Where to start?

Having just announced the release date of our second album on Instagram and begun the campaign with the first single, we’ve been mulling over the past few days over how best to present it all to you. Unfortunately for us, in the present day, this means agonising over a social media strategy. It’s the world we live in. Ideally, we’d have chosen to forego this rather dirty exercise in somehow gaining traction with the people who might be interested in what we are doing artistically using 10 to 15 second clips of whatever we can muster up for the internet 3-5 times a week. It sounds simple, but it leaves me in the position of Spong Man, with my head in my hands, on a regular basis. More on Spong Man later.

     The truth is, we started this whole thing quite a few years ago now and it was before Instagram was big and before TikTok existed. Facebook was the one back then, but even that we outsourced to an agency and forgot about it. As a fully fledged member of 2025 society, I look back and rue the opportunities we missed playing shows in Europe to sometimes thousands a people a night and not asking one of them to follow us online. But whatever. We were young and we didn’t understand. 

     I have started this blog as a home for longer form pieces, written by us, detailing some of the history of what we’ve done as a band and the memories we have made. A lot of it will be painful. But, presumably, you don’t want to hear all about what was going on back then with no idea what is going on with us now. Understandable if so. The point of this is to invite you into our interior in a way we’ve found difficult to achieve on certain platforms. Because against all the odds, I’m still alive and kicking, and we’d like to continue this story. Our album is out on 11th July, and we will spend the next few months elucidating exactly how and why we’ve arrived at a place where we even have a second album to offer.

     The world that we all share is currently being ripped apart. I know I don’t need to explain. But I mentioned Spong Man earlier and I’d like to briefly return to him. Spong Man is a lovely little fellow, inset, crafted by an unknown artist in ancient Britain and he’s a favourite of the contemporary sculptor Antony Gormley. Something Gormley said about him on telly really stuck with me. 

     We often create from a position of despair. We feel we simply must make something new in order to change reality, even marginally. I have felt like Spong Man on many occasions; often gripped by addiction, but in sobriety also; I realised, sat on my bed in a psychiatric unit last year, that something had to give. Even if it was tiny. So I drew a picture. I can’t remember what it was. But I remembered that I could use my hands, could play a guitar still, and we finished our album in the months that followed. I had given up on the whole project and suddenly it was real again. The world was still spinning. Life would go on, of course, even without me in it. That’s a big pill for an addict to swallow. But I chose to remain a tiny part of what goes on outside. Make Repetition! is a direct result of that decision.