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.

So.

Around 2010, 2011, myself and a handful of my friends set about creating a follow up to my debut album, Yonder! Calliope?, an album that found an audience for which I’m very greatly, but also an album that I never really liked, barring a couple tracks here and there. For although the production was phenomenal and although my friends sounded absolutely incredible, I just wasn’t ready to make it and it’s very obvious listening now that that’s the case. A couple dozen odd 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. The songs were stronger. It had more bite in its belly. It was going to be really, really good.

Several sessions in Colerabbey, Newcastle, a studio just across the road from the Star and Shadow cinema, if memory serves (one of the best places I’ve ever been to in my life; one of the few places in the North of England where you can see Battleship Potemkin soundtracked by two men playing hurdy gurdies and kicking at tin drums fed through Kaoss pads) went really well and we got a lot of good stuff down here and there. Other sessions were less successful. I was too drunk or fucked up in one way or another or I wasn’t drunk or fucked up enough. Hungover half time, for-by. Forgetting lyrics and melodies left and right. Andrew Gardiner at the mixing desk with his head in his hands. “For fuck sake, Aaron.”

But that was how it was supposed to me. This is what I told myself and everyone else, for I was convinced then and I’m probably still convinced a wee bit even now that I was as much a song as any song that I was singing, and I was a song that was being sung by the booze. And whatever else.

Anyway I would arrive Just about drunk enough to perform, but then very soon after too drunk to remember my lyrics or to hit any note worth a fuck or damn all else and I would fall further and further from any microphone as my friends continued working on the songs in my absence, incredible music rising up around me as I lay at the foot of the stairs tapping in time at the top of a tin. People fell asleep on leads and subsequently rendered some recordings unusable. A lot of rough tracks I brought with me were never finished. Andrew Gardiner did his absolute best to hold everything together, and the work he did on these songs deserves much, much better than this. But this is the best that I can do. My friends, playing whatever instruments were lying about, elevated the songs in ways I never could have done alone, as is evidenced here and there throughout this Angus, After All.


But it was definitely going to be finished. A release date was set. Magazines and blogs were informed. Facebook was told all about it. Believe you me. 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 couple hundred 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 it became more and more difficult to get everyone together, and more and more difficult to keep me sober for long enough to be fit to produce any sound worth a bald nut’s fuck so the spirit just fell out of the thing and then we stopped arranging sessions and I started releasing bits and pieces of what we had recorded as Eps, Eps I would upload in the wee hours of the morning without permission from anyone and would sometimes delete the following day and sometimes wouldn’t. Some of the songs that were on some of those EPs are on this, but they're different, for the most part. Fractured and broken, or maybe sightly different takes are used, or whatever.

Regardless, that was that. Angus just fell to its knees with its head back and its throat slit open and its both arms battered and broken.

It’s always haunted 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.

But it can’t be finished. The people we were – the person I was – those people are not taking up any sort of space in this world any longer. I don’t know that I could feel those songs like I could feel them at the time. New songs I'm writing throw different sorts of shapes altogether. But I felt them then.

What Angus, After All is, is partly an approximation of what we were aiming for, but more than that it is a trek though the bits of my brain within which are carved yet the names of those songs, the face of that record that only had maybe a quarter of a face to begin with. The things that were going on, the illness that was gnawing away at me day by day and gnaws away yet. Alcoholism. Schizoaffective disorder. All of this moiling away between my ears. This is what I’ve wanted to let pour out of me. I’ve abandoned Billy’s artwork and created my own. It felt appropriate. This particular artwork means something to me and to this Angus, After All that I’ve created. The album Billy’s artwork was destined for was never completed.

So. A document of whatever stripe. Documentary, even, you might say. A record of all of that, but again, it's also a wander through that album and the album it might have been and through the shadows that it cast and continues to cast for me. A wander through that time and the times that

defined it, times that fell in on it from the edges of the frame every so often. Soundspaces crashing into other. Demos recorded in North London; studio recordings completed in Newcastle and studio recordings abandoned in Newcastle; live performances in Dalston and elsewhere; friends arguing on Junction Road; fights in toilets in Highbury; impromptu raps that folk let me record after I got to talking to them out back the pubs; the sound of smoke that I shouldn’t have been smoking drawing into my lungs as I’m trying my damndest to talk to strangers on fire escape stairways two minutes from the psychiatric hospital.

The sound of stuff that I shouldn't be taking into myself going into myself in the toilets of Tesco or the shopping centre up the road. Walking the streets of London and the streets of the town where I live here now, here in this 2019. Talking with the doctor, or him talking to me. Attending mass with so much medication in my stomach that I couldn’t tell Jesus from the feet of a rook.

Most of the recordings date from those Newcastle studio sessions, but there are also demos recorded in North London, there are live performances here and there. There are also among it all two tracks that were put down recently. These were songs that were always meant for the album, and they were recorded in Newcastle, sort of. Bits of them were recorded, and bits of those bits show up here, but they were never right, they always fell apart just prior to anything with any sort of fire in it happening. So I recorded them again with the help of my friend Ryan. No relation to the "Ryan! Ryan!" that's being bid sit the fuck down in the The Coronet on Holloway Road in the opening bars of N15. Ryan who is one of my best friends in the world and is on nearly every record I’ve ever put out and has played with me more often than anyone else. Clicks with me musically in ways that are bordering on the supernatural. Knows instinctively what to do and when to do it. Never a word needing spoken. Just knows. He’s all over the Newcastle sessions. That’s his banjo stripping the skin off the end of N15, for example. Anyway we recorded these couple songs for I felt like the album still needed them.

I hope you enjoy it. It’s quite abrasive at times, quite aggressive. It’s partly an exorcism, and to me this is what this particular sort of exorcism has to sound like. Sort of exorcism that’s looking to shoo the devil without shooing away the shadow that the devil’s casting over everything.

Anyway. Angus, After All.