Paperwork

Why do all exciting projects come with big amounts of paperwork? Things are taking shape here, but with a few creative projects confirmed it's suddenly all about the admin - for the forthcoming Matt Corrall Band tour (which is now back to being a tour of Europe, having realised that the China idea - whilst great, was going to be littered with more problems than we needed) we have to still confirm further dates alongside the Holland performance as well as local warm-ups and confirm who is actually in the band, for Brighton rehearsal schedules need to be sorted and we still need to know who is actually in the play, plus there's the forthcoming murder mystery evening performances of my little whodunit 'The Murder Of The Razzle Dazzle Rose' to confirm etc etc, I'm glued to my email, it's fairly exciting, but doesn't go beyond 'fairly'.

Meanwhile I've managed to spend a few evenings in to finish what will be the Edinburgh script, if I decide to do Edinburgh this year - it's all slightly up in the air, see, as there are other opportunities being mentioned (for me as a musician) which I can't mention here because this blog is public, although I'm wary of letting my thoughts getting too excited because bad things happen when my expectations raise...anyway, it's written, just in case and if not I've got a decent play to do something with in the future. It's called 'Totally From The Heart', and is about heart attack victims, and really is the darkest thing I've ever done, in a good way I'd like to think. It caused some weird reactions with me whilst writing it - I almost felt emotional towards the characters, started to care for them a lot more than I normally do, like I was convincing myself of their plight. Maybe it was the whiskey, but I've never written anything genuinely moving before, took a lot more out of me than the average awkward farce I often bash out.

In the meantime I started filming some new comedy with my good friend Rich, it's been a while and whilst we may not do anything with it unless it's really good, we've got ideas and I've got a camcorder, and we had a few spare hours, makes sense to just do these things sometimes. Ah yes, and recording started last night for the Under The Streetlamp album - that was an intensive evening. The problem being Alister, our pianist, flies out to Mexico for many months next week so we needed to move quickly to get this done before he goes. His parts, and my drum parts, for 9 tracks are all in the bag though - mostly because Rob @ Half Ton Studios is the most patient and hardworking engineer you could ever meet. Recording for the vocals and bass take place next week in another lengthy, gruelling session, followed by many hours of mixing, in time for an early summer release. Next week I also start rehearsals with Lu, and hopefully my 'special' new project which I can't mention, and the week after I'm back in the studio with Bryan Shore. By the time that's all done, the Eureka Stockade album should be complete...I love being a drummer sometimes, especially when there's so few of us around.