Click to hear 30 seconds of the trackS S Blues [Brooker]

William Morris and the Travellers  [UK]

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Colin on the beach in his garden, formerly known as 'Rubble Hole' Alan Here's looking at you kid ... his name is Hamish

[left to right] Colin Sillence – voice and guitar (higher); Alan Balmer – fiddle
Roland Clare – guitar (lower), voices, accordion, percussion

RC: Colin moved out of Bristol to a remote hillside cottage in the Cotswolds, so this Brooker 'B' side from 1979 seemed an appropriate choice of song. We went into Colin's Heronshaw studio with the notion of recording two guitars in a country blues vein, and you can still hear traces of background birdsong on the vocal track from that session; but after a few runs-through my left hand, on the Martin's heavy strings, grew too blistrous to complete a clean track. Consequently I re-did the lower guitar part at leisure, back home in the city, where I also cobbled together the accordion line. Alan – another voluntary rustic exile – sent his violin part in on a CD which got lost in the snail-mail somewhere between Cheddar and Bristol: what he plays here was redone from scratch after we gave up hope for the original take. The fiddle, therefore, was the last piece of music on From Shadow to Shadow to be recorded – except the overdub of one toe tapping, which somehow seemed to bind it all together.

US listeners, puzzled by the Burt Rhodes theme we quote at the end, may not know that the TV show they remember as Good Neighbors was originally entitled The Good Life … which is what Gary Brooker's Self-Sufficiency Blues refers to.

Vocal mic: Rode NT2. Front end: Focusrite Trackmaster; Cakewalk, PC
Higher guitar: Brook Teign (2002), recorded at Heronshaw with internal pickup, Cakewalk, PC
Lower guitar: Martin D28 (1974), recorded in Bristol with internal pickup, Cakewalk, PC
Fiddle recorded at Appletree Cottage using Cubase 5.1 on Apple iMac G3
The name on Alan's mic has worn away, and his fiddle and bow are of unknown origin!
However Roland's shoe is a black Dr Marten Size 7, and the floorboard upon which it is tapping is varnished pine dating from about 1904. This and the TG33 accordion recorded with Cakewalk and PC

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