I’m currently in the back of Central Station in Wrexham, towards the end of the UK Softcore Tour. It’s been a blast so far, pretty draining considering we’ve had no days off (15 shows in) and we (well, me n Jacob) have been dutifully drinking whatever gets put in front of us, like the big grown ups we really are. The shows have been great though, London and Leeds in particular stick in the mind. Good crowds, good times. We ran out of our first run of softcore tour CDs, and are now down to making them the old fashioned way – burning CDRs in the back of the van.

After the end of this I have a run of more UK shows (including a jaunt across the Irish Sea), and then I’m into the studio for the first session for album #2 (working title: “Love, Ire & Song”). This is being interrupted by a stateside jaunt, mostly on the East Coast but possibly over to LA and San Fransisco for some shows too, we’ll see. Then back to the UK and back to the studio (a farm near Winchester) to finish the deed. I’m really excited about the new songs, and I’m beavering away on production and arrangement ideas. I know absolutely everyone says this, but I’m super excited about the next album; I think it’s going to be much better than “Sleep..” in every way. You may or may not agree, and I may or may not succeed, but at the time of writing signs are good.

This tour has generated two interesting pieces of correspondence. First up was a correction from a zoologist (a first for me) on the subject of a drunken rant of mine about pandas (long story). Safe to say I’m now corrected on the issue, haha… The second was someone calling me a cunt for saying (from stage) that it’s not as impossible as it often seems (and as we’re often told) to do something vocational with your life. I said that it takes a lot of courage and hard work, but it’s not the reserve of supermen / “artists” or whatever. The great myth of the music industry is that success / survival is down to some touch of god or something. It fucking isn’t: it’s down to hard graft and the bravery to carry on through the hard times.

Why any of this makes me a fuckhead I’m not entirely sure; maybe, reading between the lines, my erstwhile correspondent was ruffled because I pointed out that she’s pissing her life away in Woolworths when she could do so much more, if she had the guts. Who knows?