Category: Videos

  • From The Vaults: The Birthday Song

    From The Vaults: The Birthday Song

    It was my birthday this month, so I thought I would dig this old favourite, which I recorded on my birthday 30 years ago, when I was 52.

    It is all factually accurate. And I still reserve the moment to put way too much glow filter on any time I choose. It’s the privilege of age…

  • From The Vaults: Sympathy For The Devil (live at Catweazle)

    From The Vaults: Sympathy For The Devil (live at Catweazle)

    It’s only now that I watch it again that I realise how tired everyone must have got of singing ‘oo oo’ constantly for, like, 6 minutes. But anyway, this was my version of the Rolling Stones classic, from way back in 2013.  (Jesus, five years ago now!)

  • From The Vaults: The Hallelujah Chorus

    From The Vaults: The Hallelujah Chorus

    An old favourite butchered by me and me bruv that we haven’t had in a while. Tomorrow there’ll be a special NYE version of the Bastard English Session, and no doubt this tune will crop up somewhere. (more…)

  • From The Vaults: Fish & Bird

    From The Vaults: Fish & Bird

    Time to crack open another ‘vaults’ artefact. From way back in February 2015, in the Vaults in central Oxford, this is a version of Tom Waits’s magnificent Fish & Bird by Faceometer and myself, that’s very dark (photographically) and a bit insane, and we both seem to be competitively shooting up and up into the highest registers of falsetto. “Is it a fish? Is it a bird? No! It’s… the only way we seem to be able to wind this song up.” To be fair, I started it…

    Anyway, if you haven’t heard the original song before, it’s on Waits’s album Alice, and I think it’s one of his best. (And from me, that’s saying something.)

  • From The Vaults: The End Of The World

    From The Vaults: The End Of The World

    I’m starting early with the Half Moon All Stars nostalgia.

    Personally, I think this was one of our most fun gigs.  We still had Jane, we still had Mark — I think we might have even still had Kate!

    DOESN’T EVERYONE LOOK YOUNG!!

    Anyway, that’s great… it starts with an earthquake…

  • From The Vaults: A Lusty Young Smith

    From The Vaults: A Lusty Young Smith

    This is a piece of sheer filth that I performed at Folk Weekend: Oxford a number of years ago.

    But it’s traditional, so that makes it okay.