Extra facts about my new children’s book!

Alongside my music and articles, I also write children’s books – my previous book, A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, is a sing-along picture book about the marine food chain that gained worldwide popularity and was even chosen as the flagship book for BookTrust’s National Bookstart Week in 2016.

My new book, The Rattlin’ Bog, is out now with Barefoot Books! Based on the catchy Irish folk song of the same name, it introduces young children to life cycles in nature and real-life peat bogs. The text is brought to life by illustrator Brian Fitzgerald, who brings a wonderful character and vitality to the peat bog landscape, and the book includes a link to a rollicking recording of the song by Irish folk band The Speks.

My favourite part was writing the end notes – these are the final pages that include fun facts about the species and themes mentioned in the book. As you can probably imagine, my first draft was literally double the required length, so much of it had to be discarded. However, I thought I would share some of the extra information with you here. That way, if you buy a copy of the book, you can impress your kids with all your additional knowledge!

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What is a bog?

Bogs are places where plants grow in really wet ground. If you walked through one, your feet would get very soggy indeed!

Bogs have a kind of soil called peat, which is made when layers of dead plants squash down on top of each other over hundreds of years. Bogs are great at fighting climate change, because the plants that live there absorb carbon dioxide from the air and trap it underground when they die.

But sadly, many of Ireland’s bogs have been destroyed. People dig up the peat to burn in their fireplaces. Or they drain the water out of the bogs so that they can build on them or turn them into farmland. 

Thankfully, there are plenty of scientists, leaders and nature lovers like you and me who are working hard to protect Ireland’s bogs and help them to grow back.

Rattlin’ Bog wildlife

Rattlin’ is an Irish word for great or brilliant – and Ireland’s bogs really are a brilliant home for wildlife. Here are just a few of the amazing plants and animals that live there:

Sundew Plant

The Sundew plant has found a way to eat animals! Its leaves are covered in tiny hairs that have drops of sticky liquid on the ends. When an insect lands on a leaf, it gets stuck to the hairs. The leaf curls up, trapping the insect inside. Then the plant digests it just like we digest food in our stomachs!

Irish Hare

During the summer, the Irish Hare’s brown fur helps it to blend in with plants in the bog. But in the winter, its fur changes colour to white so that it can hide in the snow. The hare’s clever camouflage makes it harder for foxes and other predators to catch and eat it.

Sphagnum Moss

Soft, springy Sphagnum Moss grows like a living carpet all over the bog. Because it soaks up rain water like a sponge, it helps the bog to stay damp and to spread out even further. It also contains chemicals that kill germs, so humans have used it to keep food fresh, and even as bandages to cover cuts. 

Common Lizard

The Common lizard is Ireland’s only reptile (there are no snakes in Ireland). Unlike most reptiles, it doesn’t lay eggs. Instead, it gives birth to cute little baby lizards. If a predator catches a Common Lizard by the tail, it has a surprising way to escape: its tail snaps off and it grows a new one!

Dragonfly

A bog is the perfect place for a dragonfly to live, because it spends most of its life underwater as a wingless nymph. Then after a few years, it climbs up a plant stalk into the fresh air and sheds its skin. Underneath, it has a pair of folded wings. It unfurls them and flies away!

From egg to bird

Inside the egg, a chick has everything it needs. The hard outer shell protects it. The yolk contains food rich in fat and protein to help it grow. The egg even has a pocket of air for the chick to breathe.

Bird eggs are oval-shaped rather than round, which stops them from rolling out of the nest easily. Many are camouflaged so that predators don’t eat them. The Common Ringed Plover, which nests on beaches, has eggs that look just like pebbles!

When it’s time to hatch, some kinds of chicks chirp to each other from inside the egg so that they all hatch at the same time and get the same amount of care from their parents. Some have an “egg tooth” – a sharp bump on the end of their beak which helps them to smash through the shell. It falls off later. 

Being a bird parent is hard work. First, you need to sit on the eggs and incubate them to keep them warm. Then when the eggs hatch, you need to rush back and forth with a constant supply of worms and insects to feed your hungry, growing, noisy chicks. Many bird parents take it in turns, with the mom and dad doing an equal amount of work. 

You also have to protect your family and fight off predators. The Northern Lapwing is especially brave – it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest.

But it’s all worth it when your chicks are big enough to fly away and start a families of their own!

From seed to tree

Seeds are similar to eggs in many ways. They have a hard shell on the outside and a food store on the inside. But unlike eggs, seeds can stay asleep for a very long time – until it’s the perfect moment to start growing.

Many seeds sprout when they sense heat and moisture – a sign that spring has arrived. The root breaks out and grows downwards in search of water. The shoot grows upwards towards the sunlight. But if you put a bright light underneath a sprouting seed, the shoot will grow downwards instead!

Once it’s above ground, the shoot unfurls leaves which soak up energy from the sun, while the roots take in water and nutrients from the soil. That’s all it needs to grow into a big, strong tree.

How trees spread their seeds

Trees like to spread their seeds far and wide so that they can find new homes with plenty of space to grow. Here are some incredible ways that they do it:

Mountain Ash

The Mountain Ash grows bright, juicy berries to attract hungry birds. The birds carry the seeds away inside their stomachs and release them in their droppings. The bird poo even acts as fertiliser to help the young trees grow!

Sycamore

Sycamore seeds have little wings attached to them. When they drop off the tree, they spin through the air like a helicopter and get carried far away by the wind.

Tiger’s Claw tree

The Tiger’s Claw tree grows on beaches in tropical countries. Its seeds fall into the ocean and float until they get washed up somewhere new. Sometimes they can travel hundreds of miles!

Giant Redwood

The Giant Redwood only releases its seeds after there has been a forest fire. That way, the young trees will have plenty of room to grow, because the fire has burned big gaps in the forest.  

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If you’d like to buy the book, it’s available in local bookshops or from any online book vendor. Our preferred online vendors are Waterstones in the UK, Barnes and Noble in the US, and Book City in Canada. Happy reading!

How I joined The Mechanisms

I started writing this anecdote in late 2019, when my band of the past 10 years, The Mechanisms, made the mutual agreement to break up. I originally intended to write a full account of my time with the band in three chapters. However, shortly after the band’s farewell gig in January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and during the stress of that period I lost vast stretches of my memory. All I can remember of the band’s middle years, for example, is that I once insisted on making us all packed sandwiches for our gig in London, causing Ivy to dub us “the world’s most wholesome rock band.”

Anyway, I thought I might as well present these fragments for your interest, and to document one of the most exciting formative periods of my life and musical career.

Part one: The Beginning

I arrived back in Oxford a month too early to move into my new house, and a month too late to join The Mechanisms.

