Some announcements: Next week just got more exciting

Next week was already going to be quite fun, because I'm playing at the Leigh Sawmill Cafe on the Saturday supporting An Emerald City.  They're in the middle of a massively epic tour of New Zealand to promote 'the fourth' which is their new album about things like Mars and the fourth dimension and all those sorts of good things.  I'm looking forward to that.  Shows at Leigh are always a good time because you're just down the road from a marine reserve, so you can do your soundcheck and then go and have a swim with lots of shiny snappers and stingrays.  Then you get back to the Sawmill and quite often they give you a delicious pizza, and if you're lucky the pizza also has snapper on it.  Presumably it's not the exact same snapper you were swimming with just before, but if you want you can pretend it was and so feel a little bit closer to your dinner than you might usually.  Also for some reason they close the bar at about midnight and kick out all of the people, so then the bands and stuff can all go upstairs and sing 'Up On Cripple Creek' as late as they want so long as they don't wake up the other guests too much, and for some reason the beer doesn't run out up there. Also there's this cat that's only got three legs or so and she's really good at snaking through the crowd without getting trodden on.

This happy snapper lives at Goat Island marine reserve so I won't be eating him.  Snapper snapped by Travis Wiens, original here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/traviswiens/4352757129/in/photostream/

So that's something I've been looking forward to for a while, but then I found out today that also on the Friday I'm going to be opening for The Books at the King's Arms as well. I saw them play I think it was last year when they came, and it just about 'blew my mind,' as we used to say back in the seventies.  There's two of them up there on the stage with cellos and laptops, and one of them back in the crowd playing with a real-time video editing suite, and altogether it's a thing of rare beauty and very close to how I always hoped the future would turn out.  The abiding impression I got from that show was that if I ever was to open for these guys I would definitely need to get somebody onstage with me rocking a laptop pretty hard, otherwise nobody in the room would possibly take me seriously.  Being taken seriously is obviously quite an important goal of mine, so fortunately, now that the occasion arises, I know just the laptop person for the job.  Mr. Nigel Wright does a most excellent line in staring intently at a laptop and creating vast waves of hauntingly beautiful reverb and droning synth echoes, which is basically exactly what you need for this kind of show, I would say.

So, in the spirit of using my blog to announce things ahead of time, some announcements:

1) I'm opening for An Emerald City next week at Leigh Sawmill Cafe, Saturday the 26th of February, and I will get to eat a snapper and hear the new music that they honed and polished in the chill Berlin winter after I left them last year for balmy summer climes.

2) I'm also opening for The Books on Friday the 25th of February at the King's Arms, and I'm really quite tickled about that.

3) I'll be joined onstage for the Friday show by Mr. Nigel Wright and His Remarkable Laptop, which will cause your face to melt right off of the front of your head if you happen to be at the King's Arms at the right time.

4) And, completely unrelated to the other announcements, there are a couple of new videos on the video page, depicting me playing the same song in two different glittering European capitals.  The song is called 'Beartown' and we've just finished mixing the version that's going to be on the album, which I will definitely tell you more about in the coming weeks.  Gosh!

Actually, just in case you hate clicking through to new pages, here's the videos right here.  Who says I never do anything for you?

Beartown in Paris and London:





Brixton Sessions #020 - Bond Street Bridge 'Untitled' from Blindeye | Films on Vimeo.