In January I played at the unveiling of Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan's waxwork at Madame Tussauds. Was quite an odd morning, and certainly the only gig I've done that starts at 7.30am for a while.
Hrithik made an amazing speech in which he thanked 'all the fans, not just my fans, but all the fans in the world', which is a pretty extraordinary sentiment, since it presumably includes fans of unnecessary cruelty and fans of intolerance.
Still, was a fun gig.
Here's Hrithik looking awkward while we're playing:
On January 18th I collaborated with Darren Hayman as part of his 'January Songs' project. Darren is writing and recording a new song every day in January, an enterprise as impressive as it is insane.
It was great collaborating on a track with him; Darren had written a short story that we recorded at my place, along with some crunchy electric piano and muted, sometimes angular trumpet stuff.
Was a great day and a nice chance to play around with some stuff on Ableton, which (if you’re interested) I recently upgraded to the version with all the bells and whistles, hence the nice crunchy electric piano which we designed on the day. Darren, very wisely, wanted to keep it stripped-down though, so had to constantly fight the urge to play with the electronic gubbins that I’ve been experimenting with recently. Here's the result:
I really admire Darren’s willingness to explore different genres (had lots of chat about obscure ECM albums) and his desire to push himself outside his comfort zone. He’s produced lots of lovely stuff over the month, with a video diary and music videos to accompany most of the tracks. I strongly urge you to check it out.
December and January has been a busy time for the Hackney Colliery Band - I even spent my 30th birthday holed up in a studio in deepest north west London, which was not how I'd anticipated my 30s would start. Still, the studio itself is superb and is one of the few still to record to tape, and by a bizarre coincidence the tape that we were recording over contained the masters of my friend Darren Hayman's band Hefner's album We Love the City.
HCB are working on our debut album and second single (out soon on Wah Wah 45s), so there's been rehearsals, recordings, and enough admin to overload the Chinese civil service.
Still, all this prep work now will hopefully yield some exciting times for the band in 2011; lots of stuff in the pipeline. Will of course report here, but in the meantime head over here to join the Facebook group for all the latest news.
