Join me and the family on a walk through Hartlepool, featuring a Yorkshire relaxation CD, a singing train conductor, a cake recipe and a spot of toilet arson.

In today’s Dollop I reveal how I fared in Bath Comedy Festival’s New Comedian Of The Year competition. Plus, more importantly, did I accidentally sit on someone’s face last night? Not since 2016 have I imparted a harrowing tale from Bath Youth Hostel, but I have one for you in today’s Dollop.

From Northampton we move to Bath, via Leeds and Manchester as my navigation woes continue. But will I get to finally tell you those promised two stories? Or do yet more distractions present themselves?

Today’s Dollop comes live from a freezing wet piss-filled underpass in Northampton. But it’s not as romantic as it sounds. I am lost, alone, soaked and freezing, and in danger of missing my gig.

Due to a technical fault, it looks like David’s Daily Digital Dollop is actually back, and seemingly here to stay, until a resolution can be found.

It’s April Fool’s Day and I have an announcement, but is it an April Fool or genuine? Find out what the announcement is by listening to this blog post, featuring a singing love-lost taxi driver, a paella-making girlfriend and a cat.
Download the announcement here

“Are you going to be loud,” asks George. We’re in Belfast, at the venue, setting up for tonight’s performance of the Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff. The venue is called the Strand; an apt choice of name as the whole place is hanging on by a thread. George works at the Strand and is providing threadbare assistance. Casing point: his response to our enquiry about whether we could have some power to facilitate the speakers working is to look at us concerned, as if surprised by the notion that a band playing to 150 people would require amplification, and then to ask, “are you going to be loud?”

We shake our heads at him in incredulity. He takes this incredulous head-shaking to mean no, we’re not going to be loud, and flicks a switch that engages the speakers. Our sound engineer promptly plays music through the speakers to test the acoustic response of the room. George blanches, clearly aggrieved.

“oh no,” he intones, “I’m sorry but if you’re going to be that loud then Mary Poppins is going to have to come up.”

Was this some kind of weird euphemism? Is he threatening us in Belfast slang? What does Mary Poppins coming up entail? Is Mary Poppins the nickname of a particularly domineering member of staff who doesn’t hold with loud English bands coming in to her venue?

Our sound engineer – let’s call him Andy because it’s shorter than writing “our Sound engineer” all the time, plus that’s his name – silenced the music so as to make sure that he hadn’t just heard what he thought he’d heard: some incongruous statement about Mary Poppins.

“What did you say?” asked Andy. We all waited to hear what none Mary Poppins related thing George had actually said.

“If you’re going to be that loud then Mary Poppins is going to have to come up.”

No, he had actually said that Mary Poppins was going to have to come up, and then stopped speaking, as if he’d just delivered a perfectly legitimate, comprehensible sentence.

“Mary Poppins?” Andy repeated, irritation and confusion both etched into his voice. Due to some earlier ineptitude on George’s part, we were running behind schedule, and we hadn’t counted on further time being taken up with a surreal Mary Poppins based stand-off.

“Yes, Mary Poppins,” George hostilely snapped back.

“What’s Mary Poppins got to do with it?” Andy exasperatedly responded, his question sounding all the more angry by the fact that he’d slammed his hand down on the mixing desk in frustration, knocking the unmute button on the mixing desk, causing the microphone he was holding to amplify his words.

“Mary Poppins is next door,” said George, for some reason leaning into the microphone, perhaps thinking that Andy was trying to use the microphone to give him the upper hand.

“Mary Poppins is next door?” Andy responded, his voice bordering on rage, which was heightened by the fact that he had just located the mixer’s reverb function. A minute ago, I hadn’t expected to hear the words “mary Poppins” once, but in the last minute I’d heard it over ten times, said with increasing levels of angry intensity and now reverb.

Michael, concerned that the two of them were about to come to blows whilst shouting increasingly baffling phrases about Mary Poppins in each other’s faces over a variety of reverbs and delay effects, decided to step in. Finally, a voice of reason to help deriddle this confusion; and if Michael Hughes is the voice of reason in a situation, then you know things have gotten bad.

The Strand is part theatre part cinema, and it transpired that the cinema, which is next door, would be screening Mary Poppins at the same time as we were on stage doing our show, and George was concerned that our show would drown out Mary Poppins. He seemingly wasn’t concerned that Mary Poppins would in anyway effect our show. He clearly valued Mary Poppins much more highly than anything that we might be doing in the room next door.

