King And King To Be - Free Promotion

ADVANCE NOTICE

King And King To Be will be on a FREE promotion Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 12-14 October 2012. You can download it for free during these three days. (Based on Pacific Standard Time so may be a few hours delay in UK of both start and end)

Product Description:

Britain in the Dark Ages. But a Britain that has been forgotten by history. A Britain where elves, fairies and goblins still reside, feared and mistrusted by Men.

As a dark force threatens to conquer the kingdoms of Men they turn to the elves and a wizard for help. Together they seek for the one person who could save the Britain of the sixth century. A man called Arthur. A man who was born and lives in the twentieth century...

A startling first novel by J D Burke combines fantasy with half-familiar legend and a hero who struggles to accept the fate that he once thought was either a story or that belonged to someone else.

Don't miss out! Download it from Amazon to a Kindle near you! Can also be read on a PC, laptop, tablet or other device - see Amazon for details.

King And King To Be

Introducing my new baby - my first novel, a fantasy: King And King To Be. It has published today on Amazon for the Kindle and other eReaders.

I wrote this mainly during the 1980s and then it got put aside when I got immersed in computers and learned a new career which has taken me to where I am now.

The book took on the role of "retirement project" but with the advent of ebooks and the ease of self-publishing now I've taken it up again over the past few months and edited and proofed and edited again several times until I'm struggling to find the mistakes that are probably still in there!

The product description reads:

Britain in the Dark Ages. But a Britain that has been forgotten by history. A Britain where elves, fairies and goblins still reside, feared and mistrusted by Men.

As a dark force threatens to conquer the kingdoms of Men they turn to the elves and a wizard for help. Together they seek for the one person who could save the Britain of the sixth century. A man called Arthur. A man who was born and lives in the twentieth century...

A startling first novel by J D Burke combines fantasy with half-familiar legend and a hero who struggles to accept the fate that he once thought was either a story or that belonged to someone else.

A huge thank you goes to my cousin, graphic artist, Catherine Metcalfe, for the fabulous cover. The brief I gave her was "Stonehenge, a sword and some idea of magic"... I cannot fault her interpretation.

To all those who read it years ago and gave me encouragement, a thousand thanks.

To anyone who goes out and buys it (including those who rushed out today on the first day) a thousand more thanks.

Large version of the cover: at Amazon of course! Oh and Flickr also!

Links to buy the book at: amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

Can You Hear the Drums?

So we were just having a rare rehearsal to remind ourselves of a few new songs we had stuffed into the repertoire...

Not the most polished sound - no microphones, no sound system, the keyboard is coming from its own speakers which of course point straight up and the guitar was plugged through the computer into the hi-fi. Recorded on a Flip camera - no expense spared...

Can you hear the drums?

The Green Fields of France - Creeping Bentgrass

For Remembrance Day. There are only a few gigs where it is appropriate to play this song but whenever we do it is not uncommon for me to get a lump in the throat and to hear a catch in David's voice.

Will You Have a Listen?

For a friend having a bit of a hard week - my version of Hazel O'Connor's "Will You".

I met her (Hazel not the friend) a few years ago (see this previous entry) and what a lovely person she is. So I hope she doesn't mind me doing my own arrangement and version! ACtually I suppose I met the friend a few years ago too, but I'm talking about someone other than Hazel now... Confusing this, isn't it? Have a listen then...

Garstang Arts & Music Festival 2010

Yesterday afternoon we were in our usual spot at the Garstang Arts & Music Festival.

The weather had been very mixed and indeed after an hour or so we had a really heavy shower that had us dismantling and hurrying everything into the building behind us.

After an hour I'd managed to dry everything out apart from my shirt and with the sun making sporadic apprearances we set up again and played a couple of hours, attracting a decent sized audience.

Here's a video of our version of Concrete and Clay.

The Sunnyside of Creeping Bentgrass

Yay! It's here at last! Our long-awaited new album that we started as soon as we finished the last one! Two and a half years in the making! Our first album as a duo.

Called "The Sunnyside of Creeping Bentgrass" it contains 17 tracks which includes a solo track of John's - a cover of The Beatles' This Boy.

