Things have changed a lot

A song that I co-wrote in 1972 has just re-surfaced on a new CD by an old friend of mine, Drew Millin. The song. 'Things Have Changed A Lot', was one of a bunch of tunes we wrote when sharing a bungalow in sunny Torquay. I was a film student on holiday for the summer and Drew was selling advertising space on the local paper The Herald Express. But secretly, we both wanted to be rock stars - although as our band, The BOI, was a weird fusion of Crosby Stills and Nash and Frank Zappa, this was unlikely. We were either years ahead of our time - or rubbish.

As the band's producer (alias Yorick Zimmerman) I sent demo tapes off to every record label, including the Beatles' Apple and John Peel's Dandelion Records, and each of them in turn rejected us.

Above is the letter sent by legendary producer George Martin politely saying no. We were not, as we thought, the next Beatles.

Now one of the "pleasantly formed" songs, as George Martin described them, is on Drew's CD 'Don't Rush Me'.

Read all about it here - and buy a copy!
http://www.thisissouthdevon.co.uk/news/Balladeer-art-form-taking-time/article-2703444-detail/article.html

Raider of the Lost Archive

Trawling through the vaults this weekend I found a load of stuff on dusty old cassettes – including an amazing number of Drew Millin recordings with songs even he’s probably forgotten about such as ‘Production Line’ the beautiful ‘So Hard to Find’ and the two of us singing a track called ‘Mother Earth’ based on Drew’s tune ‘Music Papers’.

Now converting these into mp3s and hope to post them here soon and make up a CD compilation. The quality varies but I can probably tweak the muddier ones using various sound editing programmes.

Also a track of myself with guitar and keyboard accompaniment singing a song called ‘Spanish Night’ – did I write this? Sub-Dylanesque lyrics so may have done – “In the soup kitchen, they speak, some in Latin, some in Greek, of that Spanish night we all threw in the towel.” Anyone recognise that?

Turning vinyl and tape into MP3 digital

Finally got a decent music machine for easily converting vinyl and cassette tapes into digital mp3 files via a USB flash drive!The first one I ordered looked very nice but the tape player had no rewind - so everytime I found a track I wanted to use, in order to cue it from the beginning I couldn't just rewind, I had to take tape out, turn it round, fast forward a little, take tape out and re-insert and then play. Amazingly fiddly.

Now busy putting all sorts onto my PC - including some tracks by my old band, The BOI, that I had transferred from reel-to-reel onto cassette. Found some real gems including the beautiful 'So Hard to Find' by Drew. All I need now is a way of turning ancient reel-to-reel tapes into mp3 files.