The majority of our show isn’t particularly loud, but there are a few brief louder parts. We were now worried that one of these louder moments would cause George to ramp up Mary Poppins and then keep her up even during the quieter moments of our show. The last thing we wanted was Johnny’s heart wrenching poignant recount of men he knew who had died fighting fascism to suddenly be accompanied by a jolly blast of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as our audience wiped away the tears from their Um diddle diddle, diddle um, diddle eyes.

Kally, our man behind the show’s visuals, had finally, after an hour of exasperated attempts, got the projector working, once he’d realised the secret formula was to essentially do the exact opposite to what George said to do to get it to work. It’s incredible that out of all the places on this tour, the most challenging projector to get working belonged to a cinema. Finally, after an irksome hour of George shouting baffling instructions about what needs to be stuck where to get the projector to function, whilst Kally, with admirable resolve, resisted the growing urge to tell George where he could stick it, the projector was working.

Not wanting to risk any more projector problems, Kally said he would just leave the projector on so it was ready for the show. But George grumbled about this, saying that we should turn the projector off until it was needed. George was indifferent to Kally’s reasoning that it had taken over an hour to get the projector set up, and that the whole thing was clearly temperamental , and so it was surely best to leave it on. George just kept countering that he was going to turn it off until the start of the show. At this point Kally told George that the projector was staying on, and that was that. George reluctantly demurred, but then fifteen minutes later, when Kally returned from getting a sandwich, he caught George standing in front of the projector, his finger poised over the off button. Fortunately Kally intervened and reiterated that the projector was staying on. George slunk off.

Half an hour before the show’s start, Kally went to investigate the situation with the projector and was pleased to see that it was still on. Phew, he had seemingly got the message. But when the show began, Kally pressed the button to launch the first image and the screen was blank. The audio was playing, but there was no image. The show was now under way, but the images weren’t showing. Kally needed to be back within a minute to cue the next audio/visual slide, but he needed to see what was happening with the projector, although, he had a hunch what had happened.

He tore out of the back doors and ran to the room opposite which housed the controls for the projector, where he had caught George skulking just half an hour earlier. Behind him he heard running footsteps and wheezing. As he pushed the door to the projector room open, Kally caught sight of a clearly panicked George.

“I’ll turn it back on,” George spluttered. But Kallly didn’t have any seconds to spare. He ran into the room, the door slamming behind him in George’s face. George chastised Kally for shutting the door with such intensity, reminding him that Mary Poppins was playing next door. kally made some rather explicit remark about mary Poppins that would, if carried out, certainly warrant a much more stringent film certificate rating.

“I’ll do it,” squeaked George, “you don’t know how to turn it on.”

Kally suggested that maybe the way to turn it on was to press the big on button, and indeed, upon Kally pressing the button, the projector came on, and the images were showing on the theatre’s screen. Then Kally saw at the other end of the room, a second projector, presumably responsible for powering Mary Poppins. As strong as the temptation was to disable George’s precious Poppins, Kally had just ten seconds to race back into the room in time to cue the next slide, so he had to forgo the urge.

It is probably a bit unprofessional of me to slag off a venue and their member of staff in a blog, but it’s not like we ever want to go back and play there again, so hay ho. Besides, it’s very unlikely that George will find out about this blog post, as that would require him being able to read.

This Wednesday, the BBC television programme Inside Out featured a ten minute piece on The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff, which you can watch here. It’s nineteen minutes in. Sadly, George from Belfast didn’t make the cut.

Thanks to the person at Stockport Gig Guide who on Monday morning very kindly took it upon themselves to urge people to get tickets for our gig in Manchester. Unfortunately, this advert was no help to us whatsoever because the gig had been sold out for weeks. All it meant was that people saw the advert, went to buy tickets and then tweeted us asking why they couldn’t get tickets. But hey, it was a nice gesture all the same. Apart from the fact that they announced the gig as occurring that night, when it was in fact the following night, resulting in yet more confused tweets to us from people concerned that they’d got the wrong date and that they’d have to reorganise babysitters, cancel other plans, or saying that they wouldn’t be able to make the gig after all.

So we spent the entire train journey frantically fielding panicked tweets both from people who hadn’t got tickets and people who had. Someone at Stockport Gig Guide had logged onto their computer at 9am Monday morning, and had impressively managed to plunge a band’s Twitter feed into an absolute pointless chaos of confusion before the kettle had finished boiling for their first morning coffee.

