We’re playing an acoustic gig at The Druids on Ditchling Road opposite The Level in Brighton on Thursday, 1 December.
It’s free entry and we’re playing about 15 minutes of material from about 8pm. More details to follow.

Alex has started tentatively playing drums at home, but is unable to play for long periods. We won’t bore you with medical details, but it’s difficult for him to play to the same intensity as before – for the moment, at least.

Apparently, Turncoat is going to be featured on the front page of some sort of Google music site in the USA. If you’re reading this as a result of downloading The Brighton Blank, feel free to have a look around and peer into our past “glories”.

Details on the rerelease of An Adventure In Skill And Chance will follow in our next update. Let’s hope that’s within two months of this post…

Our festival will not be taking place this year. We’ve had a couple of people asking about this and felt it was only right to let people know. In the face of not being able play (it only seems right to perform at your own festival, especially if you’ve organised it all), we have decided to postpone it.

The other crucial factor in not doing it was the venue. We’ve had our studio space in Goddards Green to use for the past three years. This time, we were toying with the idea of using a site slightly nearer to Brighton, but not being able to play live at the moment put a premature end to any further plans.

Hopefully we’ll see the ‘Blank return for 2012…

The good news is Alex has finished medical treatment to the damage in his shoulder and neck. It’s just a case of physiotherapy now to work back towards drumming again. Some of his treatments sounded quite gruelling, and we won’t go into them here, so it’s good that those days are behind him.

We met up recently to discuss how long it would be before he is fit enough to play. His arms are still weak and it could take a year or so before he’s “match-fit”. The possibility of using a different drummer in the interim was discussed but, as we were writing new material before the accident, we felt it would be pointless to enlist someone else for that.

We might work on some pieces that don’t require a live drummer. They may not extend to the live arena, but give us a creative outlet in the meantime.

On a final (less interesting) note, our equipment is all in storage and we have no plans to set up another studio yet. Chaz and Adrian have taken some of their gear home to work on things and Alex has a snare and hats in his cottage to tinker on.

Our trip to London was good and we played a short acoustic set that went down quite well. One of the songs was new and is called Sideways.
Adrian recently played an open mic night off the cuff and performed this. The person organising the gig videoed it and here it is.

In other news, we’re going to start working on some promo for the album’s re-release and get some more photos done.

We’ve added photos from Back To The Blank Part III to the gallery and any relevant press we received in 2010 to the press section too.

But first, we’ll quickly update you on our drummer Alex: Sadly, there are no great improvements in his neck, right foot or left shoulder, and he’s still getting a lot of stiffness and pain. His left hand is also still numb and uncomfortable. He had an MRI scan on his shoulder, which revealed “angry” muscles, and could have some steroid injections to promote new muscle growth. He’s due to have some tests to find out more about the nerve damage he sustained.
On the plus side, the guy who hit him has been to court, and pleaded guilty – finally. So that’s one less thing to worry about.

Also, we’ve had some promos made up by Numbskull which will help with the re-release of our album. We’ve temporarily called back stock of our album in Brighton, but may redistribute it at some point. When it is released, it will be distributed by Proper, which is actually a distribution company, so that’s encouraging.

So, even though we can’t do a great deal without Alex, we do have a FREE acoustic gig in London on June 5 at the Big Chill House. Here’s the address:

Big Chill House, 257-259 Pentonville Road, King’s Cross, London N1 9NL.

We’re playing with Sparrow, White Star Liners and Heliopause, who are all Numbskull bands so it should be kewl.

Kewl, kewl

The best bands have a solid drummer and decent bassist, while the best teams have some decent centre backs and a solid goalkeeper. Great bands have a flair player, such as a great guitarist or interesting keyboardist, and good teams have a playmaker or wing wizard to keep things alive on the pitch. Iconic bands have a great singer, and legendary teams have a prolific striker who turns it on for most games.

