Sam and I went back up to the homeland a couple of weeks ago to mooch around, see my folks and retrace some childhood places and introduce her to somewhere that I fervently hope I end up living again at some point. It's beautiful up there, it really is. Most people in search of northern beauty tend to take a big left turn at the pennines and head to the lake district, but they are missing an absolute treat. The northerly Yorkshire dales are breathtaking, especially the sunny weather we were blessed with.

This is high force near Middleton in Teesdale. Beautiful, dramatic and doesn't quite look like it belongs in England.

Sam and I are going to be hiring a cottage nearby for our honeymoon and exploring further!

I was greatly saddened to recently hear that the local council have given notice for Ginglik to vacate their property so that the Shephard's Bush Green area can be redeveloped. It's impossible to overstate how important this venue has been, not only for us, but to all London grassroots electronic music.

Whilst the shoreditch scene continues to follow the fashions and trends of a mercurial London music scene, and London's other small venues either get closed or filled up with landfill indie, Ginglik has continued to offer a massive variety of music, unrestricted by commercial appeal or fashion.

With the loss of The Spitz last year to redevelopment, it's a grim time for London's avantgarde and there are few places left that will host a band like us. I cannot stress how important this place has been for us and so many people that we work with.

I urge you to sign this petition - I know it seems like a shallow gesture, but at least it's something and who knows, maybe there will be a chance for the venue to be saved.

http://www.petitiononline.com/ginglik/petition.html

I spent this weekend at the fabulous Green Man festival. I won't lie, it was a trial. The rain it came and basically didn't stop all weekend and by Saturday night we were so mired in mud that even the simplest of movements through the field became an SAS training course.

That said, it's still my favourite festival in the UK and, now that the Big Chill has turned into a brand experience instead of a chilled out music festival, the only UK festival where I feel like I can properly relax and be treated to quality music that I don't really know.

Indeed, I knew fewer of the performers even than last year and the weekend became one of discovery. Sad then that moving around made it difficult to catch things of interest, so that I didn't actually see nearly as much music as I'd like to.

Highlights were

The Accidental - made up of members of Tunng and moonmusic, this was bascially an acoustic take on the Tunng sound and all the richer for it.

Lou Rhodes - the ex-Lamb singer, responsible for one of my favourite songs of all time, stripped down to just the songs and a guitar and all the richer for it. Lou's voice still does weird things to me emotionally. We actually ended up camping with her as well. Possibly the set of the weekend for me.

Three Craws - James Yorkstone, The Pictish Trail and King Creosote in a proper folk hoedown with awesome vocal harmonies. made me want to make this kind of music more than ever. I just wish I could sing, play guitar and write actual songs.

Back to the laptop I guess.

:/

Just a quick post today and in fact my first in a while.

Lots of things have happened since the San Francisco posts. I've got engaged and am getting married in a few months. The album is done and is to be released in a few weeks. thinking about it, I barely even know where to start.

The biggest change here is a new build of the site which I did in a few hours today. It started with an upgrade of the blog engine to v 2.4 and then the sudden realisation that I hadn't done a parallel install, but had overwritten the site. All good cause it meant that I could migrate all the old content easily. Not so good in that I was effectively skinning a live site.

So apologies if you can't find bits of old content or there are any bugs. I'll bring everything back in order over the next few days.

Hopefully this will keep the comment spam that plagued the last build at bay and encourage me to post a lot more to the blog!

Andy.:

I don't even know where to start other than this is probably the coolest thing I have ever done...

more tomorrow after the set.