Photograph: Lisa Byrne
My plan is for 2015 to be the year Invaderband spreads its wings. The following things should become reality this year: Releases, local(ish) Irish gigs as usual but also UK dates (I know, great!), some in my birthplace and spiritual flat-capped home of Manchester. Current plans for UK are early August, but a new website is being developed right now (invaderband.com) so keep your eye on that and you will be able to sign up to a mailing list to stay bang up-to-date, and get one of our super-shiny new recordings for doing so – taken from sessions at the end of 2014. There are lots of plans (videos, festivals, blah & blah) and I am very excited because I believe these new recordings to be the best thing I have ever been involved with musically.
As for the solo stuff, the Octopus project will end in a couple of weeks with Octopus Part 8 released on – gosh you’re clever – the 8th March. I believe I have saved some of the best music until last there as well, with the usual mix of covers (Beatles again this time!), previously unreleased songs/recordings and a great BBC session track of a ‘Nature Recordings’ song, so it kind of brings it up to date with my solo releases too. I only realised recently – this was genuinely an accident – that the 8th song on the 8th release is ‘The Eighth Tower’. There are 8 Invaderband recordings, I have 8 songs written for my new solo album and I live at No. 8 on my street, so that mystical digit is clearly relevant to me in a universal sense. Richard Dawkins would say that it was coincidence & random, but he’s a bit of a bore. The lovely art for Octopus 8 is here, kindly created by my friend and brother-in-song, Chris McConaghy:
Free download for 1 month, then I think I will bundle up all 8 releases into 1 and sell it for £20 or something extremely reasonable indeed for 64 songs. I might even press up some physical copies with extra songs if there is a demand for that, but I don’t want to fall into the double pack with a photograph extra track and a tacky badge trap, which there is a real danger of. Maybe I’ll just make 8 and put them on eBay.
That’s all I can think of for now. MASSIVE thanks to BUYERS of the Octopus releases which are always available for free originally. I know who you are and I’ll hug & kiss you all if we ever meet…
Bye for now!
+A x
The Message Tapes 