News
Christmas is Coming
I have never written a Christmas song before. Years ago I heard one recorded by the great Willy Rushton (sadly unreleased) which had the immortal line, "And the Christmas Tree has an antisocial dutch disease," after which I decided that I could never better that and never tried.
This year I was playing around with a piece of music for Wurm Online and though it had a sort of left field Christmas feel to it, so I rewrote it. The original track talked about war, so in the new version I thought about the members of the British Forces that are overseas, especially in Afghanistan. They are doing a hard job and are doing it with lack lustre support from anyone, politicians and public alike. Personally, I think they are doing the right thing. The Taliban are a quite horrific group and their opinions on women especially are simply untenable. I would hate to see them back in power.
But the point it, whatever your view, the forces out there are doing the job as they see fit, and doing it well. So this song is a nudge to people to forget the politics sometimes and remember the people instead.
Angels in the Snow (Talk about the war)
You need the Flash Player to play this track
Wurm Online
Some of you may know that I have been writing music for the online game Wurm Online.
It is an interesting, if rather long winded, project and certainly not typical of other games out there. We have gone for vocals in places and lots of bottle neck guitar work, as well as the odd bit of atmospherics and orchestra that people would normally expect.
The reason is that the land of Wurm is meant to be a primitive, frontier world or blacksmiths, farmers, carpenters, boat builders and so on, as well as the ubiquitous fighting (which I find boring and pointless in every single game I have come across.) Thankfully, Wurm has servers where player versus player fighting is banned, which is much better!
Anyway, the music has grown its own Myspace website - go along and have a listen, and perhaps even play the game!