As most of you know, there is a new album “Children of a Factory Nation” in the mix. It started with a myserious character called Johnathan X who was born in the 1800s and had been a seaman for most of his life, yet somehow still managed to drown only a few hundred metres away from his home. His whole family turned out to be interesting – though just as much from what I don’t know about them as what I do. They came from Wales, and caught my eye when delving into my own geneaology last year. So few facts remained that I could only wonder at how these characters had ended up in the situations that were recored, and how they could have died the way they did.
Filling in the blanks is how stories are born, and the first track from the new album “Johnny and the Sea” is a tale about a man who refuses to live the usual life of those on the land. His youth is spent on the waves, until he is exhausted and romanticises the normal life enough to decide to return. He marries, does the usual things a man did back then to grow roots on the land – has children, gets regular work in a factory – but all the time the sea is calling him to return. Eventually he can resist no longer and walks out into the waves to meet his death.

above: coal miners in the late 1800s. Johnny is not pictured here, as his mysteriousness extended to there being no images of him at all.

Dark? Grims fairytale like? You know I have a taste for that sort of thing and in the end it is a positive story, at least in my admittedly odd opinion. Johnny had guts. He didn’t conform and chose death over doing so. The real Johnny may or may not have been anything like this, of course, but I love to imagine he might have been.

Anyway, to the album project. It is a series of tales such as Johnny’s, following a Welsh family from 1860 through to 1930 as they deal with life, love and the impact of heavy machinery and mechanised working conditions on their lives. You can hear track two “A Woman Scorned” – the tale of Johnny’s wife after he has vanished into the sea – in the video below.

You will also find out via the video, that we have run into a few problems. Half way through the recording of the album, our co-investor pulled out suddenly, without explanation, leaving us somewhat in the lurch. “Lurch” being a polite word compared to the explatives used at the time! In the video above, I ask for help to get this album prject to completion. I am always very uncomfortable asking people for financial assistance, but unfortunately it’s the only option remaining. Also, I know that a lot of you want to see (and hear) this CD finished as much as I do! Of all the story CDs I have worked on, I have not been as excited as I am about this one. For those of you who come to live shows regularly, there are some real favorites on there: “Johnny & the Sea” and “A Woman Scorned” are there along with “The Arsonist”, “A Healers Folly”, “Blood on the Sea” and “Crooked Man”.

Please check out the video and the music and I will keep you posted about how things are going. In the meantime I look forward to playing the stories of Johnny and his family to you at live shows!