Time Demands

About this album

Time Demands was the follow on project to Monochrome and was started in a new recording studio room in my new home in Warwick after I moved house following my professional retirement in August 2025. The studio was built up and ready for operation from late September/early October 2025 and writing for the album started pretty much straight away and was mainly fed by a lot of lines and ideas that had been captured over the last few years… and that then evolved into a very different thematic work to what has gone before.

Time Demands, instead of being beholden to the past and necessarily confronting the same issues again (One Trick Pony? Moi?? How very dare you…), looks more at what has been learned by those experiences and poses a number of different questions… namely that we (well, I anyway) have got this far and seen a lot, experienced a lot and been on a long journey to get to this point and experience has taught me a lot, about life, love and people. Time Demands is a reflection on that, for the most part. Its a case of learning from the past and not being still strapped to it. There are elements that address environmental concerns, there is a paen to my best friend who changed my life forever back in 1992 and there is a reflection on the events of 2016 which took so many of our most deeply loved musical influences from this realm to the next one.

The musical influences are significantly different to previous works and are more… well, I’d like to think they are more obvious, ranging from Seal and Trevor Horn, to Tears For Fears, to The Mission UK and Wayne Hussey, to Will Young, Larry Blackman (Cameo) and Stephen Lipson, to David Gilmour, Hogarth-era Marillion, Porcupine Tree and Glasgow bands of the 1980s including a huge influence of mine, The Big Dish. There was quite a bit of research that needed to be done to assess things like typical chord structures, arrangements, production values and the such like to pay proper tribute to these artists; it is not an emulation, it is an acknowledgement of how much the material from these artists has moved me over four decades and influenced what and how I write and what I love to listen to. I’d like to think that the direction of travel at the moment is a positive one and that this is definitely an evolutionary step.

Writing of the songs, certainly first draft-wise, completed by the end of October/beginning of November and there were two subsequent additions that hadn’t been part of the initial approach (Only You And I Know and A Strange Love), but they were, in my view, thematically appropriate to be added to this album, so the decision was taken to start recording them with a view to them being part of the release. Recording began in late November/early December 2025 and took until early March 2026, and the aim is for it to be mixed and mastered and released by the beginning of June 2026. I anticipate as well that it will be a completely solo effort, I do not foresee any of my normal collaborators being involved in this project and while there will be an AI element to it (possibly through tools like Re-Sing), I’m expecting that it will very much be me doing everything.

The main AI element is mostly in the artwork and that is very much a decision that was taken in order to try and produce as much relevant and high quality imagery as I can to reflect the feel of the music; these are things that are not possible for me to do through either my own photos or using normal manipulation tools like Photoshop. I know of at least one act that has taken an awful lot of stick for using AI generated photos in their most recent work, but its not something that bothers me. Sorry, but I cannot be doing with all that puritanical bullshit. Like many acts without major label support, I dont have the time or money to retain professional real people to do this stuff, those kinds of budgets are for the history books.

The pictures that I have chosen for this particular work are to me, self explanatory. The front cover of the fox drinking from the lake where there is a tree – a tree of life, from which hangs a clock-face, indicating the passage of time and also a mirror, reflecting back on us what we show to it; it is in a lake by a mountain range and the sun is coming up showing the start of a new day. The back cover is a pocket watch, lodged into a tree and it has been there so long that the tree is starting to grow around it and in due course it will be absorbed by the tree and it will go back to nature and man’s footprint, including the man whose watch it was, will be returned to nature and to stardust. Time Demands that we do as much as we can with the years that we get on this earth. Its a one way journey and no one gets out alive. We are here to learn and to teach each other, regardless of what other motivations we may think we have in the meantime. The inside cover is an overgrown pathway through a copse, which has bird feathers in the foreground; the feathers are a connection to one of the lyrics, from the closing track, The Land Of The Low White Sun, namely:

“So here I am sitting here all tangled up in my words
Shards from a shattered looking glass
looking like feathers from scattered birds”

To conclude where AI in the making of music is concerned; there is, and no doubt still will be for many years yet, an awful lot of noise around this technology in music. I do not have the financial depth to be able to ignore tools like this in order to create the best work that I can just so that it can remain as ideologically pure as some might want all musical work to be. I have no problem with leaning on the technology of the day in order to be able to achieve the results that I need to create. I guess Time Demands is the first of my works that will overtly and honestly take this particular path and if the technologies concerned allow me to be more creative and quicker than what it has previously been (five months as opposed to 7 years), I make no apology for that.