I played my first gig with The Crow Bone Chorus a couple of weeks ago. We recorded it on a wee Zoom handheld doohickey and luckily someone had a camcorder running too (cheers, Craig Ferguson!). Of course nothing was intended for public consumption and the lighting etc. was hardly conducive to quality visuals but we did do some new stuff. So here’s the first of three of those new tunes, Catch a Break.
The others will be uploaded over the next few days. It’s all pretty rough – hopefully worth a look/listen, though.
Today we have for your entertainment and edification an actual photograph of Craig Hughes & The Crow Bone Chorus in all our hoary glory plus a poster for the upcoming Glasgow showcase with Jim Dead at The Audio Lounge. Enjoy.
Time to start back into the world, specifically of live music. I’ll be playing an afternoon showcase gig with The Crow Bone Chorus at The Audio Lounge in Glasgow on Saturday, May 5th. Special guest will be me old mucker Jim Dead. Looking forward to it.
More details to come, though despite the title of this post, I can already confirm that we will not in fact be playing Smoke on the Water.
So, finally. The new Craig Hughes Two EP is available as a Bandcamp exclusive (download/streaming). Listen via the player below, then buy it for whatever price you see fit to pay, including of course absolutely nothing at all. You cheap bastard.
So the new EP from The Craig Hughes Two – yes, we’ve decided it’s an EP – should be out at the end of November. Called Off the Cuff, it’ll look like this:
As a wee preview, here’s the brand spankers new lyric video for My Side of the Veil. Please enjoy.
With our first rehearsal under our belts (and a good one at that) , I’m happy to say that my erstwhile band mates in Dog Moon Howl, Bryan Campbell and Ally Tennick, are joining me in a new project: Craig Hughes & The Crow Bone Chorus. We’ll soon be bringing new music to a venue near you, by which I mean a venue near us, as well as selections from my studio releases and more besides. The plan is now to record and release my next album, which I’ve mentioned here before, under the Craig Hughes & The Crow Bone Chorus banner. The album is unlikely to be underway before early 2018 but we should be playing our first gigs before the end of this year.
The Craig Hughes Two
The Craig Hughes Two is about to be resurrected on the live scene after a year’s layoff for heavy rocking purposes. We’ll be gigging again from Sept/Oct with our new mini-album to flog.
I’ll be posting regular “work in progress” updates here from now on, so do watch this space.
Brief update: there will be something of a flurry of Channel Nowhere activity over the next couple of weeks, so you can look forward (or not) to the release of the remastered Pennies On My Eyes on March 11th and a couple of gig announcements for both The Craig Hughes Two and Dog Moon Howl. Promos will go out for Pennies just prior to the release date and a lyric video for new track No-One Cares If You Die will be up soon on YouTube.
Dog Moon Howl had the pleasure of playing at Jim Dead & The Doubters’ album launch a couple of Fridays ago. Despite technical problems with guitar effects and unusually crappy onstage sound for The 13th Note, our set went down a treat, Jim and co. played a blinder and a good time was had by all. Thanks to Paul Kerr at Blabber’n’Smoke for posting this splendid review …
When Blabber’n’Smoke reviewed Jim Dead‘s new album Pray For Rain a few weeks ago we called him a “shamanistic weatherman.” We was only joking, honestly, but of course the album launch took place on one of the filthiest nights of the year, gale force winds blowing horizontal sheets of rain that numbed your cranial nerves. Think his next album should be called “Here Comes The Heatwave.” Anyhoo (as Mr. Dead likes to say) a grand crowd donned appropriate gear and headed to the basement of the 13th Note, attracted perhaps by the prospect of seeing three fine bands and getting a copy of the new disc all for the princely sum of a fiver, one bright spot on such a dreicht nicht.
The bloody weather actually meant your intrepid reviewer missed the opening act, Traquair & the Tranquilizers although verbal reports from the early birds were all positive. We…
So, Pennies On My Eyes will now be released at the end of February 2016. The audio work’s all done but there was just no way to have the whole thing ready to go by the end of November – as originally planned – and there’s not much point in putting this kind of release out mid-December (or January for that matter). So, February it is. As ever, watch this space.
In what’s shaping up to be my last live outing of the year, I’m playing with Dog Moon Howl at The 13th Note, Glasgow, this Friday (4th) with Jim Dead & The Doubters in celebration of the release of their new album Pray For Rain. I’ve heard it (I did the mastering, come to think of it) and do you know, it’s really rather good. Come along on the night and you’ll get a copy of the CD as part of your £5 entry fee.
Meanwhile, the writing practice continues. Tapes For My Walkman has recently been updated with a look at ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres (HERE) and Tapes For My VCR has just been updated with a review of ’90s bikers-and-explosions flick Stone Cold (HERE). Please do feel free to give them a look.
As mentioned last post, much of my time of late has been taken up with the remixing and remastering of new/old album Pennies On My Eyes.This was originally a mini-album from 5 years ago which was released then as part of the split CD Graveyard Full of Blues with Sleepy Eyes Nelson.
The logic behind the remastering is simply that I was never happy with the original release.For various reasons, I left the mastering incomplete along with alternate takes and whole songs.In the meantime, despite its limited release – the CD was sold at gigs and from Europa Music in Stirling; the download was only available via my Bandcamp page (with the two halves of the project split up online, so Sleepy’s excellent Build That Coffin of Mine was available separately via Cheap Wine Records’ Bandcamp) – the albumette picked up its own head of steam, garnering a few good write-ups and an award nomination.My Side of the Veil became a live favourite while Oily Old Rag gained a new lease of life as the Dog Moon Howl song Tenement Porch Dog.
As with my first release, the demo EP Broke, Lonely and Guilty, Pennies… was recorded at my then home studio, the Channel Nowhere Secret Facility, basically a converted walk-in cupboard.Everything else I’ve released, under my own name or with Dog Moon Howl has been studio recorded and although there is a pleasing rawness to the original version of Pennies…, it sounds just too rough to me.I was obsessed with pushing the bass and curbing the top end at that time, and the end result is frankly dull.So, I’ve gone back in, brightened the sounds up, rescued a few additional tracks and compiled them together as a new, album length piece.
Of course, the original tracks remain lo-fi but hopefully with a touch more in the way of clarity and dynamics. I’ve added a couple of touches I wanted to try at the time but dropped due to looming deadlines.The three new tracks are Richter Scale for Heartache, which had already been recorded at the time the split CD was suggested although the mix was never completed, Stone With My Name Carved on It, a single-take moody, distorted solo slide guitar instrumental that I don’t even remember recording and No-one Cares if You Die, a banjo tune that started life as something else entirely.I matched the rediscovered banjo track with an old unused lyric and Bob was quite suddenly your uncle.
The audio masters for Pennies on My Eyes are being completed this week.Then it’s the turn of the artwork.As soon as possible thereafter there’ll be a physical release (CD and, it looks like, tape) with downloads available via Bandcamp and from iTunes, Amazon, Spotify et al via international digital distribution from CD Baby.
Mister Hughes - Channel Nowhere 