Sunnyside is the name of the club near Northampton that was the site of Billy Fury's last public performance prior to his untimely death in 1983. The front cover shows the band performing at the club for a memorial concert in March 2009 and we are proud to be returning in 2010 to play alongside some of the fabulous artists who have formed close relationships on the message boards of billyfury.com

The full track listing is given below. Some tracks can be downloaded from the band's website, or the album is available mail order from:

Creeping Bentgrass
195 Palatine Road
Blackpool
Lancashire
England

Each CD costs 5 UK pounds plus 1 UK pound postage and packing to addresses in the UK and 2 UK pounds postage and packing elsewhere. Payment must be made in sterling by personal cheque.

Track List:

The Gambler
Have You Ever Seen The Rain
Sweet Caroline
A Thousand Stars
Bunch of Thyme
Crystal Chandeliers
When You Say Nothing At All
Be My Baby
King For Tonight
Green Green Grass of Home
I Can Only Imagine
Living Next Door To Alice
The Night Has 1000 Eyes
Forever Autumn
Halfway To Paradise
This Boy
24 Hours From Tulsa
.

A Musical Career

New Year's Eve. I'm looking back on around 39 years of making music to entertain the public. So next year I can do the 40th year tour!

I was 12 when I got my first guitar and it was four years before I felt myself ready to sing in front of others. The first group was known as the Heywood Senior High School Folk Group... I know... We were never going to trouble the charts of 1970 against the likes of Marc Bolan - though The Beatles were sufficiently worried and disbanded shortly afterwards... I'm on stage with Bill Lloyd and yes, that's me with all that hair and yes, it really was all mine... These days I'd need extensions to even consider a comb-over...

We played folk music, both contemporary and traditional and we played local folk clubs and had a huge following amongst the 13 and 14-year-old girls at school...

The next year, Bill and I were joined by Barry Lord and we changed the name of the band to Anacreon. We added some three-part harmony to such staples as "Oh Sinner Man" and "Sun Arise", by heck we were really with it, man...

By 1972 I had left school and was approached to join a band as lead guitar. This was Spiral. We were young, keen, skint and so we stayed until I got married in 1976.

I dallied briefly with a band on the outskirts of Preston for a while. We never got round to doing any gigs and I sort of lost interest. Music took a back seat for a while as my daughter went through her childhood.

Then computers entered my life in the form of a Commodore 64. It had, for the time, a quite sophisticated music chip that few games took advantage of. By 1984 I was producing stuff like Sweet Georgia Brown, triple-tracked on an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder that made it sound as though I had an orchestra of computers. It took ages to do this sort of thing, programming each note separately. I invented a programme to do either a "bum-cha, bum-cha" or a "bum-cha-cha" backing and then put melody lines on top. It took about a week's worth of programming to do the whole song! Forgive the hiss and the crackle of static electricity on old tape!

Then I bought a keyboard and gathered family members at weekends to sing old music hall and comedy songs. I gave them all word sheets with the bits they had to sing underlined. It meant I could get them to do things that sounded as though we'd have to spend ages rehearsing, straight off in one (well... ten...) takes - taking into account people making remarks, missing thir cue or simply belching at the wrong time... Singing went well with wine somehow... An example is The Old Bazaar In Cairo.

And then at Christmas, 2000 Creeping Bentgrass came together by chance, playing carols for the students at our workplace, Myerscough College. We agreed to carry on and are seen here as a foursome playing the Windows on Art Festival at Kendal on 8 September 2001.

Helen Fenton left and we carried on as a trio. The music, which had started out very folk-based, started to move towards 1960s pop and rock and roll! We released three CDs, see the band's website for details and more downloads.

Then this year Bob Snape dropped out to concentrate on his ceilidh band and we now carry on as a duo with myself and David Lancaster. The repertoire is currently expanding rapidly and creeping into the 70s, 80s, 90s and up to more modern songs. Our roots are in the 60s though and sixties music will always be the main feature of our act.

