Best heard on headphones, if you have them to hand, but then I suppose that’s true of anything. Download includes a PDF of the lyrics, if you’re interested in those, plus a slightly different version of these liner notes.

So.

Around 2010, 2011, myself and a handful of my friends set about creating a follow up to my debut album, an album I never really liked because although the production was phenomenal and although my friends' contributions sounded absolutely incredible, I just wasn’t ready to make it and it sounded like it. Still does. But a whole heap of gigs behind me, a lot more fire in my guts and in my throat, a lot more Bad Old Business going on (I was sober when we recorded the debut; I wasn't sober when we were recording this follow-up), I desperately wanted this one to be different. This Album 2. This “Angus.” This was to be a different sort of thing altogether.

Initial sessions in Colerabbey, Newcastle went really well and we got a lot of good stuff down here and there. Other sessions went less well. I was too drunk or fucked up in one way or another or I wasn’t drunk or fucked up enough. Hungover half time. Forgetting lyrics and melodies left and right.

But that was how it was supposed to be. This is what I told myself and everyone else. Convinced then as I am now, often as not, that I was as much a song as any song that I was writing, and back then I was a song that was being sung by the booze.

As producer, Andrew Gardiner did his absolute best to hold everything together, and the work he did on these songs deserves way better than this. What there is to show for it all is thanks to his perseverance. I was barely there for most of it whether I was there or I wasn't. Arriving just about drunk enough to perform, but very soon after that too drunk for damn all. Falling further and further from songs that my friends continued working on in my absence, playing whatever instruments were to hand, elevating the songs in ways I couldn't have done myself, as is evidenced by the few demos and live recordings scattered about this Angus, After All.

But it was definitely going to be finished. A release date was set. Magazines and blogs were informed. Billy Chainsaw was commissioned to design a sleeve. But a darkness was swelling. It was a dark old record anyway, Angus. Satanic sort of thing. And this encroaching night-time hissing with the want to swallow this Angus whole.

Eventually it did. The distribution label blew to bits one day and took the record label with it. A few dozen copies of my debut album were tossed into the Tyne prior to all of this. I don’t know why. Andrew wanted to continue work on Angus, because he believed it was good and he wanted to finish it, but sessions got further apart and in time the spirit just fell out of the thing altogether and that was that.

Some of the songs heard here were heard first in EPs that I would release in the wee hours by me and sometimes delete again soon after, but they're different, the songs, for the most part. Fractured sometimes. Broken. Maybe sightly different takes are used, or whatever.

It continued to haunt me, though, that record. Always wondering what it could have been. Always wondering could we finish it? Could we, but, though? Thinking this all the time. Pissing away years and years and years that I could've spent writing new songs, better songs, trying to improve as a performer, maybe start thinking about a different second album.

But none of the people who were busy making Angus at that time are taking up space in the world any longer. The me that was there isn't taking up space in the world, and the me that's here in the present doesn't sound like him. I can't recognize myself in his waters, even if there's more of his waters in mine than I'd like.

I'm a different person, an older person, a sober person albeit one that still fucks up proper good given half a chance. But I try harder. I have different priorities and different things going on and a different sensibility, and what new songs have started stitching together, they suggest a different kind of song, one that's new to me, even if it comes from the same place. It travels a different road to get here.

But before anything can happen, this has to happen, so that the album that never happened can stop.

Anyway, Angus, After All is partly an approximation of what we were aiming for at that time, and partly a trek though the bits of my brain carved up by that record and the times it belonged to. The things that were going on, the illness that was gnawing away at me and gnaws away yet. All of that moiling away between my ears. I’ve opted not to use Billy’s artwork and instead I've created my own, something that speaks of the me of this Angus, After All that I’ve created. The album Billy’s artwork was destined for never happened.

Most of the recordings date from those Newcastle studio sessions, but two were put down more recently. Songs that were always meant for the album, and bits of what bits were caught in Newcastle show up here, but they were never right, and so I did them again for this. First things I've sang in years. The same things I've been singing for years. Recorded with the help of my friend Ryan. No relation to the "Ryan! Ryan!" that's being bid sit the fuck down in The Coronet on Holloway Road at the opening bars of N15.

An important thing to say is that I know that there are good people, beautiful people, who were seriously impacted by the things that were going on at this time, sometimes things going on in these very recordings. People who are heard from throughout this album and people who are not. This is a story that I'm telling because I need to, but I wouldn't tell it in this way, with this album, if I didn't think there was something of value in there for people that aren't me, or something worth hearing in the things we recorded, when we were fit to record anything at all, and even sometimes when we weren't. But it's a story I'm telling knowing full well that the larger story isn't this one. It's the story of the people who gave everything they had to make sure that I would still be alive in 2019 to be able to tell this story or any other, and I doubt they'd be too enthused about it, some of those people, the idea of spending another 40 minutes in this space. It was bad enough first time around.

So. If you sit with it, I hope you get what it's doing, or trying to do, and I hope it does things for you that make it worthwhile to be part of.

Tracks Included In One Way Or Another:

N15
Blackmill Road
(Untitled)
Montgomery
Closer The Further She Be's
Three Muses
Nine Was Their Number
And It Stoned Me (just a tiny snippet, Van, don't go phoning the police)
Wednesday Song
The Tongues Of The Summer
Quare Times, Boys
Seven Sisters
I Fell Before The Revelator


Angus, After All.