TeamHorseTales

  My listening habits are wide ranging, always have been. I grew up listening to a lot of indie, rock music and metal. In the early 90s I found myself being drawn to edgier bands like Jane’s Addiction and Ministry. I also loved hip-hop and funk and soul. There were three bands that would shape my recording output remarkably. First, The Magnetic Fields. Their triple album ‘69 Love Songs’ was the inspiration for the double albums I’d put out over the years. The main man behind that group was Stephin Merritt, who had been recording under various names over the years (The Hyacinths, Future Bible Heroes to name a few). I thought this was a brilliant idea and there was scope for me to do that, given my desire to make music from genres that I’d never tried before. The second band I found myself listening to around this time was Jesu. Justin Broadrick was part of the industrial metal band Godflesh and I came across his work from his remix of a Pelican track that was just stunning. Droning ...

The year is 2006 and the creative juices are in full flow. Feeling strong and inventive, fully in charge of what direction I wanted to progress into, the latest album looked towards Tom Waits for inspiration, entitled ‘Innocent When You Dream’, after one of his songs. This was a full-on Dream Pop album, heavy on keyboards and slamming distorted beats with a shoegaze element. The harmonising I had employed on ‘…Our Black Hearts’ still appeared on some tracks. I’d started to use the violin bow on the guitar now which was an added feature making for a lovely fuzzy tone. The resin powder clogged up the strings something rotten though! The track ‘Baby I’m A Star’ not only nabbed a Prince title, I decided to sing in a falsetto/Camille voice. Another new trick I developed in this album to go along with the “shimmer” (see earlier blogs) was the “twinkle”. This trick consisted of firing high piano notes through a delay pedal to make lovely Disney magic sounds. These sounds went to create a very...

I guess my ever expanding collection of guitar effects pedals and absolute necessity to focus on them, put me into the genre known as shoegaze. I loved guitar bands like Ride, Jesus and Mary Chain, Nirvana, Mogwai and for the next album, I was determined to create a homage to one album in particular. The ultimate shoegaze band is of course My Bloody Valentine. Their classic album 'Loveless' featured guitars that sounded feck all like guitars for the most part. The magical waves of swerving warped distorted guitars absolutely bled all over my next album '...Our Black Hearts'. Still coming to terms with my Dad's passing there was still an air of sadness to my music, yet the title track of the album has a wondrously uplifting feel to it.  The other unique selling point of OBH was my decision to harmonise with myself on every song. It's a strong album in terms of song writing, I'd abandoned the sampling in favour of a drum machine, bass, keyboards and guitars la...

  My Father passed away in 2004, aged 72. I was aged just 32. Not a lot of time to have spent with a loved one when you think about it. He had been sick with Cancer since his retirement 7 years earlier and after working for over 50 years in a factory only to take unwell mere weeks into his retirement still makes me very angry to this day. My previous album had been released only a few weeks before my Dad’s death. The first album to come out after his passing was going to be a double CD collection called ‘Gloryland’. I loved my Dad very much. He was a tenor in the Portadown Male Voice Choir and also sang in a barbershop style quartet. He, along with my musical Mother, gave me and my brothers and sisters all a passion for music. We all sang and played in different bands, albeit the music I would listen to and create would be miles away from what they all did. For this album there’d be a new sound. A recently acquired electric violin would make a tentative foray into the recordings....