I’m joining with my singer-songwriter friends Keith Buckman and Surya Cooper to play a gig at Parade’s End Books on Ham Parade on Saturday 29th March at 7.30pm. Tickets available here: https://paradesendbooks.co.uk/product/ticket-for-live-music-evening-sat-29-march

Feel like some satire? Or soulful vibes? Chas Warlow will deliver both. Surya Cooper creates a mischievous mix of folk and jazz and gets you singing along, while Keith Buckman’s guitar artistry and atmospheric vocals bring to life his own research into his family history – the joys, pain and stories of ordinary folk in the late nineteenth century.

My new album is now available on Bandcamp! Seven original songs that will shake you up and glue you together again. 

No, it’s not the Kafka novel – my new track is something I tried to write three years ago after serving on the jury in a murder trial. I felt that the subject deserved a song but couldn’t get to the heart of the matter, so I shelved it. Years later it came back to me – because a murder trial never leaves you.
Anyone who wants to look into the case can look up Grzegorz Pietrycki online and you will find articles, mainly in Polish. Grzegorz was a young Polish man living in a shared house in Wood Green. He was found slumped on a nearby doorstep bleeding to death from a savage knife wound to his neck. There were other knife wounds on his body.
The song highlights the fact that at the end of the trial the motive for this murder was still unknown. No witnesses were able to shed light on what actually happened that night other than the obvious fact of Grzegorz’s death. There was nothing showy or glamorous about the trial – just the facts and witness statements. The jury did their best with the material presented to us.

It’s Remembrance Day today and in honour of that I’ve recorded a new song. When I lived in Ealing about 30 years ago I saw a grove of trees in a park that had been planted by scouts and their parents in memory of their comrades who had died in action. One plaque for WW1 and another for WW2. It was a poignant tribute that I’ve never forgotten – I wrote a poem initially, then this song.

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Sea shanties have become really popular recently – for some reason – so I have tried my hand at writing one on the popular Moby Dick whaling theme … with a difference. If you are the Covid Man – watch out! We are coming for you….

Brexit is done and dusted. It’s all over. Even the shouting is dying down a bit. So I’m going to walk away from it and not look back – no more crying over spilt milk, no more worrying about whether cake can be had and eaten at the same time. I must leave Leave and Remain. And Leave must leave, too – that’s the story. Leave.EU was the name, and website, of the main group campaigning for the UK to leave the EU. But you can only have a website with a .eu suffix if your organisation is registered in the EU (logical enough). So Leave.EU has moved – to Ireland. But, according to the Guardian, “Sean Power, the Irish businessman whose name appears on Leave.EU’s domain registration, insists he has never heard of the company. ‘My lawyers are looking into this on my behalf presently and will be in touch as deemed necessary in due course,’ said Power, the chief executive of Business Services Group, a Waterford-based company. ‘I have nothing to do with Leave.EU and never heard of it before yesterday.’

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/08/irish-mp-calls-regulator-to-investigate-leaveeus-irish-registration

Having just recovered from the dreaded Covid, I heartily recommend not catching it … so here are the three steps to Covid – to avoid!

As 2020 draws to a close, I realise that I have some catching up to do – I haven’t posted anything since June 2019. I have been active – I’ve produced some new songs in this period…. here they are:

A song inspired by the Indian guru Swami Vivekananda, who was one of the first wave of Indian spiritual figures to visit the West. Bringing East and West together. His opening words to the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Chicago in 1893 were: “Brothers and sisters of America”.

“Beautiful Land”, a beautiful song written by Canadian singer-songwriter, Nicole Almond, about her home province, Saskatchewan.

Strange to be saying goodbye to a city as if saying it to a lover – or at least a good friend. It’s clear that me and this city have developed a special bond. Yesterday was my last full day here and I completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training course I have been doing over the last five months. So I played some songs to my Happy Tree yoga family – here’s a video of one of them: it’s called “Deepbreathely”, based on garbled teaching cues that we let slip during our teaching practice, plus some liberal artistic licence. Enjoy.

….and I played my last open mic in front of an appreciative audience. Here is “Les Inspecteurs”: a song about Les Inspecteurs of the Montreal metro. They look like a SWAT team, act like a SWAT team, but really they just want to be loved. … and check that you have a valid ticket, of course.