I thought Clive should be in on the project, so it was either I go down to Spain where he lives, or get him to England. Luckily a couple of gigs came up so I was able to add him to the tracks at that time. Timing though was tight. After the gigs he had to catch a flight back to Spain so I had only a few hours to record him. In my front room he added acoustic guitar to eight tracks and Andy Le Vien at RMS adjusted his timing etc. on the computer later. Clive has signalled his approval of the project on the phone.

The album is a kind of Demo, a template, a pilot, yet it has mileage in that it is me unplugged and Clive too. The tracks “Save the Rhino” and “Amnesty” were done in 1992 at the House in the Woods studio, produced and engineered by Simon Milton, a friend of a friend of mine and Clive’s, named Chris Wilson, the blues singer and guitarist.
“One Day” was produced and engineered by Joe King, in Beeston near Nottingham. The girl singing on the track is an enduring mystery to me, perhaps she will come to light some day. Hope so. The narrated track in “That Once Tremendous War” was taken from “Asia Minor” an instrumental Clive and I did for Tim Hollier at Filmtrax, produced and engineered by Simon Heyworth in the ‘80’s.

Track Listing

“Scherazade” and “The Silken Thread” (tracks 1 and 2) are part of my project called The Silk Road. I imagined the road was a kind of link between Europe and China - so he travels from China and she from Europe and they meet somewhere along the Silk Road, it is a romance in a way, but has connotations of more between the two areas. This is true of a lot of my songs.

The “Tango Anglais” (track 3). The people who speak the English language are trapped in a king of prison, they cannot break out. I put the Sarstedt brothers Rick, Pete and Clive as examples of the condition. A dance then, of a people in aspic.

“Desperado” (track 4) and “Come on all you foreigners” (track 13) talk of Copenhagen in the 60’s and 70’s when all of us were there, young and knowing, going through the Vietnam war by proxy. There were many foreigners in town, becoming Danes, ‘ordained’. We face the same situation today with new immigrants and a different set of problems, yet the songs seem to work.

“Save the Rhino” (track 5) and “Amnesty” (track 6) are socio political. A laying down of my principles on these subjects. We claim innocence don’t we, but we hide behind the words, hypocrites.