Thank You

If you're reading this, it means you've bought one of my Dad's albums!

Thank You. We hope you like it!

There's a whole story about how this all happened. Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2013. The illness made him incredibly aggressive and we had a number of very challenging years.

Trips to Blackburn

Every second weekend, I used to travel up to Blackburn from London to give my Mum a break from the upset that was happening at home. As a way of calming him down I would take him out for long drives in the car, with his backing tracks to sing to. (Dad was a singer all his life - doing the clubs at night and working in a factory during the day). In 2016, recorded our drive one time and posted the video on Facebook, with a link to a fundraising page. The rest is history...

Dad's first album was recorded with The Guy Barker Orchestra at the world famous Angel Studios in London. I spent weeks practicing with Dad in their house in Blackburn - often to get him used to wearing headphones and singing in a microphone again. Dad would still be singing at full power around the house whenever I played any of his music - but being able to record him was a different matter. He hated wearing headphones, couldn't understand why he had to wear them and was increasingly confused. Obviously I didn't want to push him, so if it happened it happened. Dad was very very confused, but as soon as the music started, he was back in the room.

The Second Album

The second album - Swing On Jupiter & Mars - thankfully came about during Lockdown 2020. I was organising some of the many files that I had accumulated over the Songaminute years - when I found some additional recordings that I had made of Dad from around 2018 to 2019.

I always wanted to record a second album but life came in the way, Dad declined much, much more and my priority was making sure he (and Mum) were OK.

After spending time listening to the recordings again, I decided to send a couple of the vocal tracks across to producer and sound engineer Chris Traves who worked on the first album. "Give me a few weeks and I'll put something together." Initially he worked on It Had To Be You and The More I See You. He gathered together a handful of musicians that he knew from the West End (who were also out of work due to Covid closures) to work on the tracks remotely. I was blown away when I listened to the first takes - they far exceeded my expectations. The intro to It Had To Be You was exactly the sound I was hoping for ie. full big band.

So from then on, every couple of months I'd send over a new set of vocals and Chris would build tracks around them and we slowly pieced together the album over the next year.

Why space? "Fly Me To The Moon and let me play amongst the stars, let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars". The idea came from that really. Why don't we go to Mars....

I imagined us up there in space, away from the dementia and the upset. Dad travelling around from planet to planet doing his shows, much like he did in the clubs - but this time on an intergalactic scale. We'd set off on a journey to the stars and these would be the songs to accompany that journey.