Doing the Sunnyside weekend with the other artists from the Billy Fury website was a highlight last year and we are thrilled to have been asked to headline on the Friday night for 2010 at the same event. It gives us a chance to give the regulars a feel for a Creeping Bentgrass gig - with a short set last year we had to cut out a lot of the music to get the jokes in!!!

We normally do around a dozen gigs a year. 2009 has seen us do getting on for 20 and next year is looking good already. As a belated Christmas (or New Year) present, here for the first time is our version of Billy Fury's Halfway to Paradise.

More Downloads from the Band's Website

I've had a go at improving the download area of the band's blog. I had previously had all songs available for download in alphabetical order, but I've rearranged them so that you can now see which album they come from and they are in track order from those albums too.

Keeping On... was our first album from 2003 and a couple of the original tracks were recorded before we brought keyboards into the act with the result that they sounded a little empty in comparison with the other tracks - no drums etc. Those two tracks were re-recorded a while ago to replace the others on a Special Edition release. Seven of the album's 14 tracks can be downloaded.

Kites was our second album from 2004 and includes some of our favourite tracks. There were only a few available as downloads so I've now added the title track, Kites and two of the other most popular tracks, the album opener, Sunny Afternoon and an Eagles track, Peaceful Easy Feeling to make seven tracks available from the album's 15 tracks overall.

Right On The Line was the name of our third album from 2007. We had spent almost three years making it and we felt it represented a bit of a step change for us. The sound was becoming a fuller sound (if a little harder to reproduce fully on stage!) but it also included a live track which captured the atmosphere at the end of a Creeping Bentgrass gig.

It was also the album that introduced us to the Billy Fury fans at http://www.billyfury.com after the lovely Moya, who used to run Billy's Manchester fan club, got in touch. A couple of covers of Billy's tracks appeared on the album: Last Night Was Made For Love and Somebody Else's Girl and as we got to know the fans on the forum of Harry's wonderful site our lives changed a little for the better.

My mum had been a fan of Cliff Richard and I wasn't as familiar with Billy Fury as I am now! The album also featured one of Cliff's early ballads which we usually play at weddings for the first dance of the happy couple unless they have a special song they want us to play - see later! This track is the beautiful ballad Constantly.

We also included a couple of more recent songs with Billy Joel's My Life and Westlife's hit from 2006, The Rose. The Beach Boys' hit Help Me Rhonda has just been added to the downloadable tracks to make 7 tracks (counting my solo effort I Try To Think About Elvis available from the
16 album tracks.

The new album hasn't got a name yet and therefore no cover either, but already there are eight tracks from a total of 19 or 20 available. The album has no less than three Billy Fury songs on it and some cracking versions (well I think they are and hope you do too!) of some well known songs. Available to download are:

The Gambler - the Kenny Rogers song which was specified by one newly-wed couple as their special song... must be a story there...!
When You Say Nothing At All - Ronan Keating's tribute to the perfect woman...
Be My Baby - that'll teach David to suggest a Tamla Motown song! (Yes I know, not strictly Tamla anyway!)
King For Tonight - it was one of Billy's B sides, somewhat updated here.
The Night Has 1000 Eyes - one to fill the dance floors!
Forever Autumn - hey, we'll have a go at anything!
24 Hours From Tulsa - always goes down well on stage.

All other songs not linked here can be downloaded from the Creeping Bentgrass blog

Oh - and don't forget some of my solo efforts linked in the left hand column of this page!

The Night Has 1000 Eyes

Always a good one to belt out towards the end of a night on stage, I've been putting guitars and bass on Bobby Vee's hit The Night Has 1000 Eyes this afternoon.

That makes it 15 songs finished, one still needing guitars and 2 or 3 more to start for the new album. One of those will be the song that we sang at the funeral the other week to fulfil a promise, although it is a wonderful song anyway, very emotional and a little unusual for us in that it's not a well-known song.

We've not yet decided whether to put a solo one from me on the album. The three albums we've done so far have all featured a solo track - Great Balls of Fire on the first, Fleetwood Mac's Need Your Love So Bad on the Kites album and the relatively unknown I Try To Think About Elvis on the last one.