But I don’t want to have too much of a go at Stockport Gig Guide. In fairness, it was just one mistake, and I’m sure that usually they are completely on-the-ball. Although, I have just checked their twitter feed and their tweet from this morning is announcing that Jeremy Hardy is starting his tour tomorrow.

I never had the privilege of seeing Jeremy Hardy live, although I always loved his various BBC Radio 4 appearances on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and the News Quiz, as well as his own standup shows. I’ve seen a few tweets from him over the last few years where he’s referenced his love for various folk groups including Bellowhead, and our friend, the singer songwriter Grace Petrie has worked with him on various projects. I’d like to think he would have appreciated what we do, but to the best of my knowledge, he never attended a Young’uns gig. Maybe we should have got in touch to invite him to a gig, under the proviso of course that he didn’t join in with any of the choruses; I’ve heard his singing on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A clue, and we’ve already got enough out of tune singing to contend with at our gigs, but in fairness to Michael, he drives the van and does the accounts.

When we woke up in Manchester on Wednesday morning, snow had both settled and unsettled. Manchester airport had cancelled all their morning flights, putting our journey to Dublin in jeopardy. Our flight wasn’t until the afternoon and the website was still stating that our plane was going ahead, but the uncertainty immediately had Michael concocting other potential ways to get there. Michael, who loves making a plan, and loves devising a plan B even more, suggested we go to Manchester airport, get a hire car, drive to Birmingham airport, where flights were still running from, and fly to Dublin from there. This would have only cost us an extra £600.

I’ve already written in these blogs about The Young’uns’ propensity to pay for train and plane tickets for journeys that, for all sorts of circumstances, we don’t take, resulting in us buying another set of tickets for another journey instead. The amount of money we’ve already spent this year on unused tickets is ridiculous, so I wasn’t particularly keen to wrack up even more money on a hire car and a new set of plane tickets on the off-chance that our currently none-delayed plane gets delayed. And it wasn’t as if this alternative plan was watertight, as it would rely on us getting a hire car and driving to Birmingham to check in on a flight that was due to depart in three hours. It would take us two hours to get to Birmingham, but almost certainly longer in the snow. So this plan was dismissed and everyone agreed that we shouldn’t embark on what Michael was ebulliently branding, “Operation Brum Brum to brum.”.

We were staying in the closest hotel to the airport, just three miles away, but all the shuttle services were massively delayed and there was a throng of panicked people in the hotel lobby struggling to hire taxis. We were informed by the hotel receptionist that it might be two hours before we could get picked up to be taken to the airport. Upon seeing our worried faces, the hotel receptionist then unzipped his jacket to reveal a Stockport Gig Guide T-Shirt and cackled maniacally.

We were about to embark on the fifty-minute walk through the snow to the airport, but then someone in our group suggested trying for an Uber. I am rather sceptical about Uber and have only ever been in one when other people have booked it. Everyone bangs on about how simple and brilliant it is, but every time I’ve been with someone who has booked an Uber, the fare seems to suddenly double upon booking, as does the estimated arrival time. I expressed these concerns to the others, but some of the people in our group weren’t sporting footwear suited to snow-trudging, and so the Uber was booked, with reassurances from the app that it would be there in five minutes.

As soon as our sound engineer’s finger pressed the button to book, the price doubled. It was as if someone was looking right at him and adjusting the price at the very moment that his finger had made contact with the phone. Just then we heard a crazed cackle from behind us, and upon turning around we saw the hotel receptionist showing us the back of his T-Shirt emblazoned with the words, “Stockport Gig Guide, Proudly Sponsored By Uber. Muahahaha!” I assume that the last word was an exclamation of evil laughter, although it could easily be the name of our driver; I mean, they’re all bloody foreigners with weird unpronounceable names these days, aren’t they?

Still, at least the taxi was only five minutes away, and it would save us a walk in the snow. Except within a minute of making the booking, the time shot up from five minutes to fifteen minutes, where it stayed for thirty minutes. People who think that Uber provide a good service are, in my opinion, living on a different planet, probably Jupiter, hence why they are happy to accept the ridiculously slow time it takes for one single minute to elapse. It was looking increasingly unlikely that we were going to make it to the airport on time if we waited for the Uber. We would have to walk.

