How Many Times? (Intro Vocals+Harmonica Demo)

This is something I made a few years ago, and felt happy enough to put up here.It's a genuine event, so I read!. The music track is called "Divertimento" but I never recorded the artist and cannot now find it.If it's your work please do tell me and I will remove the track as I do not own the copyright.

Yorkshire Alpaca Show - 2023 BBC Re-edit

Heart So Fast (The Chase Is On)

80s Stallone - Cliffhanger (Original Mix)

Ash Money- Make U Mine

Altered States

Nothing to do with the Andy Gill Gang of Four tune or the eponymous indie record label. 

Music Michael Burton, Benjamin Dunn and John Summers. Lyrics Chris Jackson.

© 2006 Friends of the Family - Burton/Dunn/Jackson/Summers
℗ 2006 Friends of the Family - Burton/Dunn/Jackson/Summers

Demo 2006

Damaged Goods -  Friends of the Family

Buy Now

ZAYAZ - Chicane

Dance Like No-one Is Watching - sample

The Shulman Session

On Sunday 8th December, 2019, I finally made a start in the recording and transcribing of my piano based piece, 'The Bootmaker's Theme (Arnold's Song)' with violinist Stephen Shulman who recently retired from Opera North after forty years of intermittent service. 

The piece was written about seventeen years ago, before I left home for University. 

I'd lost a  dead-end job at Stylo-Barret's now demolished factory at Apperley Bridge on the Leeds-Bradford border. The company was then run by Micheal Ziff who I would see milling about the place, in and out of the office on the shop floor. It had been founded many years prior by his father Arnold. I was too slow to even count and repack returned Grattan catalogue shoes for the returns department. I had to do 800 boxes a day, but could just about achieve 500 boxes after two months in the job. 

So I enrolled at The University of Bradford.😂

The course began, just before my 23rd birthday. I scraped in on clearing, just months after my father had taken early retirement from the civil service, enabling me to have my course fees paid for free by the Local Education Authority. So began my journey into a four year archaeology degree, and within six months I had met the future mother of my two children.

The piece was originally titled 'Tell Me (I'm An Angel Now)', but I never thought those lyrics sat well with it - and besides, its melody stands up strongly enough purely as an instrumental. Then in March 2018, sixteen years after its initial conception, I sat practicing it at the piano in the Arnold and Marjorie Ziff (MAAZ) Centre in Leeds and a new title popped into my head - The Bootmaker's Theme (Arnold's Song). 

Along with the Ziff family, my great uncle Harry Austin (Ornstein) had been a shoe and bootmaker eventually owning a factory and a chain of shoe shops based in Oxford. My one time Chilean great grandfather Simon Dunn's (Don Simon) brother-in-law José Leszerovich Levy of Punta Arenas (Tierra Del Fuego) had also been a bootmaker during the early 20th Century - so the 'bootmaker theme' fitted the piece exceptionally well. 

It begins as a sad, solemn piece in E minor,  but rises to the C major giving hope, joy and even promise. Structurally is it similar to 'Hatikva' - 'The Hope'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZlSUSgj-sM

The Bootmaker's Theme

Remixer, Songwriter and performer based in Leeds.

Heart So Fast (The Chase Is On)

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