This song is from a short-lived project I set up with my friend Alex Wilkins, a wonderful guitarist who also played in The Allender Band. We had a few practices and, while trying to learn a song we'd been working on the week before, I saw that I'd written the word 'Sharaabi' down as a not particularly helpful aide-memoire. We recorded a few songs together. Alex wrote this one. I'm playing nylon-string guitar (panned left) and Alex is playing steel-string (right). I wish I'd mic'd up Alex instead of DIing. The agony of regret!

Enter Aundsleigh

I heard Serafina Steer cover this classic Geoff Stephens song a while ago and was struck by what a good song it is, so I thought I'd try my own cover. Played the SH101 instead of singing...

The Crying Game

A recording of a man singing 'What's New Pussycat?' in a karaoke bar in Helsinki.

What's New Pussycat?

A song I recorded with my brother Tom back in... 2001 I think...? We never finished it! But it has a cool vibe.

Movie Movie

Instrumental version of a track from Above the Dreamer's Head, featuring Dylan Golden Aycock on pedal steel.

Looks And Smiles (Instrumental)

Ithaca

guitar loops/tape hiss/occult voices/oswestry

Oswestry

This is a cover of an Elton John song I recorded a few years ago. I dubbed it to tape and back to digital just like Sir Elton would have wanted!

2018

This Song Has No Title

Finally got my Pog, Tremolo and Carbon Copy Delay pedals back from storage, so went to work with my Freeze and four-track - if you know what I mean!!!

October Lane

Decided to re-upload my edit of The Traveling Wilburys' classic 'Handle With Care'.

2017

Handle With Care (Remix)

I originally released this song in 2012 on an EP called Spirit's Sleep. I was never really happy with it because I felt I'd got the structure wrong and added too many layers. I came back to it this year and edited the middle section out and stripped down a lot of the double-tracked guitars and vocals.

This has always been an important song for me. A friend of mine, Piia, died in 2011. I had only met her a handful of times but she was an incredibly kind and warm person. Sometime after she died I went to London Fields to see if I could find the memorial bench her friends had set up for her in the park. It's funny because I remember seeing a bench in the distance and walking towards it knowing that it was hers, and it was!

I didn't realise until after I'd recorded it that this song was really about that experience, it's about the way we continue to feel the presence of people we've lost in our lives.

August

This song was written in open D using a 'spider capo' on the fifth fret with the G string open. So the tuning is GDGF#DG. Recorded on my phone, added some synth and the sound of the wind blowing through the Horniman Gardens in Forest Hill. This one's for Dad.

2019

Simple Gifts

City Of Magnificent Distances

The first song on Becoming Ungoing, the EP I released earlier this year. Buy it here: 

https://robinallender.bandcamp.com/album/becoming-ungoing

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