SOME VERY WELCOME NEWS

You’ll hopefully recall this piece from a couple of months back in which I lamented the decision by Adam Stafford to take his leave of the music scene.

Tucked away near the end of that particular posting, I set out my hope that Adam would take up my offer of a sit-down over a beer or two at which I’d lend a sympathetic ear if he wanted to gripe further about the music industry.

My hopes were realised and, at the tail end of January, he came across to Glasgow, ostensibly to catch a show by Broken Chanter (the new band formed by David McGregor following the break-up of Kid Canaveral), but we hooked up a couple of hours beforehand and we got talking. We were joined a while later by Mike Melville of Manic Pop Thrills and I think it’s a fair assumption to say that we both spent a bit of energy asking Adam to reconsider his decision and offering to help out in any way we could.

We both felt we were pushing a wee bit at an open door as Adam was saying that his love of composing and performing hadn’t left him – indeed he’d been given a gift of an old-style synthesiser at Christmas on which he had been working up some new pieces – but he just felt really low and bitter about how the tail end of 2018 had been panning out. In a nutshell, he’d released a critically acclaimed double-album and yet he was unable to transfer such praise into enough sales to financially support himself and his family and his efforts to tour further afield than the cities in Scotland had left him out-of-pocket.

But more than the financial side of things, it was painfully obvious that he was doubting himself for what must have been the first time in decades, wondering if he really did have an audience. Our response was that, as long as we were still capable of listening to music, he’d always have at least two fans to buy his stuff and come see his shows.

I think it’s fair to say that, by the end of what turned out to be a great night (the live show was most enjoyable), Adam was quite drunk and had been given a bit of food for thought. I got a really nice e-mail from him the day after in which he admitted not remembering much of his train journey back to Falkirk and the walk from the station to his home, but that he’d appreciated the company and the encouragment I’d given him.

I knew there would be other folk out there offering similar words to Adam, including his family, close friends, fellow musicians and other fans similar to myself. So it was great to get this missive a couple of weeks ago:-

Dear friends,

As some of you already know, in Nov last year, after a bad week of depression and insomnia, I hastily announced that I was quitting music, performing & releasing. It had been an eventful year: I was flattened by the deaths of two people I knew and greatly admired; an LP that I’d spent 8 years making was well received but a subsequent short tour of the UK was financially and emotionally ruinous. The shadows were closing in.

Thankfully I have a stupendous amount of supportive family and friends who dropped what they were doing to facilitate the massive whitey I was having and encouraged me to pause and reflect, respond rather than react.

To get to the point, I never have truly wanted to retire from writing and performing, but needed a break. In all honesty, I need to keep creating music to stop me from going insane and financially support my family. Thus, I am putting out this new EP of mainly soundtrack music that I’ve been working on over the last year. It is free to DL but any contribution (or a recommendation to a friend) would be greatly appreciated:

https://adamstafford.bandcamp.com/album/digressions-in-the-pale-palace-ep-2019

One of the issues that had come up during our drunken discussions in Glasgow had been how best to get the new music out there. I told Adam that I would be willing to get involved in any support costs in doing so and as the night wore on, I began to insist that he allow me to get involved in that way as it would be an honour and a privilege.

A few days later, in reply to his e-mail thanking me for being decent company at the gig, I reminded him of my offer and repeated my insistence. I was determined to try to make sure that he could start 2019 with something of a bang, through having new material available for sale and/or a couple of shows to look forward to. After much badgering, he accepted my offer. It’s not a great deal of money – I pay more for a season ticket at Raith Rovers and it’s come from a good couple of weeks making football score predictions and relieving an on-line betting firm of some cash – but what it has done is enable Adam to send this out:-

Adam Stafford returns in 2019 fresh from the critically acclaimed compositional album Fire Behind the Curtain (2018). This time he has hunkered down in his tiny studio with a newly acquired Synthesizer and laid down improv Synth jams over one week in a psychedelic sweatstorm.

The result is The Acid Bothy: a no-frills, no-bullshit hypnogogic slayer; a bad-trip brainmelch vomitorium spewing bubbling Synth lines that warp and contort in the shifting haze.

Fitting for an LP that was recorded live onto mono cassette, Adam is issuing The Acid Bothy on fruit salad (bi-red/yellow) coloured tapes limited to 50 copies.

Of these 50 copies, 15 can be pre-ordered HERE with the rest being available at two live shows:-

12 April: Leith Depot, Edinburgh
18 April: The Hug & Pint, Glasgow

(Turns out that the 15 pre-order copies are already sold out!!!….but you can still pick up a download version)

Who could possibly resist something described as a bad-trip brainmelch vomitorium spewing bubbling Synth lines that warp and contort in the shifting haze.

Paul Morley, eat your broken heart out.

In the meantime, here’s something from Fire Behind The Curtain, that critically acclaimed LP from 2018 mentioned earlier on:-

mp3 : Adam Stafford – Holographic Tulsa Mezzanine

JC