Ah piss, I’ve caved in. I got a Facebook profile. My powers of resistance were worn away by the fact that you can now have a band profile on there, and seeing as every fucker is on there at the moment (and I use myspace for promotion), I might as well get one. It’s rudimentary at the moment, but come say hello. Ugh, I feel dirty. Just think, loads of old school friends I never liked in the first place can come and waste more of my time. Hooray!

In other news, the good people at Good Friends Records have got the Vinyl, 10″ version of Campfire Punkrock onsale now. This is mainly a USA release, but people in the UK can email Casey Lee and ask him nicely. That’s certainly what I’m doing. Speaking of my overseas friends, there’s now some of my stuff up on the US iTunes, and the good people at Banquet Records also have a digital page for me too. So now you can download stuff legally. Oh joy.

Christmas is rubbish. Call me scrooge, but it just gets in the way of everything. Bah humbug and all that. Anyways, all is well at FTHQ at the moment, the big news just in is that I’ll be rocking London’s Brixton Academy on New Year’s Eve for the XFM Party there. I’ll be onstage for 10.30 ish (and then propping up the bar all night afterwards). The first 1000 tickets are only 15 quid and can be found here. Hope to see some of you there.

In other news, the album is being mixed, photo’s are being taken for the cover, and all is well with the world. We’re looking at a release date of March 31st next year, with some generally monster tour schedules around then and earlier to remind everyone how ace I am (haha). Tickets will be on sale as soon as possible for the headline tour, and there’s an awesome support in the pipeline too, so watch this space.

Finally, the nice people at Room Thirteen have done a year retrospective for me, and it makes for delightful reading.

We’ve just finished tracking album 2. It’s recorded. Now we’ve got some boring computer shit to do before sending the tracks off to Tristan to get them mixed and mastered. I’m tired and a little stressed, but immensely happy with how things sound at the moment. This record feels so much better that “Sleep” to me, I can’t wait to get it into the public domain. Which, to answer all the emails, will hopefully be mid march, with some kind of single action before then.

Speaking of “Sleep”, XFM now have a page up for me as a nominee, here. You can enter a competition to be on the panel of judges, and then clearly vote for me, haha. You can also hear their mini-documentary about me on there. Enjoy.

Chris Pell, who did the artwork for “Sleep”, has a shirt in a competition. Vote for him here please, he’s a great artist and it’s a great shirt.

I’m going to go get some food and some sleep now. In the meantime, don’t forget about the Xtra Mile XMas Party. Not so many tickets left now…

Well, as you may have spotted on the frontpage of the site, thanks to the magic of internet voting, I made the shortlist for XFM Debut Album of 2007. I’m very pleased to say that I’m the only independent artist on the list, the only one who hasn’t had daytime playlisting on radio and all that kind of thing. The awards are in January, and obviously I won’t win against the likes of the Klaxons and Kate Nash, but just being on the list is a victory for the underdog. And obviously, it’s thanks to the people who took the time to go over and vote. So a massive, massive thankyou to everyone who made the effort.

I’m back from the USA finally. The end of the tour, in LA, was a lot of fun. I’m hopefully going to be heading back there early next year sometime. I also found out I’m an uncle. The only cloud in this array of silver linings is that I just lost a shitload of emails, so if you mailed me in the last month or so and I didn’t reply, maybe try again.

Back in the studio this morning to finish off album 2. I can’t wait. Then a few London shows before Christmas – be advised that the first one will be insanely rammed and over-subscribed, so keep your eyes for tickets to the Luminaire show on Deecember 13th. See you there.

A few years back, Million Dead got nominated for a Kerrang Award, and an internet voting thingy was set up. Thanks to the tireless devotion to messing up their statistics of our fans, we very nearly won the damn thing. This time round, I have been nominated for Debut Album Of The Year by the good folks at XFM. That’s a flattering enough accolade in and of itself. But imagine how fucking funny it’d be if I beat Good Shoes, Enter Shikari or Calvin Harris. I’d laugh if I even came close. SO any help is much appreciated. The link:

http://www.xfm.co.uk/Article.asp?b=reviews&id;=502985

In other news, I’m currently in Virginia. We’ve been bombing up the coast, 2 solid days of driving, and it’s finally starting to get cold. Can’t wait to get to New York, and then to the West Coast…

No matter how many times I do this, I never get used to turnaround days, or find ways of dealing with the stress, or focussing on the good side, or whatever. Session 1 of the album finished this afternoon in triumph. We got more done than expected, everything sounds amazing, and I now have the problem of choosing which songs will make the album and which won’t. Tomorrow morning I fly to the States for the tour, which is going to be great. The DVD is out, finally, which is awesome. So, despite the fact I have 9064937 things to do before bed and have to be up at the crack of dawn, all is well. I’m listening to monitor moxes of the album right now and it sounds great.

Something I just did: put tabs on the website. They didn’t come out so well on the DVD, so here they are, high resolution, for everyone: The tabs page. Enjoy, share, learn the songs and play them yourself.

I’ve been let out of the farm into the land of the living for an hour or two to catch up on my corespondence, while Ben goes to get Nigel from Oxford so he can start drumming for us. Things are going really well, the location is simply breathtaking. We’ve been making friends with local cats and horses, and roping in really old friends of mine for backing vocals (the studio is in the valley I grew up in). We’re starting drums today, which is a little daunting. Up to this point we’ve been working on acoustic / drumless songs, and actually taking the time to focus on that has been great, new ideas have been arriving and things have generally taken a more English folk turn than I had been expecting. This is a good thing. I even bought a mandolin yesterday, learned how to play it and then laid it down on a few songs. I could spend a long time living like this…

The live room:

The control room (Ben’s lair):

Some guitars….:

RIGHT.

Apologies, profuse apologies to those waiting on the DVD. The story now is that the pressing plant fucked up and so the official, in your hands release date is now 22nd October. Words cannot express how pissed off I am about this further setback, so massive massive apologies to those waiting on it. I can only say that I hope you think the wait is worth it, I do.

For those not waiting on it, well, you should be. Go here.

Thanks.

This morning me and Ben are heading into the studio. We set up last night, it’s an awesome space, in a barn on a farm in a valley where I grew up, totally isolated and peaceful. I have even shaved off my beard in celebration. We’ll resurface shortly, with a masterpiece…

I’m currently enjoying the fact that Norwich has crashed headlong into the 21st Century by having a FREE WIFI ZONE in the city centre (actually a small patch of land around the library). My show here tonight is going to be my last UK show until December. Ireland was a lot of fun, especially the chaos that was Belfast – thanks to Johnny Black for the hospitality and the cack-handed Springsteen covers in a bar until 2am last night – I’m now exhausted.

Within a week, Ben and I will be hitting the studio to commence work on album #2. The first session will run until the end of the month, when I go to the states, and then we’ll be back finishing it all off before the end of the year. I’m really excited about this one, the work has come together in my head an awful lot in the last month or so, and I can’t wait to actually start laying some music down. Roll on next year…