Apparently, Jonny and Dr Carmilla had already formed the idea of the band at that summer’s Edinburgh Festival, a petri dish for strange new projects. I’d been at the festival too, doing the lights for a queer feminist burlesque show, but I had been unaware that the pair even knew each other. Of course, Jonny always turned out to know everyone – I once turned up to help shoot a short film for the local Super 8 competition, only to find him playing the starring role of a terrifying giant death rabbit in a white fluffy suit in 30 degrees heat. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually cross paths with the enigmatic musical genius Dr Carmilla.

I always admired Carmilla – she was a brilliant instigator, sitting like a majestic Gothic spider at the centre of a web of music, cabaret and writing, inviting people into her world of prog rock, anime, Dieselpunk and sinister storytelling. To my knowledge, she still is.

And so, that October, when Dr Carmilla invited me round to her rundown house off the Cowley Road, I found the kernel of the band already crammed into the bedroom – Jonny on vocals, Ivy on flute, Nastya on viola, the long-lost Scuzz on cello, Ashes on bass and Carmilla on vocals, piano and every other instrument required. Drums and acoustic guitar were absent, but many of the band’s core concepts were already established – the idea of performing in character as the mechanised space-pirate crew of the starship Aurora, for one. Dystopian fairy tales, for another: “Rose Red” was already in full marching order. But the idea to knit the songs together into an overarching narrative was yet to be established. Crew members’ origin songs rubbed shoulders with fairytale ballads and a frantic, repetitive cabaret number about a nightmare that Jonny had once had.

The room itself was tiny – I had to lie down in the gap between the bed and the wall to listen to the band rehearse. The music washed over me in a jumble of mysterious and off-kilter melodies – raw and unformed, but no less exciting for it. My confidence buoyed by the recent acquisition of a mandolin, I immediately asked to join the band. I was told that I was too late: they already had all the musicians they needed. No matter. All I had to do was bide my time.

Still, I was happy to stay on the outside for the time being. I’d already started writing my own music by then, and, in fact, debuted “The Hedonist” and “The Spiv” at the same open mic night where The Mechanisms debuted some of their first shanties (for which I showed my glowing appreciation by stating that they were “almost like proper songs.”) I wasn’t there for their official launch gig on Halloween – I’d been booked to perform in Birmingham, one remaining obligation hanging over from when I thought I might be staying in the dreaded Midlands after coming home from university. I was there for the band practices, though, where the recently-press-ganged Drumbot Brian had to gamely make do with a single snare drum, and where they rehearsed how their very first gig would begin: Carmilla tripping a switch on each of her frozen band members, bringing them to life for the first time.

After rehearsals, we would drink red wine, eat cake and talk happy nonsense, crammed onto the tiny sofas, the floor, and sometimes each other, much to the chagrin of all involved.

Soon enough, my window of opportunity arrived. My big break came with the Queer Cabaret at St Hilda’s College that winter – I’d moved into a proper house by then, and no longer had to sleep on Jonny’s living room floor, with him and his housemates constantly playing Fallout Three on playstation and embedding its retro 1940s soundtrack into the deepest recesses of my brain. I was brought in because Jonny couldn’t make the gig. He’d started a job in London working nights, one week on, one week off, which would render him only able to attend 50% of Mechanisms gigs for the next two years (we worked it out – it was indeed 50% exactly). I sang his character, The Captain, in Nastya’s origin story “Cyberian Demons”: an ingenious, futuristic Russian Revolution story cycle that quite never made it to the recording studio.

To get into the military theme, I wore a vintage officer’s dress uniform that I’d purchased from Oxford antique market that summer as a reward to myself for passing my final exams. I believe I even wore a giant silver clockwork key fashioned from a spray-painted toilet roll inside, but that had to be dispatched with at later gigs, when my mandolin strap got in the way. Before the show, Carmilla photographed me posing in uniform in a local graveyard – and so the Toy Soldier was born.

Despite the fact that I made everyone on stage burst into laughter by improvising the line “I wish I wasn’t dead” during the tragic final song, the band seemed impressed with my performance, and I was invited to join permanently. This might have been partly down to an amusing opening skit with Nastya, where the Toy Soldier’s activation code consisted of the correct way to drink Earl Grey tea (milk, no lemon). The psychopathically cheery, excessively British persona of the Toy Soldier would remain in place from then on.

Part Two: The Middle

There was something about the following summer – the hot, lazy excitement of being part of a new cultural movement, part of the music scene of the city, that I’ve never felt since. I’ve never felt so current, so relevant, and so ridiculous. I wrote and recorded my first EP, Rogue’s Gallery, late at night in Dr Carmilla’s spare room, necking red wine to quell my nerves and still damp with river water from cooling off in the Thames earlier that day. Everywhere you looked, strange cabaret bands roamed the Cowley Road and haunted The Cellar, the main alternative gig venue in Oxford: the punk cabaret Borderville, who released a concept album version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis that lives rent-free in my mind to this day. Barberella, a glam rock clown cult whose show concluded with a man juggling, and then eating, raw onions. And Scarlett in the Wilderness – a feverish, burlesque-tinged jazz folk ensemble decked out in corsets and feathers. We fitted right in.

Despite this, I still hadn’t quite got my head round the strictures of being in a band. Some days, I decided I would rather go shopping than to band practice. At a garden party gig I refused to wear my Toy Soldier uniform because I was too hot and wasn’t allowed to sing the vocals on “Rocket Girl” (I remember playing glockenspiel extra loud in a fit of pique because of this). There were gigs in living rooms, basements, birthday parties, pubs and gardens. The venues almost always spelled our name right.

As far as I can remember, we recorded our first album, Once Upon a Time: In Space, in a farm in the middle of a very allergenic meadow, on the day my pet Triops (a kind of glorified sea monkey) had cannibalised each other. I was encouraged to jump up and down while singing to make the Rose Red character sound more punchy, and Johnny opted to record sans shirt (well, it was a hot day). The poor sound technician didn’t know what he was dealing with – this was before the arrival of the excellent Jimmy Heatherington, who was totally on board with our vision.

How I write songs – some possibly useful tips!

Today I have taken it upon myself to try and explain the incredibly profound question of how I write songs. The first thing I would say is that it differs from person to person – some people come up with the melody first, or the lyrics, or the overall concept, or the instrumental backing – or several elements at once. Every way is valid. All I can do is explain how I do it, and advise you to start with whatever form your initial ideas take (tunes, words, or subject matters) and build it up from there.