Fifty minutes later we arrived at the airport on foot. The walk cost us £5, as Uber charge a cancellation fee; yet another example of The Young’uns being charged for a journey we never made. It seems a bit rich of Uber to charge a cancellation fee when it was essentially Uber who forced us to cancel because the taxi got stuck in a time vortex for half an hour. The bugger was probably just lying in bed, accepting fairs, knowing that they could make a pretty penny on cancellation fees alone. This is the kind of tip that Martin Lewis won’t tell you, but if you want a get-rich-quick scheme, sign up to Uber, indiscriminately accept bookings, spend the day in bed, and watch the money roll in as people are forced to cancel the taxi that doesn’t even exist because you don’t actually own a taxi; in fact, you haven’t even passed your driving test; although, in fairness, neither have most genuine Uber drivers.

When I ask friends why they use Uber they cite that it is useful to know that wherever they are in the world, they know they have access to a taxi service, and they know what they’re getting. But what they’re getting is a taxi company that seemingly arbitrarily charges you double on a whim, has a similarly arbitrary approach to estimating the time the taxi will take to arrive, and then they charge you a fee for cancelling the damn thing, despite the fact that you’ve moved house twice, got divorced, remarried, had children who have gone onto have children of their own, and are now an old man on your death bed and the app is still telling you the taxi is fifteen minutes away.

People are seemingly happy to sacrifice standards for standardisation. This is a reason people go to McDonald’s, because wherever they are on the planet they know what they’re getting; it might be shit, but at least it’s reliable, predictable, standardised shit designed for the completely risk averse, so long as you don’t count the risk of heart failure and cancer. At least in France you can buy beer at McDonald’s, meaning you can always give yourself liver failure to take your mind off the cancer and heart disease.

Fortunately we made the airport just in time for us to check in and then wait two hours for the delayed flight.

This current show we’re presenting is a theatre piece called The Ballad Of Johnny Long staff. It’s the story of one man’s adventure from begging on the streets in the north of England to fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War, taking in the Hunger Marches and the Battle of Cable Street.

We’ve brought our own sound and lighting engineers, as well as someone who is responsible for the various visual elements of the show. This means that there’s very little for the venue’s own tech people to do during the performance. At every other venue the staff are perfectly content to just put their feet up, maybe even watch the show, but presumably one of the tech guys last night got a bit bored with sitting around doing nothing and so decided to spice up the tales of hunger marches and antifascist campaigns by engaging the venue’s smoke machine. The show ends with a rather emotional story from Johnny, his voice cracking as he sings a refrain of a song about the people from all over the world who stood up to fascism in Spain. Often the audience find themselves in tears, usually due to the emotion of what they’re hearing, but on this occasion also due to plumes of smoke filling the theatre. There was nothing we could do about it. This is a serious show. We can’t really break the mood and start bantering about the absurdity of the situation, so instead we had to stand there, trying not to cough while someone at the venue sent smoke billowing around the room to accompany a dead man’s plaintive singing. As we left the stage I could have sworn I heard an all-too-familiar evil cackle.

I’ll impart further Young’uns touring adventures in next week’s blog post.

During Christmas dinner, post Christmas cracker pull, I began to muse about the people who write the jokes for Christmas crackers. Does a Christmas cracker company just commission one person to do it, or is there a whole team of people? Is it a work-from-home job or is there a room crammed full of frustrated, embittered writers who failed the audition to write for Mock The Week? Do these writers also work for greetings card companies or maybe on devising the wacky drivel found on product packaging, or are these very separate industries? Perhaps the greetings cards writers and the Christmas cracker writers have an intense, snobbish rivalry between them, and they have snide jokes about each other: the greetings cards writers dissing the Christmas cracker writers with twee rhyming couplets, the Christmas cracker writers retaliating with cringe-worthy pun-based put-downs.

I wonder how much a Christmas cracker writer gets paid. If the money is good then perhaps I might offer to lend my talents to the Christmas cracker joke writing industry. Obviously the money would have to be pretty good bearing in mind that I am currently working as a folk singer and so naturally am raking it in.

I have come up with a few jokes that I think would make for a better Christmas cracker experience than the one we had this year and so am considering creating my own Christmas cracker range. My Christmas crackers would be more environmentally friendly than other crackers because I wouldn’t bother with the hats or any other paraphernalia; just the joke. You might feel that this is short-changing people, but you haven’t read my jokes yet. When you do you’ll appreciate that the jokes are good enough to stand alone as the soul item of the Christmas cracker and that any other frippery such as hats and toys would merely get in the way of people fully experiencing the joke. It would be a shame to dilute the joke’s power with extraneous bumf.

