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So we’re back in England, tired, jetlagged, weirded out by being away for 2 months. It’s the longest I’ve ever been out of the UK in one stretch, for sure.

So let’s look at some tour facts ‘n’ stats: [Read more →]

OK, we’re here in New Jersey, playing a house concert tonight. Jetlag is the worst I’ve had in ages, which is probably due to flying with a toddler.

Both Lobelia and I managed to finish up our solo albums before we set off. Which is very exciting!

My new solo album is called ‘11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything‘, and will be out via bandcamp on May 18th, and via iTunes/Amazon etc. not long after that… That picture at the top of this post is the cover art, and there’ll be individual art for each track too, as well as extensive sleeve notes. And of course, I’ll blog some more info and thoughts on it here over the next few weeks.  [Read more →]

Here’s a month-by-month breakdown. As if such a thing were neccessary

January – Flapjack enters 2010 barely a month old, Lo and I still reeling from becoming parents, so January is a slow-ish month of ongoing adjustments to parentalism. But it does see two new ventures start – First, my work with the department of Social Computing at Imperial College began its first tentative steps, planning a new music discovery/sharing/listening app, that we’ve been working on all year, that’s proved to be all kinds of fun and a great chance to apply the knowledge I’ve gained about the changes in the world of music to a real-world project.

The other launch was the rebirth of ‘New Music Strategies’ – Andrew Dubber wanted to take the ideas that he’d developed on his blog, team up with some ninjas and see where it would go. We met up in Holland to talk over what it might end up being, and came up with all kinds of ideas. It’s quite a remarkable group of people, and NMS promises all kinds of great things going forwards… [Read more →]

I’ve got a lot of posts to write about this tour, so I’ll start with one of the easiest – the music gear round-up. For the kind of small-scale touring we do, getting this bit right is SO important.

• If the gear is too big, we can’t travel.
• If the sound is bad, you can’t hear what we’re doing,
• if anything breaks, we can’t afford to carry spares so it needs to be fixable.

We need the trinity of tech spec – small, reliable and super-high-quality. [Read more →]

One of the joys of releasing music through Bandcamp (officially the world’s greatest digital music release platform, as voted for by me) is that album releases can be progressive.

We’ve already added ‘Happy‘ to the live album, when it became our de facto single, thanks to the awesome video. [Read more →]

OK, this is going to be fun, and you can help – we’re playing in Cincinnati, in a week’s time (or less, depending on when you read this). So we need your help to get the word out to the lovely people of Cincinnati, OK? [Read more →]

Tomorrow we drive to Nashville – I love Nashville. Some of my favourite people in the world are there. Clever, lovely, talented creative people. What’s not to love about it?

Which is why we’re there for a week in the middle of this tour. We’re doing a lot there. Here’s the list: [Read more →]

Ahh, the future – it’s a wonderful place to live.

So, as I said in my last post, our live set up now has a MOTU Ultralite soundcard at the heart of it, is wired with all super-high-quality Evidence Audio Cables and on this tour we’ve got killer live sound from QSC K8 speakers. Which all adds up to us being able to record ourselves, multitracked, on every gig, and to play very well given the consistently marvellous sound that we have at the shows.

So here’s our brand new live album, Live So Far: [Read more →]

We’ve been in the US nearly 2 weeks and this is my first blog post – what a bad blogger I am!

Anyway, we’ve had 4 shows so far and met up with friends old and new, having our usual fabulous time. We started out in Brooklyn, playing a house concert hosted by an American friend met in London. It was a great night, not least of all because it was a chance for Samantha (the host) to talk about The Urban Collective Project – a fabulous music industry social enterprise that has been a great success in the UK and is now launching in the US. [Read more →]

We’re off to the US of A this week, taking Baby Flapjack over to his place of nationality, to meet the family.

While we’re there, we’re doing a handful of House Concerts, as is our want.

Here are the first few dates, with links to their Facebook event pages. Please send me a message too if you want to go. These are, for the most part, private events, so the addresses aren’t public, and the people whose houses they are want to know who people are, naturally… So email me, tell me who you are, check out the page, and I’ll put you in touch for more details. (it may be that some of the gigs are either full, or the details are not available for some reason or other – please don’t be offended if this is the case – the privacy and wishes of the hosts win out here…)

here’s the first batch of shows: [Read more →]