Concept

I usually come up with the concept first, e.g. “I want to write a song about the Sirens from Greek mythology” or “I want to write a song about the migration patterns of the European Eel.” (It helps that I started out writing songs for musical theatre, where I had to compose to a highly specific brief). I might have vague ideas for lyrics or even whole snatches of completed song running round my head (I sometimes come up with words and melody at the same time, often in my sleep, although I have no idea how) – but I don’t solidify anything yet.

Ideas usually spring upon me when I’d busy doing something else (washing up, having a shower, putting the laundry out to dry, going for a walk), so the first thing I would recommend is try to find a quiet, meditative activity that lets your imagination run free, rather than sitting staring at a blank page.

Melody

Next, I think about what kind of genre or atmosphere the song should have. Would it be slow, fast, melancholy, mysterious, jazzy? What kinds of songs that already exist in popular culture would work for this idea? Then I try to come up with a vocal melody that suits the subject matter. I either improvise a melody by humming it aloud with stand-in lyrics, or listen through my recordings of random melodies that have popped into my head over the years (I have a dictaphone by my bed for this very purpose, as I can’t read or write music).

I always try my hardest to come up with original, unusual melodies that are pleasing and attention-grabbing to the ear. I try to make them catchy and memorable, but without making them corny and too similar to everything else. The vocal melody is the part of the song that listeners will latch onto most, so it needs to hold their attention and get them invested in the message of the song.

This is partly a matter of personal taste and intuition, so don’t be afraid to try lots of different ideas until you land upon something you really like. Don’t settle for the most obvious tune that first comes into your head if it doesn’t enthuse you. I personally tend to avoid excessive repetition or long stretches of the same note over and over again, which don’t take the melody anywhere new.

Lyrics

Once I’ve stitched together the verse, chorus and any other sections that I feel the song may need (bridge, middle eight, etc), I set about finalising the lyrics. A lot of people write the lyrics first, and then fit the melody around them. If that works for you, then great – that’s just as valid. But I personally find it extremely difficult because it means the melody is constrained by the metre and syllables of the lyrics, making it harder to come up with something really original and interesting. If I ever do write the lyrics first, I always end up having to change them dramatically to fit in with whatever melody I’ve come up with – so I might as well wait and finalise them afterwards.

For the lyrics, I try to think of artful, poetic ways of saying what I want to say, rather than just being a “talking head” that blurts out exactly what’s going on. I call it “dressing it up a bit”, and it’s the difference between: “The European Eel hatches as a transparent, leaf-shaped larvae of around 1 centimetre with small black eye spots” and “Well, I was born of tiny size, a leaf-like waif with pinprick eyes.” Try to look for similes or metaphors, or comparisons in stories or popular culture that explain how you’re feeling. Which combinations of words sound nice, or just quite cool? Do you have to generalise, or could you use a more specific example?

Linked to this, try to use different perspectives and put yourself in others’ shoes, rather than describing things very generally or having the songs always coming from your own viewpoint. Would “Eleanor Rigby” have sounded different if it started “I am quite lonely”, or if it was just a generic song about loneliness without any individual characters?

One of the biggest turn-offs for me is when a song sounds too obvious – it’s almost like it’s insulting the intelligence of the listener, and can come across as overly mawkish and earnest. We can never, ever guarantee that the listener will get everything we’re trying to say. But if you trust in your feelings and commit to the emotion that provoked the idea for a song, it will come across to the people who need to hear it.

When it comes to rhyming, don’t be afraid of half-rhymes (e.g. “saying” and “pain”) – they’re always going to be more interesting than overused perfect rhymes (love, dove, above). If you can manage it, it also sounds cool to have rhyming words of multiple syllables (delicious, malicious, pernicious). I try not to rely on hackneyed phrases and aphorisms that appear in songs all the time.

Accompaniment

Then, when I’ve got all those elements finalised, I try to fit the melody to chords, thinking about which accompanying instrument would be most appropriate to form the core of the song. This very much depends on whether you already play a backing instrument. If not, the best way to learn in my opinion is to do covers of some of your favourite songs from a range of different styles and genres – that way, you learn how the music you love is put together, and can apply those rules to your own work.

When you’ve come up with a chord progression, rhythm and playing style that suits the song, you can start thinking about dynamics – does the song build up to a dramatic crescendo, or come to a sombre realisation at the end? Either way, it’s worth making the accompaniment livelier, sparser or just different at these points to reflect what’s happening in the narrative of the song. Then you can start planning which additional instruments you might want to include to create a fuller sound (or work with a backing band or producer if you don’t play those instruments yourself!).

Some people come up with a nice-sounding chord progression first and build the rest of the song around it, which, again, is completely valid if that works for you. I, however, find it very restricting as it confines the melody to a limited number of notes, and often flattens it to the base note for that chord.

Getting feedback

Getting feedback from others is a vital stage, as it’s easy to get so caught up in your work you lose sight of how it sounds to the outside world. I work best with one or two close confidants who know me well and share my criteria for what makes a good song (in my case, it’s my mom and my producer, who have saved several of my songs from avoidable daftness). They need to be willing to give honest, no-nonsense constructive criticism without worrying about offending you.

If you can’t play the song to them in person, send them a recording AND a copy of the lyrics. Ask specific questions about any bits you’re unsure of and take their feedback seriously, even if it’s inconvenient for you to alter the song. However, if you strongly disagree with one of their comments from an artistic perspective, that means it matters to you and should probably stay as it is – so trust your gut as well.

I also leave the finished song a couple of days and come back to it with a fresh mind, at which point I often end up instantly solving issues I spent hours puzzling over at the time of writing!

Have fun!

Phew! So those are my thoughts. Obviously you don’t need to use ALL these tips in one song – that would probably be impossible! And some of the advice may sound quite harsh, whereas in reality if you’re just starting out, the point is to have fun and don’t be too hard on yourself. All of the above is just food for thought and will hopefully give you some ideas of where to go from different starting points. Choose which bits appeal to you and ignore the rest!

I would also say that I rarely write a song all in one go, or push myself to write a certain quota of songs over a given period of time. I’ve been known to write songs over a period of days, weeks or even years. I pace myself and write when inspiration strikes – otherwise it’s not fun anymore! Besides, there’s no point tainting everything in your life with the capitalist cult of productivity.

On the other hand, there’s also something to be said for making time to finish a song you’ve left half-written for months, especially if you have a busy life. So do what works for you!

I seem to have gone into quite a lot of detail! Let me know if you find it helpful, or if you have any other questions. Do you agree with my advice? How does it differ from how YOU write songs? I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts!

My next album is going to be a bit… different. Let me explain…

Renaissance plotting with Cambridge storyteller Marion Leeper

Hello world! It’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been keeping myself busy. Along with gigs in forests, my improvised comedy debut, and being an extra in a popular period drama, I’ve also got an exciting new project in the offing… a CONCEPT ALBUM based on the Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso!