In fact, I’d suggest that people pull my Christmas cracker a good half hour before sitting down to their Christmas dinner, because they will be so overcome by the brilliance of my joke that they will want to discuss it at length. They will want to share how the joke made them feel on a deep spiritual level, and how their lives have fundamentally irrevocably changed as a result. It would be a shame for someone to put all that effort in to making a Christmas dinner, only for it to go cold because everyone is too busy talking about the joke to eat. Obviously I will include all of these guidelines on the packaging so that people know what they’re getting in to before pulling, although, to be honest, no amount of preliminary warnings are going to be able to prepare people for what they are about to experience.

I am about to give you just two of my self-composed Christmas cracker jokes. These are merely a taster of the kind of thing you can expect when my Christmas crackers are officially released. If you are listening to the audio version of this blog post then I’d advise you, if driving, to pull over to avoid causing a road accident upon losing control of your vehicle due to involuntary spasms of hysterical laughter. OK, I have done all I can to warn you. Let’s get to the jokes.

Joke 1.

What does a Buddhist eat for breakfast?

Omelette.

Joke 2.

Did you hear about the scientist whose trousers fell down?

He won the No Belt Prize.

Sorry, I’ve just realised that I should have done a warning for those of you with heart conditions. Hopefully you are all OK. Those jokes are so incredible that some recent research indicates that they have the power to take your mind off depressing Brexit-based thoughts for at least forty seconds.

Thank you to Sam, who commented on last week’s blog post about niche aquatic porn. He says that he would like to have me saying the words “niche aquatic porn” as a text tone. I should probably charge for this service, but as I said before, I am a folk singer and so really don’t need your money, therefore I have clipped me saying the words “niche aquatic porn” from the blog post which you can download as an MP3 here, meaning that there is now absolutely no excuse not to have that as your text tone, apart from the excuse of being a sane and rationally thinking person, but given that you read my blogs that is unlikely to be the case.

Let us know how you get on, Sam. You never know, maybe there’ll be someone on the bus sitting next to you who hears your text tone and they just so happen to be a David Eagle blog listener.

“Are you Sam?” They tremulously enquire, unable to believe that this is occurring. And you confirm that you are indeed Sam, leading the person to swoon at this astounding news, and you immediately both fall in love, united by a powerful bond that can only be known when two David Eagle blog listeners unite.

Of course, there is a chance that this choice of text tone might not meet quite such a desirable outcome. It could easily backfire on you, and upon hearing the tone, the person sitting next to you excitedly informs you that they are also a massive fan of niche aquatic porn. And before you can stop them, they are passionately talking about their favourite erotic whale films, such as Free Willy With Extra Willy, Moby-dick With Extra Dick, and their personal favourite, The Story Of Jonah, in which Jonah rather enjoys being swallowed by the Whale. And now you’re trapped with a filthy fish film fetishist enthusiastically shouting how “that film franchise really does put the sperm into sperm whale,” before laughing maniacally, causing you to recoil in disgust due to their laughter, but also because you’ve just caught a rather disconcerting fishy odour on their breath that is knocking you sick. And now you are ruing your reckless decision to change your text tone. But hey, it’s up to you, Sam. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Oh dear, I was planning on blogging quite regularly this year, but now I am worried that niche aquatic porn might be what kettles was to this blog in 2016. On the subject of which, I was doing a standup gig in London yesterday, and a comedian did an entire routine on smart kettles. I was horrified, not only to see this brazen plagiarism being carried out in front of me, but also because the audience were lapping it up, seemingly completely unaware of the fact that the man who’d just been on mere minutes earlier had written blog post after blog post on that very subject. The comedian in question was Darius Davies. Once I’ve published this blog I intend to write him a cease and desist letter, instructing him to drop all smart kettle related material from his gigs. It wouldn’t surprise me if in a few days Darius Davies announces that he is planning to launch his own Christmas cracker range. Apart from that he was very funny and I’d recommend checking him out, although feel free to heckle if he starts ripping off my clearly original material that only I could have possibly thought of.

This Sunday morning we (as in The Young’uns) were on Cerys Matthews’ BBC 6 Music show. Having got to bed late due to celebrating a friend’s birthday, and then waking at 5am to take a painfully slow megabus journey from Sheffield to London, I felt, rather aptly, in a state of catatonia. I hope Cerys appreciated the tribute. If we’d been on Hewey Morgan’s show then I’d pay homage to his band the Fun Loving Criminals, perhaps assaulting someone by throwing a banana skin in front of them, resulting in them having a comical skid and trip. I suppose that tactic would also work if we were on the Marc Riley show, given that his former band was The Fall. If we were on Clare Grogans show then I would walk around using a pair of augmented reality glasses. I’ll let you Google that one, if you haven’t worked it out already. Sometimes you appreciate things more if you have to work a bit for it. While your at it, see if you can decipher this blog post’s hidden political subtext. It’s there if you look hard enough. Keep re-reading until you get it.

