Book Illustration

Just found a book I wrote and illustrated and thought I'd scan it in before it fell apart. Quite like it although the dog looks a bit strange - no good at drawing animals!

Shoot 'im up!

I'm now working on the world's shortest computer game 'Hunt the Nazi'. You pick up a gun, open the door and there he is on the toilet. Bang! Game over.

A Body Among the Binbags

Finally finished my radio play and sent it off to the producer at BBC Radio Wales suggested to me by Gillian Clarke, Wales' national poet (no less).

My play was originally called 'Always the Mourner', then 'A Bunch of Daffs' and is now 'A Body Among the Binbags'. Third time lucky...

Raider of the Lost Archive

Trawling through the vaults this weekend I found a load of stuff on dusty old cassettes – including an amazing number of Drew Millin recordings with songs even he’s probably forgotten about such as ‘Production Line’ the beautiful ‘So Hard to Find’ and the two of us singing a track called ‘Mother Earth’ based on Drew’s tune ‘Music Papers’.

Now converting these into mp3s and hope to post them here soon and make up a CD compilation. The quality varies but I can probably tweak the muddier ones using various sound editing programmes.

Also a track of myself with guitar and keyboard accompaniment singing a song called ‘Spanish Night’ – did I write this? Sub-Dylanesque lyrics so may have done – “In the soup kitchen, they speak, some in Latin, some in Greek, of that Spanish night we all threw in the towel.” Anyone recognise that?

Turning vinyl and tape into MP3 digital

Finally got a decent music machine for easily converting vinyl and cassette tapes into digital mp3 files via a USB flash drive!The first one I ordered looked very nice but the tape player had no rewind - so everytime I found a track I wanted to use, in order to cue it from the beginning I couldn't just rewind, I had to take tape out, turn it round, fast forward a little, take tape out and re-insert and then play. Amazingly fiddly.

Now busy putting all sorts onto my PC - including some tracks by my old band, The BOI, that I had transferred from reel-to-reel onto cassette. Found some real gems including the beautiful 'So Hard to Find' by Drew. All I need now is a way of turning ancient reel-to-reel tapes into mp3 files.

Double Dutch

I was amazed to come across some blogs by students in the Netherlands where they were writing about some books I wrote ages ago.

They were published by a company called Unicorn whose website is: http://www.unicornproductions.nl/index_bestanden/Page1816.htm
The blogs can be read on: http://www.scholieren.com/boekverslagen/8533

Talking about a futuristic book for teenagers what I wrote, entitled 'Zoomer and the Blizzard Weavers', one person has commented "Thit (sic) was a nice book, because it wasn’t very difficult to read. " Another wrote "I didn’t like this book much, because it looks like Science Fiction and I don’t like that. The story takes place in Manchester, and I think that the story takes place in the future, because there are no bands in this time who are not real."