But what is Orlando Furioso, I hear you say? Well, apart from every Italian person I’ve ever spoken to, who learned it at school, it’s surprisingly little-known – despite having inspired a huge amount of modern literature, including Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. It was written by Ludovico Ariosto in the 16th century, but is set in the medieval era, covering the battle between king Charlemagne’s paladins and the invading Saracen army. It’s about knights, love, chivalry, battles and all the other things you might expect from an epic poem.

So far, so highbrow, right? Well, not quite. When Cambridge storyteller Marion Leeper contacted me last summer, inviting me to collaborate on a show based on the poem, I had no idea how hilarious, ridiculous and oddly modern it is. It turns out the poem was basically joke fan-ficiton for an earlier epic poem, Orlando Innamorato, written by a different author who died before he could finish it. Ludovico Ariosto took it upon himself to complete the tale and, just as Fifty Shades of Grey originally started out as fanfiction for Twilight, it became just as popular in its own right. Highlights of the madness include:

A hippogriff
A trip to the moon (the place where all the lost things go)
An evil necromancer with a steel castle
A magic ring that makes you invisible (sounds familiar?)
A talking myrtle bush

The Hippogriff Song!

It’s also surprising how progressive and feminist the story is in places. Probably because he wanted to attract the patronage of noblewoman Isabella d’Este, Ariosto put in loads of amazing female characters including:

Bradamante, a badass female knight who is constantly rescuing her boyfriend from peril

Alcina, a sorceress who turns irksome men into garden shrubbery

Marfisa, the formidable warrior woman who wears a belt made out of the foreskins of eight lecherous kings

For the past year, Marion and I have been performing a live storytelling show around the UK based on these excellent and ridiculous characters, focusing on the star-crossed romance between paladin knight Bradamante and saracen warrior Ruggiero. Marion’s silver-tongued story-spinning brings out the humanity and humour of the story, interspersed with songs which are in turn hilarious, tragic, melodramatic, romantic, and all incredibly fun to perform.

Me and Marion in action (in a medieval cellar!)

The next step was, naturally, an album – but we agreed that we didn’t want to do a straight-up recording of the full show, because we’ve often found that recordings of storytelling shows don’t seem to capture the magic of the live experience. Instead, we’ve distilled the show into a tight 40-minute concept album. The songs are interspersed with very short sections of narrative, backed by music throughout – sort of like a calmer version of War of the Worlds, or the kind of thing I did with my Steampunk space pirate storytelling band, The Mechanisms.

Like my previous albums, it will have the full-band sound that can only be provided by my amazing producer Nick Siepmann, who has been tirelessly recording us over the past couple of weeks.

The recording sessions were challenging, exhausting and incredibly fun. We’re all really proud of the result, and we think you’ll enjoy it too. So watch this space!

(And it you’d like to book us for the live show, just drop me a line!)

Marion and Nick in the studio

 

I made laundry detergent out of conkers and it didn’t go as terribly as you might expect

As promised, the blog post you’ve all been waiting for… the time I made laundry detergent out of conkers!

Now, before I begin, I’ve found that not everyone knows what conkers are – they appear to be a uniquely British institution. So, for the uninitiated, conkers are the seed of the Horse Chestnut tree. Not to be confused with the seed of the Sweet Chestnut tree (known, less imaginatively, as chestnuts), these smooth, brown spheres are not edible, and not originally native to the UK. The first Horse Chestnut trees were brought over from the Balkans in the early 17th century by the famous royal gardener John Tradescant the elder, not for their conkers, but for their uniquely candelabra-like flowers. He obviously didn’t understand the tree’s true forte.

The Horse Chestnut tree in flower © Steve Slater / Flickr

So, why do the British love conkers? Apart from being satisfyingly smooth, round and a quintessential sign of Autumn, they’re not really that useful – apart from the fact that they’ve got their very own game. Here’s how it works.

To play “conkers”, you drill a hole down the middle of a conker and thread it onto a string. You and your opponent then whack the conkers together until one of them breaks. The intact conker is crowned the winner. Conkers that have defeated multiple opponents are named after the number of conquests, such as a “one-er”, “two-er” or “twenty nine-er”. In schools across Britain, children were known to use drastic measures like boiling their conkers in vinegar and baking them in the oven to strengthen them, which, according to my stepdad, “wasn’t cheating as long as you didn’t get caught”.

The Conkers game

It’s hard to describe the absolute mania that once surrounded the game. My aforementioned stepdad referred to it not just as “conkers”, but “conker season”, an with entire leagues and matches reminiscent of its autumnal counterpart, football. By the time I was born, the game had been banned from many schools due to its sheer dangerousness, and as an uncompetitive child who preferred finding a quiet corner to read the better-known works of George Orwell (not a word of a lie), I only partook on a handful of occasions. I did, however, love running around the woods collecting them with my fellow tomboy Charlotte, marveling at their swirling, varnished patterns as we filled entire bin bags like demented squirrels. However, once we got them home, they would lose their lustre, becoming dull and lifeless. I always ended up wishing I’d left them where they belonged.

But now, there can be a purpose to my conker-collecting frenzies! Vaguely aware of the polluting qualities of normal washing powder and the air miles of soap nuts (an organic alternative), late last year I was pleased to stumble upon an instructional article on how to make laundry detergent out of conkers (which I have since lost – sorry!)

This wouldn’t be the first time I’d tried to make something out of conkers, which contain natural saponins (soap molecules) – part of the reason they’re inedible, and the only possible reason I can think of that they’re said to ward off spiders. Following instructions I’d once read in the seminal Horrible Histories classic The Vicious Vikings, in my first month at university I set about making “viking soap” in the kitchen of my student accommodation. Apart from creating a huge mess and attracting a curious horde of fellow students (many of whom became my friends through this unusual encounter), the mush yielded little in the way of soap. Laundry detergent, however, seemed far simpler.

And it was! The first step was to completely mash up my conkers. Aware that the conkers would probably keep far longer than the detergent, I separated them into two lots of 16, keeping the second half for next time.

I then set about completely flattening the first half. It was very therapeutic…

Then, all I needed to do was add boiling water. I wasn’t too sure how much to add, but reasoned that a lot of dilute laundry detergent would be better than too little strong detergent, so I settled on about a pint. (I added more after this picture was taken…) 

Looks appetising, doesn’t it?

Then all I needed to do was wait overnight…

It worked!