As we walked through the BBC corridor we passed Andrew Marr, who had just interviewed Theresa May (apparently Brexit still means Brexit), also Michael Ball and some bloke from Strictly Come Dancing who I’ve never heard of and am not going to look up because I take a strange glee in remaining ignorant about such things. I also overheard a conversation between two people, one of whom declared that they were off to the Sexy Fish. Having Googled Sexy Fish, it appears that it’s a high-end London restaurant, although I suppose it might also be their nickname for andrew Marr, given that’s whose studio they were standing outside.

Just a warning: I’d be careful going any further down the list of Google search results for “sexy fish,” as you get some rather niche aquatic porn; let’s just say those carp aren’t so coy, and those Salmon are most certainly wild. Fortunately I’ve done the research for you, and so here are some facts about fish porn.

One of the most famous fish porn films is Grinding Nemo. That features quite a lot of gill on gill action. Another one is all about a fish swingers party which involves a lot of partner swapping. If you want to look it up it’s called Your Plaice Or Mine. Sadly that film made headlines in the fish porn world because the actor playing the part of an insatiable fisherman failed to ware protection and consequently caught crabs. Apparently they couldn’t find a condom adequate enough to fit the fisherman’s rod. That’s according to an unnamed source, although people believe it to be a source close to some of the prawns working on the film, which presumably means that the source in question would be one Marie Rose. Marie Rose worked in the costume department and was responsible for dressing the prawns.

Anyway, what were we chatting about before we got distracted by the subject of fish porn? Oh yes, Cerys Matthews. A special hello by the way to anyone who has stumbled across this because they Googled “Cerys Matthews fish porn.” Sorry for your disappointment.

We arrived in the studio to some panic, as a befuddled engineer was trying to figure out why all of the music played so far on the show was massively distorted. This mishap probably did us quite a big favour, as it got fixed just before we came on, meaning that our songs sounded infinitely more pleasing than the previous 90 minutes’ worth of music. This might have been the reason why we were deluged with orders for our CD from 6 Music listeners. It’s a shame that all of our CDs, due to a technical fault, are riddled with heavy distortion.

This sudden surge in sales resulted in Michael having to get a train back to Teesside so as to be able to post the albums out. His original plan was to stay in London until Tuesday, because we were doing a session on BBC Radio 3 on the Monday evening. You would have thought it would make sense for Michael to have brought a load of CDs with him so that he could post them from where he actually was, rather than having to make a 600 mile round trip, but alas there was no room in Michael’s bag due to the fact that he insists on carrying his own two pillows from home, maintaining that he can’t get a good night’s sleep without them. So on the one hand he had to make a completely pointless and expensive six hour round trip, but on the other hand at least he got a good night’s sleep, even though, ironically, due to taking the train home, he ended up sleeping in his own bed anyway, meaning that he essentially just took his pillows out for a day trip. But at least the pillows got to meet Cerys Matthews. Cerys was particularly inamoured by the pillows, especially when Michael pointed out that they were made from international velvet. That’s a hilarious Catatonia joke there, I thank you.

This whole pillow fiasco has become so ridiculous that Michael has suggested we don’t sing any songs on our radio sessions that require him to play guitar, as he is travelling by train and is too encumbered by carrying around his bloody pillows. We’ve turned into a band that can’t play half their songs and can’t sell their music due to a pair of pillows. Those pillows are The Young’uns’ Yoko Ono.

If you want to buy a copy of our latest album, The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff, you can get it here. But please hurry, because we fly to Dublin in a couple of days, and I don’t want Michael making a round trip on a plane in order to keep up with the purchases. We’re on tour from late January through February. Tickets are selling very fast, with a few venues already sold out. If you’re attending one of the gigs then feel free to come and say hello and meet us in person, and if you’re really lucky you might even get to meet Michael’s pillows. Maybe we could charge a pound to have a photo with the pillows. It might help recover some of our costs incurred by Michael’s redundant train journeys.

You can listen to our BBC 6 Music chat here.
And our session on BBC Radio 3 here.