So the album is moving closer bit by bit... I bet you're fed up of me saying that, aren't you...?

Introducing the Duo

Well it's now official that Bob will be leaving Creeping Bentgrass to concentrate on his work with The Old School Band.

David and I wish him every success in the ceilidh band which has become extremely successful and in demand for parties, making it difficult for him to perform with us on Saturday nights!

However David and I are well used to performing as a duo, having done so on and off since 2004 and that is how we are going to continue for the forseeable future. We have a few club bookings coming in and bookings for 2010 are looking as though it will be a good year again for us.

We'll be travelling about a bit too - February sees us up in the Lake District performing for a wedding reception and March sees us back in Northampton at the big Billy Fury gig of the year - Sunnyside. But we hope to see our regulars at the usual regular bookings at Myerscough, Witton Park, Garstang, Heskin Hall, Larbreck etc.

A return to Highfield Road is on the cards too, as apparently club members have been asking when we were to be booked again. Given that David had flu that night (and gave it me too, grrr...) we can't have been too bad! Also clubs in Eccleston and Ormskirk are in the calendar.

The new album will be completed as a duo - it's been a long time coming, but I've released a few tracks from it now - in the left hand column of the band's blog you can download The Gambler, Have You Ever Seen The Rain, Be My Baby, King For Tonight, Forever Autumn and 24 Hours From Tulsa.

The album will be a full hour of music and, of course, I'll let you know when it is available.

Incidentally, the music downloadable from this blog is of me on my own. Top download currently is the Christina Aguilera song The Voice Within which gets around 50 downloads a month with I'll Stand By You close behind.

The band's music is downloadable from the band's blog and I reckon the new tracks may alter the stats somewhat there!

Special Edition Album

I've had this in mind for quite a while.

There were a couple of tracks on the very first album we produced that didn't sound quite right. They were recorded way back in 2002 and I hadn't then brought the keyboards into the band and so the tracks had no drums or keyboard sounds at all.

By the standards we reached even on the other tracks of that first album they were a bit raw and so David and I had a crack at re-recording them last night and will use them to produce a Special Edition of the first album Keeping On... which will be the one on offer from now onwards.

The tracks were the two Creedence Clearwater Revival tracks and you can download for a listen below.

Bad Moon Rising

Proud Mary

Canon 350D Download Problem

Yippee! At last I've managed to find a solution to a really niggling problem.

When I got the new computer it had Windows Vista and as with any new operating system I expected to find a few things that didn't quite work properly. One of these was the downloading of images from my camera, a Canon EOS 350D. I visited the Canon website and downloaded the driver they have on there and it downloaded, installed and opened up automatically when I connected the camera and switched it on. Lovely!

Except that it totally and utterly refused to do anything from that point onwards. It didn't download any photos from the camera. It didn't give me any error messages. It didn't want to close... I kept having to do a three-finger salute and force the software to close, turn off the camera, remove the flash card and insert that in a card reader.

I muttered and gnashed my teeth at Canon for having such a grotty driver and tried at intervals to download it again only to go through the same frustrating palaver.

Then tonight, having done it all yet again, I did a Google search and came across a blog entry by a chap called Tomek Onyszko from Warsaw in Poland.

He had also had the same problem and found out (I know not how) that you could solve it by going into the camera's menu (tools menu 2) and under the connection setting, change it from PC Connection to Print/PTP.

Tomek, thank you! I hope you see this because your own blog does not accept comments unless you are signed up to whatever it is you have to be signed up to to make comments. And I hope that by proliferating the advice someone else benefits. And I hope Canon pull their bloody finger out and tell people that the driver only works if you do this!!!

Look! New photo of puddy cats from recently re-connected camera!!!

And just to prove that I really did find out just this minute, tonight, sitting all alone in the Jurys Inn in Newcastle... here I am...



Large version of the photos: Well... you can have one of the cats anyway...

Christmas Music

Happy Christmas everybody!

Three Christmas songs from the band for you to enjoy.

