I Hate Mornings

I played piano on Jont‘s new album, and All My Life is one of the songs we’ve really enjoyed rocking live with the band (we all seem to find a common musical ground in the upbeat rockabilly kind of vibe). He just sent me a link to the video for the song, and it’s amazing:

Here is the incredible new music video made by my friend, the director Simon Ratigan for the song “All My Life”, from my new album “Set It Free” (Released on my label Unlit Records and available now from www.jontnet.com). It is made from 100,000 photos taken of people Simon met wandering through the desert and in the Los Angeles area and then rendered together to make a moving image. The use of a stills camera means it was incredibly painstaking to make but the visual result is quite extraordinary. Hope you like it.

Watch it full screen and in HD if you can. The effect of full quality stills in motion is very cool:

In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.

The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…

I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.

Over the next five years I went to loads of his gigs. Some of them were UNLIT (a mixture of a house party and a gig), and eventually I put on an UNLIT of my own at the Gardeners Arms in January 2008. Jont played, I did a set at the piano and Stornoway played acoustic. Jont noticed that I could actually play, and I started to play piano at some of his gigs. We played a load of house concerts, small gigs and festivals around England (and a couple in Paris) through 2008/9.

Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.

And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures

It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond XK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.

Unfortunately it’s all sold out (in – like – 0.3 seconds), but we’re playing another half dozen gigs around the country in the next couple of weeks (Bristol tomorrow, then Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Nottingham, Manchester). You should come and see us!

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Jont is running a series of Sunday gigs at (Up)market, an outdoor market just off Brick Lane. The gig runs from 1-6pm, and there are four or five acts playing at each one.

I’m playing this afternoon (probably around 4pm), and again next week. If you’re in London, you should come and check it out. The bands will be playing in the market square (you can’t miss them), or if the weather won’t play nice we’ll be in the underground tea room. Either way, it’s going to be a classic UNLIT-style happening with (apparently) really good cake.

If I can carry all the technology I’ll liveblog some photos, but whatever happens I’ll post some video updates on my 12seconds channel and Twitter away like a maniac as usual.