Solo album · 2026
Songs I Made
An album of songs I made, borrowed, bent and broke.
Eleven songs, covers, rewrites and oddities made over a number of years and gathered together here.
01
Tracklist
- 01 Since You Turned On Original
- 02 Pump Dot IO After Elvis Costello
- 03 Dream Job Original
- 04 Individuality After Billy Bragg
- 05 Doomscrolling Original
- 06 Woven Sky Inspired by The Blood of Flowers
- 07 All I Want To Do Original
- 08 Here Now Piers' song · 2009
- 09 Jimmy Carter After 20lb Sounds
- 10 A New Ingerland After Billy Bragg
- 11 Satisfaction Rolling Stones cover
02
Sleeve notes
Since You Turned On
Original
Written in 2025 as an attempt to imagine what a new Hovercraft song might sound like if we wrote and performed one now.
Pump Dot IO
After Elvis Costello
A 2013 riff on Pump It Up, written for This Is Not A Podcast with Evan Prodromou. 'Dents' came from the identi.ca/StatusNet world; 'Pump your life in and out of your friends' was Pump.io's own tagline.
From the archive: The Prince of Aberystwyth
Dream Job
Original
Built from an AI-generated summary of my 2024–25 autobiographical writing about work: the jobs I hated, the care work I unexpectedly loved, and the institutions that can turn meaningful work into targets, metrics and tick-boxes.
From the archive: Curriculum Vitae (Memento Vivere) · Notebook transcript
Individuality
After Billy Bragg
A take on Billy Bragg's Sexuality, written as the musical coda to a Southall Stories piece about Ealing Council's new logo, its promise to respect the individuality of residents, and the gap between branding, consultation and representation.
From the archive: Individuality — Southall Stories
Doomscrolling
Original
A comic song about scrolling until it isn't funny any more: wrists, algorithms, Gaza, public language and the things a phone can put next to each other.
From the archive: A little tune I created
Woven Sky
Inspired by The Blood of Flowers
Inspired by The Blood of Flowers: displacement, the move from village to city, carpet-making, discovery and a young woman learning to shape her own life.
All I Want To Do
Original
A grief song stripped down to the things grief keeps repeating: missing someone, dreaming of them, waking alone and wanting to hold them again.
Here Now
Piers' song · 2009
Written by Piers in 2009 and gifted to me as atonement for taking my guitar amp in 1996 and selling it for super-strength lager. A song about coming out of your own fog and recognising the person and the life that are still here.
Jimmy Carter
After 20lb Sounds
A football cover of a 20lb Sounds song about the Jimmy Carter everyone knows, rewritten for the former Millwall, Liverpool, Arsenal and Portsmouth winger.
From the archive: There's Only One... · Whatever happened to Jimmy Carter?
A New Ingerland
After Billy Bragg
First written in 2014 after years of writing about England's football failures, then updated twelve years later. Older singer, newer disappointments, same old England.
From the archive: A New Ingerland (2014) · Same Old England
Satisfaction
Rolling Stones cover
My preferred electric-guitar and full-band arrangement: still a reinterpretation rather than a Stones replica, but with enough muscle to sit naturally at the end of this album.
03
About this record
This is not an attempt to turn a scattered set of recordings into something grander than it is. It is simply an album-shaped home for songs I have made over the years: originals, covers, rewrites, football songs, political songs, book-inspired songs and things that escaped from the internet.
Some began as blog posts, some as jokes, some as grief, some as arguments and some by borrowing somebody else's song and seeing where it went.