Monday 28 December 2015

Gray Nicholls - Waiting for Nancy (Book)
















A few of you one of my best friends, Gray Nicholls is also a really, really good poet in his own right.

Somewhat quiet by nature, earlier in the year, he asked me to help him edit what has now become his debut book the together ‘waiting for nancy’ which is a series of 17 poems telling the story between a man and a woman and write the blurb on the back of the book and then publish it on my own page on lulu.com.


The blurb is ‘ An ‘on the road’ for the 21st Century in verse told on the streets of Manchester (UK) which jumps up and down between pathos, humour and a rich earthiness exploring a relationship between two very different people which begins off as a relationship before going off in a totally different direction.

Gray’s words throughout each piece are tingled with a edginess bordering on the genre of a emotional thriller, constantly spinning backwards and forwards which by the end certainly had made me look at places in some cases I had known for years in totally different ways.’

Definitely a name to watch.

Highly recommended.

Andy N.’

The original versions of the poems are still available on his profile on write out loud (although are quite different from what ended up in the book)

http://www.writeoutloud.net/blogs/graynicholls






Friday 11 December 2015

Music and Writing news (december 2015)




 Some music updates to start with, first of all, some sad news, but owning to a variety of reasons I won’t go into here but me and my good friend Amanda Silbernagel have had to put our joint project Audio Poesis on hold for at least the foreseeable future.

We do have a EP or two hanging around of unreleased tracks which I need to speak to Amanda about to decide what we are going to do with, but while this is sad news, I am hopeful we will get back together in the future and work on some new material.

 My gigging band for the past four years, A Means to an End is also about to finish off but not before playing our what is likely our final gig tomorrow at the Tyldesley Chapel in Tydlesley at 2pm. We will have some 4 track EP’s ready for distribution on the day too, which contain demo versions of 4 tracks from our up and coming album which is currently been remixed and will be ready shortly.

I’ll upload the demo tracks on Sunday on bandcamp and hopefully some live footage from the gig also of us.

In good news, it can be revealed that me and Jeff will hopefully carrying on with hopefully a new friend or two (whose name I won’t reveal yet) in a new project called Passover which will start rehearsals in January. I’ve wrote a few possible pieces and I’m looking forward to seeing what direction we go, as I suspect it will be a bit different to what we have done as a Means to an End.

There is also a possible chance of a second live band coming in the New Year with a former guitarist from a very old band I fronted Words & Music many years back who has got in touch. I hope to arrange a meeting with him soon over this and see what happens.

Ocean in a Bottle will be carrying on into the New Year too. The last few EP’s have been going down really well ‘Circling Winter’ and ‘The Midst of Winter’ and is signalling in a direction as a project this shall go.

A few titles floating around for future EPs include:

Heart of Winter (January 2015)
Reflecting Winter (February 2015)
The living dead of Manchester Morgue (March 2015)

And so on..

Writing wise, things are looking promising for my next book with Nick Armbrister, following on from 2014’s Europa with Europa II. I’ve currently wrote 14 pieces for this book (Aiming for 20 to 25) and if all goes well, should be out by next Spring or so if I can get a good burst of inspiration over Christmas.

I’ve recently help edit the debut book by my friend, Gray Nicholls ‘Waiting for Nancy’ and wrote the blurb at the back of the book. I really enjoyed reading this and helping him, must admit.

Link to follow soon on that.

I believe he has a second book in mind too but no doubt he’ll tell you about that himself.

More towards 2017, I guess my third full length solo book ‘From the Diabetic Ward’ will follow I guess. Currently that’s going ok too with maybe drafts of I guess 15 or 16 pieces done (Aiming for pushing 40 for that) and without giving away spoilers, the tone should be completely different for this book too.

More soon guys as always.

Andy