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What a year ! -I got my band started up, played a bunch of gigs, released an EP and a Single which received really good airplay, shot three music videos, bought a flat, toured in India with Dub Pistols (amazing experience...I grew up there), did up the flat (still in progress....), won a BMA Award (as part of Dub Pistols), did a lot of gigs with Dub Pistols + other bands, recorded with Gabriel Kane And The Ables (...mixing this week...)....and now it's already Christmas...
I've been wanting to release this video for ages but was hoping to finish another one first. I have realised that you can't plan everything....especially not if you're busy, so here it comes. Enjoy!

What a weekend. Still trying to get back up. Wednesday - a sold out Jazz Cafe with the Dub Pistols , Thursday we where at the most amazingly cool pub / venue: The Duke, in Whitstable, with great food, rooms and lovely people, -and Friday supporting Madness in Minehead, with Suggs Mcpherson  joining in on vocals when we did Dub Pistols - Mucky Weekend !! On Saturday I played one of those funny castle/function gigs with The Unmentionables that makes it all happen and tick over.... So here's Iron Man Dave Budgen Vader with the Main Man Barry Ashworth and THE Suggs ! -What a picture opportunity i missed out on, packing my pedals down. Oh well.....

Dub Pistols have again this year been nominated for a BMA award in the catagory "Best Live Act"!  PLEASE VOTE for us !
http://thebassmusicawards.com/index.php/best-live-show-2014/

My wall...after the video shoot last week.

I see the right side of a woman holding her left hand over breast wile starring at the moon... -what do u see ?

Update on my single Take My Heart And Go (released on June 30th).

Tom Robinsons BBC Radio 6 show was the first to play the song and also feature it on Toms weekly Mixtape blog, back in late April.
-It went on Frank Skinners weekly podcast on Absolute Radio, and was playlisted twice a day for two weeks on Voice FM, Southampton -and was on rotation for several weeks on RadioPlus, in Coventry.
-Andreas was the featured guest with a live interview on The Richard Andersone Show broadcasted on Liberty SKY 0186, Community TV SKY 539, Satellite Astra 2B, Frequency 12.402 Verticle SR, 27500 FEC, Eurobird 0186, SKY Freesat 0186 and 13 other FM and AM stations around Europe, and was interviewed live by Clara Winters on Sheppey FM.
-The was loads of plays around the country amongst them: Brfm Vault, Blyth105Radio, Sine FM, Unsigned Madness @EGH Radio, Brooklands Radio, 956BRFM, RFTK Radio, and ARFM etc.

In Denmark the song has been moving well too. It was playlisted on B-rotation on Radio Langeland, and received several plays on Radio 10FM, Lokalradioerne i Brønderslev, Radio Sindal, Musikværkstedet Viborg, Radio Solskin, Radio Als, Radio Djursland, Radio Randers, Radio 2000, Radio Ballerup and RADIO 10FM, while Westfield Alliance Indie Show 252 in Detroit,USA blasted it.

The song got featured on the Captain Sib podcast and on The Musical Outcast blog, plus on Steve Muscutt's Listening Post AND it ended up on Mi7Records/emerging-artists list...

The best thing is that the song still seems to be moving out there and the video is being recorded in these weeks, which has the potential of  elevating the track up further, giving it a second wind.

Thanks to everybody who has supported me so far !! I love you all !!

Felt honoured last night to be playing With Dub Pistols at the same site where Hendrix played 44 years ago at The Isle of White Festival.

-Too bad there was a Gary Glitter tribute on before us....

DID GARY STEAL THE VODKA ???

After the gig, as we where sitting in the dressing room we suddently heard a klanking noise. We turned around to see a hand disapearing back out through the lining of the tent -with a bottle of vodka.... Annoying but impressive !