The next morning, it had formed a thick, milky substance that smelled slightly of biscuits and really did feel soapy! I strained it with a normal kitchen sieve and added some rose essence to give it a pleasant odour. Then I put it in with a usual wash…

And it worked! In fact, it was one of the best washes I’d ever done! No white flecks from powder or slimy patches from inadequately-distributed detergent. Instead, everything was spotless, fresh and sweet-smelling. Finally, a conker-related venture that I could excel at! Why not give it a go yourself when autumn comes around again…

The quest to find the black squirrels of Cambridge

As soon as I heard that there were black squirrels in Cambridge, I knew that this was something I had to see. The only time I’d ever witnessed one before was in Belgium, of all places, and at the time I thought I was going mad. In fact, I’d spent hours convinced it was some sort of small, squat pine marten until I found out that black squirrels were a thing that actually exists. Then I started questioning all squirrels I saw, which I’d never really paid attention to before. Had grey squirrels, for example, suddenly started having white tummies, or had I only just started noticing them? Needless to say, I was eager to go through this harrowing and existential experience once again.

My informant told me that black squirrels can be spotted at two Cambridge colleges: Churchill and Girton. But how did they get there? Well, as a “melanistic” mutation of the Eastern Grey Squirrel, it made sense to assume that they can be found anywhere that grey squirrels exist.

Grey squirrels, as we all know, were brought over from the Americas as a fancy pet and proceeded to drive out our smaller, cuter reds. Given their reputation as invasive “tree rats” nowadays, it’s hard to believe quite what a highly-prized status symbol they were at first. One of the things that’s always driven it home for me is a fancy oil painting in Wolverhampton art gallery, displaying a family of Georgian nobility decked out in their finest attire. And right at the centre, there’s a grey squirrel on a silver chain:

The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee, by Joseph Highmore, 1736 – can you spot the grey squirrel?

Little did we know that Cambridge’s squirrels would turn out to have a rather more intriguing past…

And so, on a sunny Saturday, me and my trusty Executive Squirrel Assistant set out to the first of the squirrel-heavy locations.

1. Churchill College

Named after the stalwart prime minister who shepherded the UK through the blitz, you would think the college would look a little less dystopian and futuristic…

But it still had its fair share of nature and rustic features, so we kept a beady eye out for any shadows moving among the trees…

We did hear a few skittering sounds and spotted a couple of grey tails whipping through the branches, but as we made our way past the oddly picturesque compost bins and out to the final line of trees at the end of the college, we still hadn’t seen any of the promised sable beauties. I was fine with this – I didn’t actually expect to spot any, and was just happy to have an excuse for a quest. But then we stumbled through the trees, we found ourselves somewhere entirely different…

2. The Astronomy Department

Tall, ivy-clad domes loomed over us and we realised we had wandered in among the uncanny observatories of the Astronomy department. And here, there were far more grey squirrels, who were unnervingly tame. We even managed to photograph one…

And where there are higher numbers of grey squirrels, there must surely be more chance of spotting a black one. Spurred on, we made our way through the towering pines and redwoods, but it wasn’t until we were finally attempting to stop trespassing and exit the site that I saw it – not one, but TWO beautiful black squirrels, streaking up the tree in front of us.

I was absolutely delighted! Especially since I’m NEVER the first to spot things – that’s why I’m not into birdwatching, despite writing for a bird charity. But this time, I’d done it! Sadly, they were too fast to photograph. My Executive Squirrel Assistant left a handful of presciently-purchased cashews on the edge of the table and we waited for a while, but they didn’t return.

And so we set off towards our next destination, passing through one of the strangest places in Cambridge:

3. A brief detour to Eddington

This is one of the most sinister places I’ve ever been. It’s a brand new village on the outskirts of Cambridge, built specifically as overspill housing for academics. Much of it is still being built, creating a bizarre vista when you look out across cranes and skeleton apartments to the countryside beyond. Much of what has been built is still empty, and even for those poor souls who have already moved in, there must be something very odd about living in a village designed from scratch all in one go, rather than springing up organically over centuries. A strange shrimp kite – or was it a squid? Fluttered from a tree as we approached the village, and I attempted to appear three times in a panoramic vista.

But soon enough, we shrugged off its sinister atmosphere and set off to our second destination:

4. Girton College

This is like an adorable version of the Blair Witch Project

-Executive Squirrel Assistant

I really really love this college. It’s so harsh and Victorian! It’s just how I imagine the desolate boarding school in the middle of a moor that Eustace and Jill escaped from at the start of the Silver Chair. It’s also the closest anything has ever come to the building I dreamed about in my song “School for Lost Souls”.  And there are so many ravens! It’s just great.

After a brief detour to their orchards for some scrumping and a packed lunch of peanut butter and crisp sandwiches, we set off through its grounds, seeing nothing at first. But then, suddenly, while my Executive Squirrel Assistant was taking a photo of something completely different…

A sneak preview of my imminent blog about the quest to find Cambridge's black squirrels… pic.twitter.com/AIasG0xTHr

— Jessica Law (@JessicaTheLaw) November 10, 2018

I mean, you still can’t see any of the squirrels – but at least you can see our reaction to them. And with the lens flare and the shaky camera, you certainly can’t say it isn’t atmospheric!

Oh, all right, fine. We did manage to get a sneaky photo of ONE:

Can you see it?

And after that, we started seeing absolutely loads of them! About 20 or 30 at least, frolicking alongside their grey fellows. And that’s when we started noticing strange things about them. For example, they seemed bigger than their grey counterparts. Surely this couldn’t be possible if it was just a colour mutation? Maybe the fact that they were black just made them stand out more and their outline look bigger? Not only that, but they were different shades – some were solid black (reminding me of the Black Rabbit from Watership Down – maybe they were there to ferry the souls of the grey squirrels to the afterlife?) – but others seemed more of a brown-black – and I could have sworn one had a tan tummy. This required further exploration…

The true origin of Cambridge’s black squirrels

My research took me to places I never could have imagined. Firstly, I found that black squirrels aren’t just a rare mutation of grey ones – in fact, in some places they used to be the main colour morph. In the deep, dark forests of the Eastern United States, for example, their black fur used to give them an advantage over greys – but now, deforestation is overturning this trend. And not only does the mutation make them have a higher concentration of melanin pigment in their fur – it also makes them bigger, better at defending their territory and more attractive to females. No wonder it had spread so fast at Girton!

In fact, I found that at Girton, three quarters of the squirrels there are black! No wonder they were so easy to spot. I felt a little less proud of my observation skills, but no less intrigued. And then I found out something else – scientists had analysed the genes of Cambridge’s black squirrels, and found that they were actually more similar to modern squirrels living in America than they were to the ones in this country. So they aren’t actually mutant local squirrels. Instead, the story goes that, thanks to novelty of their monochrome fur, some black squirrels were captured from America and displayed a fancy menagerie at a posh manor house, from which they escaped.

