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Back sitting on my very stylish 1950's vintage danish couch in my house. It arrived last week in a van after a seven week wait. Aside from having to help the man who delivered it empty his van full of furniture and then negotiate the couch up stairs into the living room (is this not what I paid him for?) to say I'm happy with the result would be an understatement. I've never enjoyed sitting on a couch more. Scandanavian furniature from the 50's and 60's is fast becoming a new obsession of mine. Luckily for me it's all so expensive that I'll only ever be able to indulge once every year or so. My ears are ringing from the show last night Idlewild played at Edinburgh's new venue 'the picturehouse'. It seems like it'll be a good place, although for all intents are purposes we were the guinea pigs last night. The sound system needs a few tweaks, at the moment it's one of those places that deafens the crowd and band alike. Still, i hope it does well. It'll have a hard time matching the ABC in Glasgow which, in my humble opinion, is the best venue in Scotland, aside from maybe the Royal concert hall, but thats a venue much more suited for jazz and folk. We (idlewild) have finally announced our run of gigs at King tuts wah wah hut in Glasgow in December. It's been planned for a while now, and we're going to record each night and release them as downloads next year. The plan is to play pretty much every song we're ever written over five nights. It's a little indulgent i know, but it's a fans only sort of venture, and for us it's going to be a challenge, and good fun. Plus it's just before christmas. you can't go wrong. The idlewild site has all the necessary info.

I've still not managed to work out how to use the 'add photo device' so my plans to display all my pictures a recent trip to Denmark will have to wait. I'll need to pester Wayne (the webmaster) some more and be talked through it all again. It must be said that my internet capacities are weak. Truth be told, i'm not much of fan of the world wide web. Sure it's handy for occasional emails, or booking a hotel last minute, but it doesn't play a large part in my life thank goodness.
Anyway, I'm just back from Denmark, and playing at the Tonder festival with John and Kris. It's a famous folk festival and it was my first time attending. The Danes had done everything right, and the whole town was packed full of musicians and music fans getting drunk on Tuborg lager and eating sausages in the sun. We got to play twice, which is another great thing about the festival - you do one 'festival' show in a large tent, and another gig in a venue, in our case a school gymnasium. And you get to soundcheck, which might not sound like much, but believe me it's a
saving grace. The weekend before we had a trial run with gigs at the Wizard festival near Peterhead and the Edinburgh book festival. Two more opposite gigs I could not imagine. Wizard took place in a muddy field. I asked one of the organisers why they'd named their festival wizard and she replied 'because it's magic!'. hmm. We played to a near empty tent. They'd covered the ground in straw, so it gave the venue the atmosphere of a damp hay barn. One of the audience members persisited in shouting 'Show us your woomble!' over and over again throughout the show in that particular, agressive sounding accent they have up in the far north east. The book festival in contrast was very civilised. cabaret tables, candlelight, with folk fans, journalists and various others nodding their heads in appreciation and sipping merlot. I think it's easy to tell which one was the more enjoyable concert, but then again sometimes there's nothing like a tough crowd or venue to bring a band into shape, or at least let you realize what you've still to do.

You might have read or heard that John, Kris and I have had to re-schedule the english shows of the upcoming tour for the album. I can't really be away from home at the moment, for specific reasons that I won't go into on a web site, but it's all positive, and I'm sure the Scottish shows will lead into a really good full Uk tour in february. We've played four concerts with this album so far and it's been great fun. We're really proud of the songs and the album. I think if you come along to one of the shows you'll enjoy yourself.

welcome to the re-designed website, designed expertly by an old school friend of mine, Wayne. Wayne and I used to play in a band at school together called 'A duncan life', our claim to fame was entering and almost winning an anti-drug songwriting competition run by the local radio station Radio Tay. They enouraged lots of local bands to write songs with a 'just say no' theme. Ours was called 'And the boy took a message'. At the time we thought it was a stone cold classic, now i'm not so sure. We had one concert booked to play in a country pub called the fiddlers, but sadly it was pulled when Graeme, our guitarist had a massive dose of pre gig nerves and went into hiding. The band soon split up. Still, it was good while it lasted and now Wayne's doing well designing websites for companies and I'm sitting writing this on my new website blog, which I'll try and keep up to date as often as I can. The new album with Kris Drever and John McCusker called 'before the ruin' is out on Sept 15th, we're playing eight UK shows to support the release, which are in the 'live' section on the site. We're doing another week of shows in February 2009. Idlewild are working on a new album which we will hopefully be recording in January. We played a new song from it last week at the Belladrum festival outside Beauly and the crowd took to it instantly, which is rare. Maybe it sounded like another one of our songs and collectivley they all got confused. Belladrum is a great festival actually, small, in a beautiful location, lots of good local food stalls and a good beer tent, and some varied bands on the bill. That's all I want for a festival nowadays. It was almost rain free as well. In the summer that we're currently having here in Scotland, that's something of a miracle.

Anyway, have a look round the site, I'll put up some more photographs when I work out how to do it.  So far I've managed to get one of Allan and Rod outside the dressing room at Belladrum. Colin is just out of frame setting up his drums. It's an exciting shot i'm sure you'll agree.