There is nothing like going to your ex-girlfriends party, especially if she's found someone new….someone taller, intelligent-lier.. and decidedly manlier !
It provides you with a perfect dose of self pity and rebelliousness. It makes you do things you later regret, but which makes perfect sense to you in that drunken moment… like pissing in her flat mates indoor palm tree, coming on to her mother, or shouting abuse at her best friend while having bear hugs with her new husband….. (cause of course they got married…didn't they…?)
Saturday we start the shooting of a video to my single #takemyheartandgo. The guy in charge is my good friend Carl Fox @ carlfoxphotography.com . I wont be starring this time which suits me fine. The video will feature: nails, sweets, blood, old books, black paint, hammers, drills and ribbons…..and much, much more.

As a fashion photographer Carl has worked with loads of top models and has shot uk underground legends like Rodney P, Roots Manuva etc etc. 
Carl is a man of opinion and taste -which I really like about him. He's also a perfectionist and is nearly autistically artistic !!
-and then he's the bass player in super cool Gabriel Kain And The Ables, which sounds a bit like Tom Waits dropping acid with Edwyn Collins….(btw I'm producing their next album…..).

AND FINALLY ON THURSDAY AUGUST 21st me and MY AMAZING BAND will be playing at The Good Ship in Kilburn -one of Londons coolest venues ……. COME ON DOWN ! 

Get in contact if you want on the £4 guest list -no I AIN'T LYING, it will cost you the minimum of £4…for a good night out

Next project has got to be an update of my website….

On June 30th we are releasing a remastered radio edit of Take My Heart And Go, and I thought I'd share a bit about the creation of the song:
I was writing with Nano Whitman, in Austin, Texas last year. Nano came around to The House Of Songs, where I was staying at. I had written with him before and I wasn't particularly nervous just looking forward to hook up with a friend. Nano brought along an idea for a song which I though it sounded a bit like an Elton John song....it wasn't bad, just not particularly what I had hoped he would come up with. Last time we had hooked up he had shown up with this amazing, nearly finished, song called Peace, and I was hoping we could continue down that path, as I really liked what he was up to there. But now.... Elton John(?). Anyway, I thought it was an ok song idea that probably could improve with a bit of rewriting and tweaking. We worked on the song for an hour or two, and I continued rewriting the lyrics over and over the next couple of days, added a chorus, cut out some lines in the verses etc etc. I was getting stubborn and just wanted to finish this thing now....though I wasn't particularly emotionally attached to anything I was writing....

A couple of days later we hooked up again, and I showed Nano the results of my efforts. As I sang through the song, he just sat there, without saying a word, kind of expressionless (-which honestly worried me a bit. Had I completely butchered his masterpiece here ? -Or was it him that was being too precious ?). Afterwards I asked him what he thought and passed him the paper with the lyrics. 
He told me that it sounded like the verse was written with the words of an Oxford professor, but the chorus sounded like it was written by a cowboy living in a trailer.... -I think it was my bits that sounded like the cowboy......
I was slightly taken aback, and I suppose a bit disappointed that he didn't think my "art" was amazing..... But deep down inside I knew he was completely right (!), and I had known it all while I was working on the song.....
 
Any way, I now felt that I had to pull something REALLY good out of the hat -to save the situation..... and not feel like a complete idiot, I suppose.

On the last day before I left London for Austin I had been going through the voice memos on my phone where I usually store any good (and crap...) ideas that come up, and to my surprise I had found this great nearly fully formed song with chords and melody and a fair amount of words too though they made absolutely no sense to me. Anyway I thought the idea had potential and I had brought it along to Austin.
Songs are funny. Some days you can wake up, pick up a guitar, play a few chords, and sing some completely random nonsense that you don't think anything to, and five minutes later you have completely forgotten it. Thats how Take My Heart started out, and as I sat there in Austin, in front of Nano, -slightly embarrassed- I desperately reached out for my phone and played him my idea (or maybe I sang it to him...cant remember) -anyway, he LOVED it (!!!) and asked me to sing it again, this time into HIS phone so he could go home and work on the lyrics, make sense of my unconscious ramblings, and figure out what on earth I was on about......
Two days later he came back with two AMAZING verses, we added my third verse idea,  worked out the missing lines, changed the long instrumental chord section, and tweaked the whole shebang....and there you go: Job Done !!

We are both so happy with the result, that we both wanted to release our own versions of the song.

Here's my version.

Here's Nano Whitmans version.