I also often compare gigs with football. Every footballer wants to play the best teams in the biggest stadiums, and bands want to play with the biggest names on massive stages. If a gig in our home town doesn’t go that well, I class that as a home defeat, whereas if we travel to London and get a good crowd that really get the music, then that’s an away win.

In any case, like many of the bands we know, we’re still mid-table in the Conference – hoping to break into it professionally one day. Conference Premier mind you, we have some dignity.

Enough of that. Myspace is rubbish. I’ve just been trying to use it and given up, again. Too many pop-ups and embedded videos; why can’t Myspace realise this just turns people off? Facebook have the right idea; at least their advertising is discrete. We’re not really up with Bandcamp yet – as soon as you get used to one thing, another media platform comes along.

I met up with our manager, Simon, last night and had a few drinks. He is quite enthusiastic about Numbskull HQ, his label. He runs it with two other people and is working on a band called Sparrow at the moment. In the post ‘Goodbye Hideaway’ I mentioned their recent success with the Sunday Times and air play. They are now confirmed for Glasto, so I’m dead impressed with the good work Simon’s doing with them. It looks like they could be edging into the playoffs for League Two…

Back to the point: Alex has had MRI scans and tests. He has some nerve damage, but it may not necessarily be located in his shoulder. He seems a bit better and I even bumped into him walking around Patcham village on Sunday without crutches, so that’s good. I guess we’ll see what the comeback is from the scans.

We played a secret acoustic show (without drums) for Simon Parker, our manager, to celebrate his birthday recently. It went well (his birthday and the gig) and we’re looking to play a similar sort of gig on June 5 at the Big Chill House in London. More details will follow on this as-and-when..
The video for The Brighton Blank is nearly finished. I feel like I’ve been saying that for the last ten posts now.
The single for it is being released over the summer to coincide with the re-release of An Adventure In Skill And Chance.
In the words of Gus Poyet; it’s complicated.

Mainly, we have moved out of The Hideaway. After five-and-a-half years at this studio, we decided on a change of scene. We were fortunate enough to record the majority of our debut album there and have also recorded some additional excellent musicians, which has been a pleasure.

The situation with Alex, our drummer, is not much better. He is still unable to play drums and uses a sling sometimes. He is scheduled to visit a physiotherapist soon and have an MRI scan to determine the extent of the nerve damage sustained to his left shoulder.

For this reason, we have decided to put our equipment into storage in Brighton, with a view to moving into a new room or premises near Brighton at some point over the spring/summer.

There isn’t really any point in renting a studio space while we can’t rehearse, so we’re going to do a bit of planning and try to get some videos online for fans to have a look at. One is the video for The Brighton Blank.

In the meantime, Luke has been releasing drum ‘n’ bass material through Bad Taste under the name of Loki. Adrian has been jamming with a couple of people and Chaz, our guitarist, recently proposed to his long-time girlfriend Kate.

Numbskull, our management and label, has been busily promoting Sparrow, a decent indie rock outfit from Brighton and Hove who released their first album recently. They received a review in The Sunday Times and some airtime on 6music so something’s going right for them.

We’ll try to update this more often. Ideally you would have found out about these things as they happened but that’s life.

The video for this song is also nearly finished! Yes, unbelievable. It will accompany the release of the song as a lead-off single from An Adventure In Skill And Chance at some point this year. Understandably, this has been put on ice given the circumstances in our previous post but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

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The session is now on BBC iPlayer. Unfortunately Phil Jackson called it ‘Brighton Burn’ instead of ‘The Brighton Blank’. Possibly it was because one of the other bands was called Burn Before Reading. That band ended up being pronounced like the Berkshire town of Reading - when in fact they mean reading in the literary sense. Even Stevens I guess. He did cut the song short though, so if you fancy listening to two-thirds of it, and hearing some fair-to-middling criticism, hear’s the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00d9x8t/BBC_Introducing_The_South_06_02_2011/

Timeline minutes = 11 mins introduction and an hour later at 1.11 the “demo” panel starts

As a footnote: The session also broke the news that Gary Moore has died. RIP. (22 mins)