs, seeing where I’d gotten up to with them and just exactly how close they were to something I’d be happy to release (with the forgiving hindsight of about 10 years of distance).

I’ll go into more detail about some of the things that kicked me off the path I was heading on in a future post, suffice to say that the songs on Lost&Found constitute what could have been an amazing debut album around about 2008-2009. I’m hoping they’ll constitute a pretty fantastic album for 2021 as well - there wasn’t anything particularly ‘2008-y’ about the songs back then either!

Maybe it’s showing my cards a little early, but here’s the running order I’m thinking of at the moment;

1. The Eureka Song (co-written with the wonderful chanteuse Sophie Delila)

2. See Miss America

3. The Greatest Gift

4. Victoria Has a Secret

5. Running Out of Time

6. Cinnamon Sun

7. Took Me Too Seriously (a co-write with the fantastic Ben Mark and Jamie Norton)

8. Don’t Go

9. Get Up Get Moving (of which there may be a contemporaneous music video to share)

10. This Is The Last Time (a co-write with the brilliant John Fortis who I can’t get in touch with!)

11. Nothing Like You

12. Leave On A High

13. All Good

14. Mr Inconsistent

Quite the rundown - maybe there’s a few titles in there you recognise? Some were staples of the live sets - I loved kicking the shows off with The Eureka Song. Still a belter I reckon :-)

The thing that pulled me back to start/finish this project was having the lines from the breakdown of ‘The Greatest Gift’ relentlessly repeating in my head when I couldn’t sleep one night this December just gone;

“The best piece of advice I ever got was be exactly who you are, not who you’re not and things may turn out better than you thought; don’t be afraid to reveal who you want to be…”

That sentence - when I understood why it was nagging at me - buoyed me up something special, and it made me reframe the whole enterprise of revisiting music from my own past. In a weird way, I sort of owe it to the Gillan from 2008 to bring this thing together and get it out into the world. Christ knows that useless twerp wasn’t about to, although I’ll forgive him for it now.

There he is, the work-shy fop. Get a haircut! And a proper job!

So, if you’ll indulge me a little, I’d love to set these songs free before I move on to anything else, starting with a song that still means a great deal to me, ‘The Greatest Gift.’

You can follow this link to pre-save or stream/buy it - depending on whether it’s before or after the launch date, the 8th February 2021.

All the best - your friend in time,

Gillan

Britannia Music Club, I Owe You Everything

This is from entirely the wrong year, but you catch the drift… Still love that Sheryl Crow album though, defo in my personal top 10.

In retrospect, it seems like a bit of a con, but at the time I thought it was an incredible opportunity to fill out my CD collection with some classic albums for what I think might have been £1 a disc. Maybe even £1.49 for 5. I can’t seem to find any concrete evidence of the deal now…

New subscribers to the Britannia Music Club would receive a welcome gift in the form of 5 CDs at a much reduced price. Then you’d be sent music every month that you either kept and paid for, or sent back for a refund. Needless to say, I could barely organise my own hair, let alone sending back CDs in the mail, so until our membership was cancelled, dear Mater and Pater shelled out over the odds for still unlistened to CDs of various forgotten musical also-rans.

But let me tell you - I feel like the albums I received in that first delivery have shaped my entire life since.

Suggestions for my choices came from a rather odd place in retrospect. Tam, the janitor of my primary school, would be forever suggesting great music we should check out, and this was invariably classics from the 60’s and 70’s. So my first delivery consisted of mostly greatest hits collections from Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Bob Dylan, and The Kinks. I also received Dark Side of the Moon, still Pink Floyd’s finest album to my ears, although I didn’t ‘get it’ til much later in life*

What an education - these are still the stalwarts of my listening habits to this day, and were instrumental in my understanding of what constituted good and bad music. New music would forever be compared to these absolute legends of songwriting and performance.

No wonder songs from these artists have populated my live sets as well. I’ll grant you they are far from obscure artists, but for a young teenager I felt they’d opened me up to a world of genius creativity that still resonates with me many years later.

I’d love to know your formative albums or artists - the music you think shaped you and continues to comfort and keep you enthralled.

Gill

*I still believe that all you need to understand humanity and our place in the Universe is Dark Side of the Moon and a good recording of Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite. And maybe some stimulation of an alternative kind, thought not essential.

Two Obsessions, One Objective, No Idea Whatsoever

The Queetles. Or ‘Bean’ if you’d prefer. Either way it’s the stuff of nightmares, eh?

Why do I do what I do, and how in the heck did I even get here?

I had two whirlwind romances in my youth. It began with Queen and shifted to the Beatles, and I’ve been spellbound by those two pillars of British pop rock ever since.

I think the reason I pursued music was that nearly all of my childhood heroes, regardless of their attitude, outlook or style, were musicians.

It started with plinking and bashing away at the old walnut coloured upright piano at my mum and dad’s house as a toddler. I eventually progressed to formal lessons, but soon found it far more rewarding to make my own songs up, adapt the music I was supposed to be learning rote and to copy the things I heard on the radio. Much more fun and immediate than pursuing the ability to sight read.