And here's the song Peace I mentioned earlier in the blog.


What Take My Heart And Go is about:

For me, Take My Heart And Go is a song about how it feels going to your ex-girlfriend's party, still feeling raw and fragile, searching for the flame when she seemingly has moved on. 
In my my mate Carl Fox' words: "A pop song wrapped in a Lloyd Cole, Edwyn Collins style production" 
My Radio Plugger Emma Scott ads "...With lush strings and a haunting melody, it's sure to leave an impression that will linger inside like a love lost".
Awwww, sweet !

Just got pulled over by the Hungarian police. The hungarian translator has been standing in the back of the minibus, holding onto the backdoor as they havent been able to figure out how to shut it.... Is he planning on standing there for the entire hour and a drive ?

The policeman gets involved hands on in sorting out the problem....

Turns out the driver has shut the left backdoor first instead of the right which apparatly is supposed to be shut first ! Policeman goes back to his patrol car with a proud smile. Classic!

Let Them Eat Gak presents: THE A BAND + DARK PATRICK + ANDREAS S JENSEN + BLACK ORCHIDS
Tomorrow at 7:45pm @ Rythme Factory, 16-18 Whitechapel Rd, London E1 1EW
Tube: Whitechappel / Aldgate East / Aldgate

https://www.facebook.com/events/1489961717889199/

Running a band is like being an octopus.

You need to have a lot of arms and you have to be able to juggle ten things at the same time….Not the octopuses actually do that. They just lounge around in sapphire blue waters, hunt for food -and  shag... though octopuses apparently have an entirely different way of doing this than us humans.

According to http://tinyurl.com/octopusex  :"The Argonaut octopus has a lot of sex, but it never directly experience sex. This is because it reproduces via tele-sex. The male octopus produces sperm in its penis. The penis is then detached (yes, detached) from the body and swims (yes, swims) by itself to a suitable female".

That sounds very much like being a bandleader (not..), apart from that the octopus has the big advantage of automatically delegating assignments…..

And there are a lot of assignments to be dealt with when you run a band:

You obviously have to be able to play reasonably well (not always important though…), write songs, record, produce, mix and master, and fundraising definitely wont hurt either -But setting up your own band in the internet age also consists of learning how to use a million different apps and if you, like me, have a constant fear (or should we say a “cloud”)  of failure lurking in the back of your mind when it comes to learning new computer skills, it can be daunting. However. In the last three months I have achieved VERY BASIC knowledge of:  Photo editing apps, video editing, set-up-and-edit-your-own-website-apps, direct mail marketing apps, reading statistics (who watches your video…and what sites are they referred from), marketing plotting, radio plugging, pr etc
Luckily I have had help from some really pro experts in some of these tasks: good friends, chat line staff, and of course google and YouTube searches.
(I imagine this is a very different world to the classic picture of the work shy musician, traveling the world, hanging around drinking, doing drugs and picking up girls, with an hours work a night only extended with the occasional, eccentric outbursts of manic, hangover-driven creation....)
But it IS a great –though frightening -challenge to overcome these obstacles, though as much as it’s a challenge it's very time consuming and often I wish I had stuck to producing and writing for other artists and running a studio instead.

But then, sometimes a  little thought creeps into my mind: Do we ALL really have to be experts/amateurs in everything ?

I personally think life should be about using each others talents, complementing each others strengths and weaknesses, ying-yang, “you scratch mine I scratch yours” etc and it’s a shame that creatively, talented (…?) people have to spend 80% of their time in front of a computer learning about online marketing and checking Youtube hit statistics, when there are amazingly adapt business. Hasn’t anybody come up with the idea of making a music business/musician dating site ? -Or am I just not aware of one ?

Anyway. The reward for all this work is obviously when people acknowledge and appreciate your music by listening to the songs, watching the videos, commenting and liking/disliking, gigging etc

And it's a amazing to walk up on stage and see a bunch of enthusiastic listeners out there up for having a good time.

If you want to be one of them then drop in at our gig tonight at The Underbelly on Hocton Square in London. We're onstage at 10:30.

Lots of love, Andreas