And so history repeats itself once again…

A Tale of Two Apple Days: a Photo Essay

It’s that time of year again, folks – APPLE time!!!! Having been raised by a apple-mad dad who turned our entire suburban garden into an orchard and took us to the amazing all-singing all-dancing Ironbridge Gorge apple day every year, my standards are pretty high. So imagine my delight when I found that there were not one, but TWO apple days going on in Cambridge: the low-key, homegrown Murray Edwards College apple day, and the classy Cambridge Botanical Gardens apple day. Below I review and compare both, because why the ruddy heck not?

Saturday: Murray Edwards College apple day

Too many young people and too many apples.

-my housemate

She had a point. We arrived to find that the entire place was overrun with hoodlum whippersnappers, or “students”, as they are commonly known. To us, some of the Freshers looked like actual children, and we couldn’t remember (or imagine) ever looking that fresh-faced and idealistic. However, once the existential crisis had worn off, we were able to start exploring and soaking in the “vibe”. I’ll start with the positives:

1. It was free

And when I say free, I mean everything was free – Murray Edwards College has its own orchard, so this knees-up was plainly an excuse for them to get rid of as many of their apples as they possibly could. We even saw a squirrel carrying one on the way in, which we interpreted as a good omen. So it wasn’t just free to get in – there was also free apple juice…

Free apple pie (which all three of us had to eat out of a single cup, because the bowls ran out the minute they managed to replace the spoons, which had also run out…)

Free giant marshmallows, which we melted on a lovely fire:

2. There was a lovely fire

There’s nothing as wonderfully Autumnal as the smell of wood smoke and searing sugar. After I’d melted (well, burned) my marshmallow, I was advised to put biscuits on it to create what is known as a “smore.” But I’m not entirely sure I did it right…

3. The apples were pulped and pressed on-site

Just like any self-respecting apple day, the apple pulping and pressing was happening right under our very noses, with the bitter scent of crushed pulp fresh in the air and the juice poured by straight from the weird machine thing:

4. There was a lovely dog

It just added something to the atmosphere, you know?

4. There were cool crafts

Roll over potatoes, there’s a new plant-based stamp in town…

But there were also some negative points…

1. The apple bobbing was too character building

I mean, usually there’s at least a little stalk or something you can bite onto. But in this case, the apples had absolutely no purchase at all, and I ended up feeling like I was being waterboarded…

In the end, I just gave myself one as a reward for my ordeal. It was delicious!

2. The music was too quiet

The Murray Edwards choir was lovely, but you had to get up pretty darn close to know that…

Then there was a duo who had made some quite… interesting fashion choices. They both had ginger hair, and had opted to wear matching tops that also matched their auburn locks. Perhaps it was their “unique selling point.” Their guitar-backed vocal harmonies created a  mellow, Simon and Garfunkel-esque soundtrack to our peregrinations, but again, they really were too quiet – even though there was a PA system! They obviously hadn’t turned it up to eleven…

3. There really were too many young people.

My housemate put it best when she said that the clientele of adorably traditional events like Apple Day usually make her feel younger, whereas here, the opposite was true – and we all started getting rather existential…

But then again, there were cool straw bales. And we did all have a lovely time!

Score: a solid 7/10

A little while after this photo was taken, my housemate insisted we go home due to “apple fatigue”. But that wasn’t an option for me! So the next day, I was onto the next one…

Sunday: Cambridge Botanical Gardens apple day

This had better be worth the £8

-my colleague

As you can imagine, this was an enterprise of a whole different scale. Rather than accidentally gatecrashing a college event (which I fear is what happened on Saturday), this bonanza was the highlight of the Cambridge social calendar, which had both up and down sides. We’ll start with the positives:

1. Cambridge Botanical Gardens are beautiful in Autumn

2. I mean really, really beautiful

3. There was an apple identification stall!

My apple, which I had brought from my garden, caused quite a bit of controversy and intrigue as nobody in the tent seemed to be able to work out what it was. It was passed around the tent from expert to expert as they hummed and hawed and talked about ridges and sepals and other bizarre parts I never knew apples had. Finally, one of them shouted “listen! It squeaks when I rub it!” which somehow apparently meant that it was a Lane’s Prince Albert cooking apple. “Prince Albert” because it was named to commemorate the monarch’s visit to the orchard, and “Lane’s” after the outraged gardener who had actually invented the breed, and added his name on afterwards in disgruntlement at the mustachioed monarch stealing his glory.

4. There was delicious food

From food vans outside to a whole market inside, there was no limit to the fancy schamcy food on offer. I would particularly recommend the gloriously creamy Cambridge Blue cheese. Perfection!

However, there was one item of food that proved the source of a particularly fervent quest. My American colleague insisted that we find out if there were any “caramel apples” left and, thinking this was just the American way of saying “toffee apple”, I allowed her to lead us on a film noir-style odyssey from stall to stall until we finally arrived, tousled and out of breath, at a van that possessed the last three such items in the entire garden. We had purchased two when, hot on our tails, a small child arrived in pursuit of the third one. As my colleague put it, “I would have felt bad if I’d taken the last one, but I still would have taken it.”

However, no sooner had she taken a bite than she recoiled in horror. “This isn’t a caramel apple!” She exclaimed. “Caramel apples are soft!” When I suggested our brittle, inedible toffee version was more “character building”, she went into a diatribe about the British habit of “taking a perfectly good food and making it worse”. This didn’t stop both children and adults from running up to us and asking where we’d purchased these much-desired items, and us having to turn them away in disappointment.

5. There were Morris dancers!

Through the trees, we could see them mustering. They were definitely up to something. But by the time we got there, they’d finished their routine and were making a beeline to the beer tent. I’ve always thought Morris dancers were flighty creatures. They only perform for about three minutes at a time, after which they run off for another half hour break, and I always seem to miss their set. But this time, we stuck around. And after a while, they started doing things again:

The Morris dancers were a particular source of fascination to my German colleague, who had never seen anything like them and kept asking “Why do the do it? What is it for?”. I couldn’t really think of any way to explain it, really, except that the Spanish have the Flamenco, the Argentinians have the tango, and the English… have Morris dancing.

But apart from the customary flightiness of the Morris dancers, there were a couple more negatives:

1. You had to queue for everything

Not only did you have to pay for entry (£8!) and food, but the event was a victim of its own success. It’s a good job I went into the apple-tasting tent last year, because this was the queue for it this year. Luckily, I could still remember the experience of sampling slices of hundreds of different apple varieties, and no-one else seemed that enamored of the prospect, so we moved on.

