a bit more. Johnny played many gigs and he recorded too and so musical interchange between us created a natural impetus. I was playing at burgeoning Open Mic nights and many charity gigs at local pubs and even played at an EMI album launch party for Starsailor’s second album. I passed auditions for Stars in their eyes playing Neil Young and singing Heart of Gold (be- ating 20,000 would be Neil Diamond). I was a reserve for the last series and several great things came out of that. First- ly I got paid (contestants did not get paid) and I got 8 weeks free voice coaching. They told me the Chris de Burgh, Lady in red, guy had been a previous reserve and that he came back for the next series and won! Ho- wever, the next series for me was scrapped because of a situation with Matthew Kelly.


I learned


a lot from being around that series but I wished I kept the Neil Young wig! (rehearsal ses- sion) http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=G4OVmwcdtRA


You’ve now been signed by a new American Label. How did that come about? Yeah, it’s amazing really. A piece of good fortune happened after I supported a cause for two musi- cians who had been wronged in a MySpace blog. When put up a query for a name of a good re- cording studio, Martyn Smith’s Audiofile at Nelson in East Lan- cashire was offered to me by Ja- son Johnson.


After speaking to Martyn at Au- diofile he told me to listen to Teaspoon, a Colne band he had played on tracks with and recor- ded. I loved the ‘Petard’ song and a video of ‘A song I’ve ne- ver heard’ and even pleaded with Teaspoon to put some new tunes on.


I went down to Audiofile in Mar- ch 2010 and did a test recording of a new song Galileo and the results proved to me that I had found the person who would be able to capture my acoustic style and music.


Did that lead to your new album? The demos of new songs were put onto myspace and older songs from the first two CDs relegated http://www.myspace. com/dogmandavesands The- se included near live recording of my ‘Home Fire’ ,‘Galileo’ and ‘Small acts of kindness’ ( a poem) and ‘Earth plc’. I was so pleased when my new songs attracted attention from fellow musicians with some pointing out my obvious Neil Young-ish style. Once I had enough songs recorded, with Martyn Smith he mixed and mastered the main tracks and ‘The Whisperer’ was released as a download album through USA BABY CD in May 2010. The download album also included some tracks from those two early albums. Online distri- bution made my music available as downloads through I-Tunes, Amazon and on Spotify.


Did you recently release a new CD? Yes. At subsequent gigs, in parti- cular I played at Studio 2 Liver- pool for special night ‘Under the influence’ Neil Young and a few enthusiastic members of audiences asked me about obtai- ning a CD. This interest encou- raged me to pay for the produc- tion of a limited-edition digipak of 100 copies of ‘The Whisperer’ in June 2010. I included‘Home Fire’ as a remix which was done by a talented musician and pro- ducer I found through MySpace, known as Mikans. He was based in Japan at the time. This was the start of a tremendous musi- cal co-operation and some of my songs re-emerge as remixes as a resulting of an online friendship. The CD included demos of two new songs recorded at Audio- file that were not available when the download album was laun- ched. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, a song sketch written five years before and Do my dance, written almost a decade before for Jonathan to explain that I had left it too late to make it in the music business.


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