About The Album
Monochrome was a project commenced straight after the completion of No Expectations and London Road in 2018. It was ran in parallel with another project, specifically the since abandoned project called Mondegreen. As the strapline said, “songs in black and white, no shades of any other colour, they were what they were.”
The songs on the album were a bit of an unusual collection; Birds And Butterflies was one that I always knew how I wanted it to sound and it wasnt thematically correct for No Expectations, so it ended up by default on this project. It was however, inspired lyrically by the same events that led to the creation of the other tracks on No Expectations. Thematically, it also has a lot of parallels with the No Expectations album, around loss, bereavement, abandonment and unrequited love.
The Last Dance, in its lyrical evolution, likewise, but that came even before Elia, which was on London Road. I originally had the idea and the melodic line for The Last Dance before Elia was done and was hoping to get some steerage from my uncle, Angel Louis Paniagua, in July 2015 but it didnt quite happen and we ended up with Elia instead, the story of which is told elsewhere on this site. Well, I found that I was still very attached to The Last Dance, so I pursued it and eventually managed to make it happen. Hunters Moon was, as the record shows, conceived lyrically and storyboard-wise on a journey to a Marillion gig in Leamington at the back end of 2014. Tomorrow Too Soon was a spin off from No Getting Over You and had that James Grant thing going on, as I was still heavily influenced by him at the time of writing.
I guess the biggest regret that I had about Monochrome was the amount of time it took to do it. Seven years is a damned long time to make an EP, let alone an album and it shouldn’t really have taken that long. That said, there were numerous false starts, there were periods where real life got in the way, particularly around my day job at the time in the early days and being on call, not to mention the lockdowns in the early 2020’s which distracted everybody, but me maybe more so than they should have. I was also at the time, doing a lot of musical work for my friends from the AlterZero world; there were at least three EP’s that were recorded and released during that time, some of which were remix projects of older material that I then had the expertise to try and remix and make better than what they were when they were released first time round in 2012/13/14.
Added to that was the work on Mondegreen that ran in parallel, six tracks, some of which had potential and others that didnt. When I migrated from the old Mac Pro’s to the current Mac Studio, the work that had been done for Mondegreen ended up being lost and I had the awful feeling that the disk containing the songs from that album ended up in the recycling at the local tidy-tip. It is what it is. So as a result, Monochrome took a lot longer than it should have done to be finished and released, which it was eventually, last year before I moved house to Warwick where I am currently working from. Two of the songs on the album, namely the opening two, will likely re-appear in the listings for Echoes at some point in the future, as they have both been washed through a GenAI provider and the results are ok, but very different to how I’ve imagined them in this form.
The artwork comes from a series of black and white photographs – monochrome, some might say (and yes, that was deliberate), which came from the collections of the Coventry Evening Telegraph. I did try and reach out through their contact forms to be able to licence the pictures properly but I never got a response, no one from the paper or its new owners seemed to be interested. I grew up in Coventry, reading the Evening Telegraph, as so many of my age group did; it was a true local paper and in my young days, it was an important part of the city’s culture and history. The pictures themselves are all taken within a mile of where I was born and some of the images are the results from wartime bomb damage and others are the results of the city planners figuring that they would transform one of the oldest towns in the country into a city in the clouds at the bleeding edge of modern day architecture…. so they just destroyed all the history that stood in their way; shops, narrow old streets, houses and workshops previously occupied by lacemakers and other artisans… to replace it with high rises that were an abject crime ridden failure from day 1; the image of the child playing with the parts of an abandoned car on a waste ground with a new high-rise block in the background and the half demolished shell of an old building adjacent… where there would previously have been a family, supported by a tradesman…. yeah, that about sums up the seething mass of contradictions that I have for my home town. Part of it did make me the man that I am and it formed the first 18 years of my life… and that is the black and white part. The shades of grey came from every other place that I have ever lived in the intervening years…