2. Some of the food stalls had some rather bizarre signage…

But all in all, I would say that the £8 was worth it, and we did have some very jolly and non-existential fun, in stunning surroundings! So I’d give it a shining 8/10.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this apple-themed romp! And don’t forget to tune in for my next extremely rock n roll adventure, where I’ll try to make soap out or conkers! The fun never ends…

Why I’m Crowdfunding My New Album

Hullo folks!

It’s been a while since I last posted here, and in the intervening time there have been quite a few changes, including a new job, a new home town, and, most relevantly, a veritable smorgasbord of new songs!

Those of you who are familiar with my music will know that I’ve brought out four six-song EPs so far, each one entirely under my own steam. This isn’t because I have anything against crowdfunding – in fact, think it’s a fantastic idea. But the first EP at least was brought out almost entirely on a whim, before most people even knew I made music, and possibly before crowdfunding was even a thing. And from then onwards, I simply reasoned that if I could finance it myself, I might as well – I’m a big fan of the DIY movement, and a few songs every couple of years, burned on my own computer and sold in handmade CD cases, certainly wouldn’t break the bank. Bandcamp is also fantastic for selling digital albums, which of course have no printing costs at all.

However, this time, it’s different – and these are the main reasons why:

1. There are twice as many songs

Since last summer, I’ve written 13 new songs – more than I’ve ever written before in such a short space of time. There are even a couple of other ideas in the pipeline, which may or may not appear on the final album. I think one of the reasons for this influx is that I’ve become more confident (or reckless!) in my songwriting. I used to dismiss a lot of ideas out of hand before I’d even developed them, but recently I’ve been finishing the songs anyway, and then seeing whether they’re any good – and often, these songs have turned out to be some of the best. Last December, I also gained a piano, which has expanded my musical range further. This album is going to be more varied, and take more risks, than any of the previous ones, and I think it’ll be better for it.

Not only that, but despite the dramatically changing music industry, there’s still something nice about having a “proper” full-length LP to flog. It feels professional and real person-y, and more suited to the point I’m at now with my music.

All of this means is that I basically need to pay my excellent producer, Nick, twice his usual rate to arrange, record, mix and work his usual prog-folk magic with the songs. And I just don’t have that kind of money knocking around. Especially not since:

2. My circumstances have changed

A couple of months ago, I relocated to the promised land of Bristol to seek my fortune. And I’ve realised that the only way I’m going to escape the curse of public-facing jobs is if I bite the bullet and do some unpaid work experience behind the scenes. Bristol has some fantastic opportunities for Biologists, and matters of principal aside, I want the best career I can get for myself. So I’ve reduced my current job to two days a week, am spending the rest of the time as a Digital Marketing Volunteer at the Soil Association.

I’ve got a few royalties from the recent success of A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, and some money saved from my previous job in Wolverhampton, since I wasn’t paying rent while living at home. But none of this will last forever, and I need to prioritise using it to support myself. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been able to do an unpaid internship before, and I need to take advantage of it.

3. I can’t keep making everything by hand!

I’m sorry! I know a lot of people really like my handmade CD cases, but they’re incredibly time consuming! This wasn’t so much of a problem at the start, but as my audience has increased, so has the time spent making the darn things, and I might not always have time for it – who knows where my life might take me in the future? Not only that, but it’s an undeniable fact that professionally printed albums are – well, more professional! And it’s hard to credit everyone who’s contributed their hard work to the album when trying to hand-write the liner notes onto 15 square centimetres of card!

Luckily, my mom, Jacqueline Law, is an incredible artist, and she’ll be doing the album art – so you’ve go that to look forward to!

4. I trust you folks!

Every other time I’ve considered crowdfunding, there’s always been that nagging little voice saying: “but what if nobody contributes?” This is especially relevant with Kickstarter, where if you don’t reach your goal, you don’t get any money at all. However, I’ve come to realise that this is foolish. The support and encouragement I’ve received over the years from friends, organizers, audiences and fellow artists alike has given me confidence in the fact that this is something people would genuinely like to help bring into existence. So thanks, folks – you’re great!

If you’d like to make a pledge, my Kickstarter campaign is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1541711332/record-jessica-laws-new-full-length-album-the-sum

 

 

 

Meet the Outlaws #2: Rachel Hughes

Rachel is the keyboard player in Jessica Law and The Outlaws, as well as an (astro?) physicist and an accomplished jazz singer-songwriter in her own right. We met through the ridiculous comedy theatre group Oxford University Light Entertainment Society, a “gateway” society that then lead to her being conscripted into the Steampunk space pirate storytelling folk band The Mechanisms. Since I was also a band member at the time, it didn’t take long for me to rope her into my solo musical pursuits. Her voice has been described as being “like an angel who smokes 40 a day”, and we are still seriously entertaining the idea of performing a sultry jazz version of the popular harvest festival song “Cauliflowers Fluffy” together (in costume).

The idea that you have to have either a scientific brain or a creative brain, not both, is obviously codswallop. But what’s the link between creativity and science for you? Is there one? Or are they opposites?

I think there is a link, because the human brain naturally picks out patterns from its surroundings and applies them to make new things – which is what we do in science and maths, and also music too, if only on a subconscious level. When you make music, you’re always riffing off the conventions and structures of the music around you, but then trying to push them further and do something new. What I like about music, though, is that there can never be a wrong answer like there can in science or maths – it’s just a playground where you can mess around and be free to do what you like, which takes a lot of the pressure off, and makes it more fun!

Is it true that Brian May was one of your tutors?

Not quite – it is true that he is a guest astrophysicist at Imperial College, which is where I was doing my PhD. So we may have been in the same building at the same time, but I’ve never met him, sadly.

A few years ago, Rachel and I went on a walk to Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, and while we walked, we told each other stories. My story became the song and novel, “Jack the Re-animator”, and Rachel’s story has just been released as the concept album “Lolina: Origins”. Tell us about it!

It’s set in a dystopian future where humans, having destroyed the environment of the earth and colonised the solar system, genetically engineer people for certain roles in society, creating what is essentially a slave class.  The main character, Lolina, is a genetically engineered sex worker living on Mars, who is then kidnapped by a member of a moralistic, eco-warrior cult and taken to the barren wasteland of the ruined Earth… drama ensues! In terms of music, it crosses a lot of genres – as with much of my solo music, it has a jazzy/bluesy/soul feel in many places, but I also experimented with classical music when singing the part of Mariella the cult member, for whom I used the higher, purer register of my voice. I also, with the help of my friend Ben (Drumbot Brian of The Mechanisms), got some awesome funky electronic sounds in there. The last song of the album is a proper electronic pop anthem!

