Edinboro Man 1990/92
'Dark days in June'

We left London and moved to the capitol of Scotland in the summer of 89. It turned out to be a musically fertile time but also a desolate time for me. Edinburgh, although beautiful was also bleakly austere, grey, rainy, windy and bitterly cold...and that was in summer.

One of the saving graces was a little boxroom in my flat down Comiston Road where I installed a brand spanking new Fostex 280 high speed 4-track recorder (purchased using my student grant, I was studying computing at Napier University), it was an excellent machine and I made some great tapes on it. People used to come up to my tiny box studio and record their songs on my machine, I also had an Amiga 500 computer that I midi'd up to a Yamaha pss-790, the amiga used to run a brilliant tracker program called 'octa-med' that could control 12-bit samples and run the keyboard.. it was great but so primitive by today's standards.

I made a band with 2 of my old London mates who also ended up moving up there..(one of them is still there), 'Planet Janet', whose demise was brought about mainly by the emotional tensions present within it. .. Planet Janet played a few gigs around the town at places like 'The Venue', and the St James Oyster bar. The other band if I can call it that...was trio called 'Man of the Cloth' a full on rock out thing but we never played any gigs.

During this time I also made some tunes with a lovely fellow called Michael Magg. These tunes were really quite different to all the others, he was a classical flautist and had some top gear like a korg wavestation, an akai sampler and cubase! Those tunes sound quite accomplished to me now as I listen, elevated by his fabulous playing.

I ended up living in a place called the Salisbury Centre, a kind of new age healing community in a beautiful old house in the middle of town, but that was the end of the road for me, my marriage went sour and I had to leave town in a state of utter dejection. Luckily for me the next place I ended up, down in a meadow in East Sussex, saw a significant upturn in my fortunes and a whole new exiting chapter in my 4-track adventures.