Good King Wencelas
A Winters Tale
I Believe In Father Christmas

Large version of the photo: Christmas store

Crazy

It's a solo effort on the Billy Fury web site for the month of June.

I've done a laid back version of Patsy Cline's Crazy, one of a number of recordings I've made for a potential new solo album.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Billy Fury was billed as England's answer to Elvis. Born Ronald Wycherley on 17 April 1940 in Liverpool, he became one of the Larry Parnes stable of artists, appearing on TV shows such as "Oh Boy". During the 1960s he had 24 chart entries, clocking up an impressive 258 weeks on the Top 50.

The website keeps Billy's name and music alive through an excellent collection of sound and video resources, interactive forums and the monthly "Sounds Special" feature which contains an free album's worth of music recorded by artists from all around the world. There are some superb artists amongst the regulars and you can comment on the "Sounds Special" songs using one of the forum topics.

Billy Fury Track

We have a new song on the Billy Fury web site for the month of April.

Picture of You was a smash hit for Joe Brown in the early 1960s and comes from our third album, Right On The Line.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Billy Fury was billed as England's answer to Elvis. Born Ronald Wycherley on 17 April 1940 in Liverpool, he became one of the Larry Parnes stable of artists, appearing on TV shows such as "Oh Boy". During the 1960s he had 24 chart entries, clocking up an impressive 258 weeks on the Top 50.

The website keeps Billy's name and music alive through an excellent collection of sound and video resources, interactive forums and the monthly "Sounds Special" feature which contains an free album's worth of music recorded by artists from all around the world. During April the website is celebrating its 10th anniversary and is must for Billy Fury fans.

We hope that our fans will have a listen to all the songs not just our own. There are some superb artists amongst the regulars! You can comment on the "Sounds Special" songs using one of the forum entries.

Download Creeping Bentgrass Christmas Songs

Merry Christmas to all our friends and followers.

We hope to see you soon and wish you all a happy and prosperous 2008!

We recorded these two songs for the Christmas edition of Sounds Special on the Billy Fury website.

We hope you enjoy them!

A Winter's Tale
I Believe In Father Christmas

Prepare for Indigestion...

No... not just because it's very nearly Christmas!

The phrase that goes before this is: "If music be the food of love"...

To all those who used to look forwards to the tapes (ah yes, pre-CD days these!) of the Bispham Buskers in the 1990s then feast your ears here!

To anyone who has never heard of the Bispham Buskers check my music web page. It was the barmy family who used to gather to destroy a song or two at regular intervals.

Here's a festive little track for you and as an added treat I've left some of the out-takes on so you can see what a battle I used to have! The full length track is at the end of the sound file! You have been warned!

The Bispham Buskers - Wonderful Christmastime

Music Downloads

I uploaded a number of music tracks over the weekend but hadn't found an opportunity to say so until now!

They are available from my music web page and cover both solo tracks and Creeping Bentgrass tracks which are also listed of course on the band's own webpage.

There's even a handful of tracks from The Bispham Buskers - aka my mad family - so if you fancy a laugh, you'll find those tracks are not particularly of the serious sort!

Have a listen and then click the comments link below to leave a review!

More Music News

Talking of online music to download (see previous entry); as it's Remembrance Sunday, I've uploaded a track from our new CD for free download.

It's The Green Fields of France a beautiful song that sums up the day. Click on the song title to download it.

Yesterday I got out the keyboard and microphone and spent the afternoon recording a version of The Beatles' song "This Boy", one of their earlier tracks as it was the B side of the hit "I Want To Hold Your Hand. Thinking about it, it may even have been a double A side in fact - someone with a better memory give me a prompt!

I had great fun sneaking a guitar bit in from "Oh Darling" from their "Abbey Road" album! It'll turn up on the Billy Fury site some time next year - though it may be as far as March before I've a chance! There's a waiting list of songs.

Next month should be good as the artists are sending in two tracks for Christmas. Ours have been especially recorded and are the Greg Lake "I Believe In Father Christmas" and David Essex's "A Winter's Tale" both of which sound quite nice to my ears, but I'll let you be the true judges next month!