Where did you get the idea? And what messages were you aiming to put across?

I guess some of the ideas are similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are genetically engineered for certain roles in society. But I wanted to take it in a different direction to explore gender roles, sexuality, the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, and how much we are determined by our biology compared to our experiences. These kind of thoughts were floating around in my head a lot anyway, being a bisexual woman in a society that is often still quite judgemental of women’s sexuality, so this is just how it all came out.

We’ve both been in The Mechanisms, but I’ve never written a narrative album on my own. What were the challenges of telling a story through songs?

In a way, having a narrative was a help, rather than a hindrance – I find that if you want to write a song but have no ideas, you get nowhere. But if you have a certain theme and storyline you want to get across, it informs the genre and the feel of the song, giving you a jumping-off point. What is hard is trying to make sure the lyrics include all aspects of the story. I don’t think I could do what Jonny (Jonny D’Ville) of The Mechanisms does, and write long narrative sections, because keeping track of what the audience do and don’t know is confusing when you have full knowledge of the story. That’s why I opted to include short, in-universe clips, such as radio adverts and sermons, to help advance the story without spelling it out exactly. I was really inspired by the way Janelle Monae (check her out – she’s amazing!) tells stories in her music, where the story isn’t essential to the enjoyment of the songs, but if you want to, you can pore through the lyrics and the radio sections and work out what’s going on.

This is your first album release, but you’ve been doing music for far longer than I have, haven’t you?

Yes! I first got into writing songs at the tender age of 11, when I became involved with the Young Women’s Music Project in Oxford. They’re an amazing organisation who support young women and girls with making music and playing gigs, and I don’t think I would still be making music now without the support they gave me over the years. If you’re based in Oxford, you should definitely check them out!

How did you get into jazz?

Being the ultimate hipster as a teenager (a hipster before it was cool) I had to like an obscure music genre! More seriously, I was raised with Steely Dan and rock with Jazz fusion elements, so it was inevitable that I would track back to the source of the delicious river Jazz. I was also quite an unhappy adolescent, so mournful, bittersweet Jazz ballads by people like singer and trumpet player Chet Baker, and pianist Bill Evans, really appealed to me.

What were people’s reactions when you started singing like Louis Armstrong?

I remember my mum being quite surprised when I started singing so low at age 11, but I think she grew to accept it! People always say my speaking voice doesn’t match my singing voice, which is especially true when I’m excited or around people I don’t know well, and start talking really high-pitched!

To most people, jazz and folk seem like polar opposites. But I’m not convinced. Can you see any parallels?

Yes, definitely – both jazz and folk are often based around playing the standard, traditional tunes and putting your own spin on them. Folk lyrics generally have more of a storytelling element, whereas jazz is more about improvisation and how much can you play around with the base material you’re given. I don’t really do proper jazz in my own music, although it has a jazzy feel – I mostly borrow the kind of chords you get in jazz and mix it with loads of other stuff – although at the moment I am having jazz piano lessons to try and improve my improvisation skills.

You can catch Rachel, and the rest of the Outlaws, at our gig in Bristol on the 17th of June, which will also include afternoon tea! Find out more here.

Meet the Outlaws #1: Nick Siepmann

Not only is Nick the guitarist of Jessica Law and The Outlaws, he’s also a talented multi-instrumentalist producer, responsible for arranging and recording my past three EPs. I met Nick when advertising for victims (collaborators! I mean collaborators) in “The Adventures of Sticky Harry and Associates”, a madcap radio play I wrote at university. Since then, we’ve developed an almost psychic level of creative communication, to the extent that he’s actually able to understand and execute phrases such as “electronic doomscape” and “BOM bom BOM bom.” Nick lives in London with his fiancee and numerous pets of varying adorability.

Firstly – why did you agree to get embroiled in all this?

After university, I found myself doing a sound engineering course at SSR London, and was in need of recording clients. Fortunately, I had just discovered that you had expanded your array of talents to include songwriting, and so, having heard those first songs, I offered my services. Many mandolin and vocal tracks later (not to mention a string trio recorded in a bedroom, a set of pan pipes improvised from beer bottles, and a joint of ham boiling in a pot), The Littlest Libertine was done, and we were off!

And you’re not just a collaborator – tell me about Phlebas, your “philosophical death metal” solo project!

Aha! In fact, this is also a child of my time at SSR London – I wrote and recorded my first ever death metal song for my first big project there, and I have been writing and demoing metal songs ever since. Last year, I decided – mostly to prove to myself that I could – to properly record a full album of the best of my songs so far. The resulting album, Alkahest, is now fully recorded, will be released at some point this year, with some wonderful album art from Lordanumblue (Nottingham-based artist Ben Lord).

Where does the name come from?

The name comes from the mention of ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’ in the fourth section of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, called ‘Death by Water’. That section always stuck with me – a beautiful bit of simplicity in the midst of a sprawling Modernist poem, looking at time, death, and nature – and I felt it was in-keeping with the attitude and themes embodied in the songs, so I went and nicked it. Unfortunately, it’s almost universally assumed to be a reference to Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas, which I have yet to read… Sorry, fellow nerds.

So, what have you found to be the challenges of being in a band compared to solo projects?

One thing I’ve found both tricky and rewarding after each release is the challenge of how to translate the vibe of our often complex arrangements on the record into something that can be played live. Also challenging: helping move Rachel’s keyboard up and down tube station stairs…

Are there some things only a band can offer?

However much I love sitting at my laptop and indulging myself with Wakeman-like multi-instrumental excess, there’s nothing quite like the feeling during a gig when you all lock together and the song just carries you along. It’s sort of like being a component in some sentient Rube Goldberg machine.

Where do your musical roots lie?

I’ve sort of put down roots as I go – I’m the son of two classical piano teachers, and have sung in Anglican choirs on and off since I was 7, but since then I’ve taken it upon myself to educate myself in bluegrass, extreme metal and trad English folk, which have more or less become my musical home. For now.

When we meet, we often spend every second rambling on about all things musical. So there are probably a lot of things we don’t know about each other. Tell me something about yourself that I didn’t know…

I share a birthday with Niccolò Machiavelli, James Brown, Pete Seeger, email spam, and geocaching.

Do you have any pie-in-the-sky projects you’d love to do if you had infinite time / money?

I’ve had a hankering to put together some kind of impractically theatrical metal band inspired by the Wicked and the Divine series of comics – the lighting alone I’m sure would reduce me to penury, but it’d be a hell of a show right up until the bailiffs arrived…

You can catch Nick and the rest of us at our next live gig in Bristol, Teatre: Jessica Law and the Outlaws, an intimate afternoon of sinister folk ditties with tea and cake included!