Two events conspired to spark my lifelong love of Queen.

In February of 1992 a formative obsession with Waynes World began, endlessly quoting it to myself and with my school mates. And of course the absolutely iconic BoRhap in-car singalong/headbang was a definite highlight for me. I thought it was such a cool song - and the re-release eventually made it back to number 2 in the UK charts. I don’t think I really considered the band behind the soundtrack at that point, but it must have planted a seed.

On 20 April 1992, I was attending my weekly piano lesson with Fiona. Her husband was downstairs engrossed in a televised concert, which Fiona explained was a tribute to a phenomenal performer and songwriter called Freddie Mercury. “Have you ever heard of him, or Queen?” she asked - I hadn’t. So rather than cover the scales and practise pieces we were supposed to that week, she took me through a Queen songbook highlighting some of their finest work and performing some for me. I was absolutely hooked - I spent the next few years amassing a collection of CDs and books and absorbed everything I could about my new heroes, Freddie, Brian, Roger and John. The first album of theirs I owned was a cassette of the spellbinding Greatest Hits, which I bought in a sale at Woolworths for a bargain price (due to the fact it was missing its sleeve).

Looking back, this was my true musical education - how I learned to layer harmonies, how to flavour songs to keep them interesting and unusual but always coming back to accessibility and catchiness. I would irritate my sister by refusing to sing the main melodies of whichever song was on the radio - I would always be, rather smugly, providing a second or third harmony to proceedings. What an annoying twerp.

A year or so of Violin lessons led me to conclude that the guitar must be similar to play, as it had strings as well. Not quite, Gill. And so a 3/4 sized classical nylon strung guitar was purchased for me to learn on from John Douglas music in Dumfries. Eventually I must have persuaded Mum and Dad that an electric guitar was essential to my continued progress. And what guitar could be more fitting than an identical model to the one Wayne lusts after in his film - “It will be mine, oh yes - it will be mine”. So for Christmas one year, a white Japanese Squier Stratocaster turned up via mail order - a recommendation from my guitar teacher of the time, Derek.

Lessons with Derek were mostly about playing toplines or melodies from well known songs, as well as learning chord shapes. Well, supposedly well known songs; he made a joke about the quality of the photocopying of one piece of sheet music I was learning - Yesterday - saying it was one of Paul McCartney and John Lemon’s finest. The joke whooshed over my head - I’d never heard these names before. But this started me off down the path of my second musical obsession, those bloody wonderful Beatles.

I similarly strove to possess everything possible I could get from the band - every CD album (including the rather pricey double White Album set) and a myriad of books and documentaries. I realised that I had heard them already on my parent’s copies of the Blue Album - Yellow Submarine was a favourite. I had vague memories of being completely freaked out by Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds as a really young child - the imagery must have twisted my tiny mind. But the first album I listened to properly, and I think the first CD I was bought, was their much lauded Sgt Pepper. What an education! My folks had an original vinyl, so I loved the infinitely looping outdo collage - “Meeur! I can have a goose we ganny, pam pam pa”

I’d cite both Queen and the Beatles as far and away the biggest influence on my musical output, having also fallen in love with Led Zeppelin, Beck, Elliott Smith, Ryan Adams. This might seem like a redundant statement, as they have both been so influential on the bands that have followed them that it’s impossible not to be. But they set standards that I still strive to rise up to. Not a bad high watermark to reach for, I’m sure you’ll agree…

So that might explain the approach I take with my Isolation Tapes, how my mind fits all the pieces together - usually before I’ve even started to sketch a demo. I think listening to their tapestries of sound has enabled me to ‘aurally visualise’ music as a complete soundscape in my head. It seems like I’m constantly tuned in to my own musical musings - and a chaotic and rather stuffed notes app and Music Memos folder will attest to that. The only thing usually lacking is the dedicated focus to really complete things, but I’ve got a helluva demos bag to root around in should it take your fancy.

So the next step is external accountability - I need to feel the pressure from the people who might want to hear these things to let me know and I’ll deliver! The project currently in the works is the first Sensitive Husbands Club album, ‘Love and Be Loved’ - a mixture of acoustic, organic sounds and what I’d consider my most genuine lyrics (mostly themed around love). 

Keep an eye on the instagram for updates on my progress, and keep sending your requests through - they’re always gladly received!

Gill

Majorelle blue

I never knew what colour I was supposed to be,

until you painted every colour you could dream up on me.

#sensitivehusbandsclub

Paradise Misplaced

Ask any friend - I’d find it almost impossible to give you an answer in 5 words or less what it is I do exactly. Or what I’d like to do with my music. Torn between ultimate authenticity and vacuously enjoyable pomp, it’s been a struggle to pin myself down. So I decided to hell with it, I won’t try to pigeonhole  myself. But I will make an effort to compartmentalise. Hence… The Repository. Those who seek shall find; those who find… well - I’m afraid you’re up the creek without a map to call your own.