John O' KANE'S ALBUM...chapter 2

I met John in my role as a keyboard player, sometime in 1990. His management put a band together to rehearse down at the Ritz studios in Putney, London, in preparation for a back to back tour....firstly supporting Beverley Craven, and then going on to support Sting all around Europe on the "Soul Cages" tour. That was a pivotal experience for me as a musician, and it was also the beginning of a strong friendship, and creative association.

When the touring / solo career stopped I carried on working with John in the studio...his shed in the garden....working up arrangements of the songs he was bringing back from his writing trips. In the absence of any professional framework...budget...anything, it is remarkable how much effort we put into creating the best arrangements we could for those songs.

After having not been in touch much, save the occasional small recording project, since 2000, John called me in January 2007, to come to a meeting with him and his old friend Alan Campbell. He'd known Alan since he was this high, and the two friends had met up again at a time when each was dealing with big challenges. Alan had played in bands in Scotland, but did not follow John to into the professional world, and was now working as a director of a small company. Always a great supporter and admirer of John's talent, Alan resolved to do everything he could to bring it to the wider public again, after too many years in the background, and for both of them it represented a new positive focus.

Trawling through years of demos, they came up with a shortlist which featured my name as arranger quite heavily, which in turn added weight to the instinct John probably already had to ask me to play on, and produce the album. In the absence of a record company, there was a corresponding absence of budget, so it was nice and easy to deal with...no complex drawn out negotiations, and because of the schedule...i.e. "whenever you've got time Phil" it meant nothing else had to be worked out around it. I said yes, thinking it might take a year at the most, but like I said, that was Jan 2007.

Of course that is not three years of solid work...it sometimes involved months off as I went on tour with my long term band (Tony Hadley) or produced other artists, but it took on the relentless quality of an Olympic Torch, always there, burning...sometimes not so brightly, but then back to white hot. Every place I went in the last three years, every musical situation I was in threw up some contribution to the John O' Kane album. As well as using some of my favourite musicians here in the UK on the recordings, I have used amusicians from Norway, Germany , and the USA, all via the internet.