The Lost Cavalry's Diary

4/7/09 : Recording

We're going into the studio to record some tracks next week with Paul from Stolen Recordings, who I recorded the Fanfarlo single 'Harold T. Wilkins' with last year and who has also just recorded and produced the debut My Sad Captains album. I'm excited to be working with him again, he has a great ear for capturing the life of a song and also some interesting techniques - including taping turkish flat bread to the drums to deaden the sound and get them sounding just right!

We're aiming to record a proper version of 'Secret Steps' as well as 'Oh Sally' and 'Up For Air', two of the songs that have been working well live. So expect some more mp3s to be available soon. Can't wait, it's going to be good to get back into recording.

26/6/09 : Red And Cyan and Booked Out

As well as singing, I recently seem to have become an actor. At the moment, I'm in the middle of filming a cool short film called Red & Cyan as 'Ross'. Red & Cyan is "A modern day tale of an innocent descending in a dark murky world where nothing makes sense". Filming has been going well and we have just one day of shooting to go.

I've also recently got the part of 'Jacob' in the indie feature film Booked Out due to start filming in September - I'm really looking forward to it, it's going to be good to spend a full month really getting to grips with the character.

In the mean time here are some photos from the filming of Red & Cyan...

24/6/09 : Krankenhouse

We played a gig last weekend at a place called Krankenhouse in Crouch End - it's a kind of legal (ish) squat that used to be a nursing home, now transformed into a centre holding things like drum workshops and life drawing classes. We took it over for the day for a Wonderland party and The Lost Cavalry played outside, our first acoustic gig.

We decided against playing up on the stage that had been constructed on the outside of the building as it seemed that playing down on the ground nearer to people might be a bit more fun. It went well! It's good to know that our songs work well stripped down, and it was good to re-work them with some accordion added and plenty of percussion... and it's always nice to just sing really loud :-)

Our next gig is acoustic too, at The Fellow in Kings Cross, for NoOneDied - it should be a good day. Hopefully we'll have a new song 'Only Forward' ready to play, we were working on it tonight and it was going well, it's about sailing away to an Island called Antillia...

20/6/09 : Sign Of Death

Every time I drive along the A40 at the moment I get a weird reminder of a day that I nearly died. Well, I could have died anyway... I certainly thought I might at the time.

I was on holiday after my a-levels with my friends and we took a day trip to Greece. There's a beach with a wrecked ship washed up on it that you can only get to by boat, so we had to swim from the boat to the beach. It didn't look too far and I'm an ok swimmer so I jumped in and swam from the boat - but about half way along realised that I was no where near as good a swimmer as I had thought.

I probably would have been ok, except that I thought I would probably be near enough to the beach to stand already, so tried to put my feet down... and instead went under. I remember really vividly opening my eyes under the water and seeing the floor still quite far below me, and knowing I was in trouble. I managed to get up to the surface again and shout for help, and keep afloat, but by that time I was knackered and had swallowed a load of water. Fortunately a guy from the main boat zipped out in a small dinghy and literally rescued me.

So now they've decided to use a photo of that beach on an advert for holidays to Greece - so every time I drive into town I have to pass a huge picture of it. But at least it makes me remember it's good to be alive!