The Graylands Tapes

The Graylands Tapes were made up of "orphans", songs I'd produced that I thought were too good to throw away, but that didn't feel like they belonged on any of the Moonstruck or Popping Cherries albums.  On listening to them, I realised I had enough of them to make their own album.

Constance's Veil was about teenage angst, about a friend I had whom in her teenage years was determined to kill herself, and would listen to no counter argument, if she didn't get into a tryst with the guitarist from The Gazette.  She's still alive ten years later and would absolutely deny all knowledge of it now.

Morwen's Lament is a tune for a character, eponymously also called Morwen, from a series of vampire novels I wrote in my thirties.

Lady Susanna actually did make it onto a Moonstruck album, but I was never satisfied with my singing on it and wanted to do it again.

The lyrics on Night were written by Jennifer May Leith a fellow dour Scot with a hell of a talent for writing dark lyrics that somehow combine sexual revulsion with compulsive, obsessive sexual attraction, one of her songs, Itch, was the first song I ever successfully produced.

The lyrics for Stalker were written by Sharon, my girlfriend at the time.  I'd only been seeing her for a couple of weeks and wondered what kind of crazy person I might have gotten involved with, but we went on to see each other for about two years.

Julia's Blood and Julia's Theme were written for Julia Caples.  She also used one of the Moonstruck songs.  She was having trouble using music in her videos because of copyright issues, so I wrote her a track that she could cut into pieces and use different parts for different things.  We also had long telephone conversations into the night about blood letting and sexual fetishism.  I dread to think what we might have gotten up to if we'd lived close to each other.

Fires of Elysian Fields was a song I wrote for one of my friends when she was feeling a little put out by the onset of middle-age, to assure her that the fire of her sex appeal had not gone out, which it hadn't.

Mininova Maneuvers In The Dark (name ripped off of OMD, Orchestral Maneuvers In The Dark), was a jam I had with Jack Burton of Kuato Hammer to test drive his new Mininova Synth.  I loved it so much I bought one of my own.  Most of the other sounds in it were done with a Vic 20.

Victoria Sometimes was a song I'd written, on request, about Vicereine De Mournay, my sometimes (see what I did there?) collaborator in some of the dark musical works.  It also has the dubious honour of following in the footsteps of the much more famous Charlotte Sometimes, by The Cure, by becoming the second song to blatantly steal the opening lines of Penelope Farmer's book.

The Cold North Wind was a song that the Vicereine returned the favour and wrote for me, which I lovingly arranged a musical score for.

So much fun and nostalgia contained on this record.  -- c0_WAV, May 2025.