Correspondent Video

​'From Our Own Correspondent' is a BBC Radio 4 programme where foreign reporters send back news and stories from around the world. I guess the idea of this programme merged with a thought that if someone has passed on, they might as well be based on the other side of the world and out of contact, like a reporter or a correspondent sending back reports as memories. And all the spaces they've been in once they've gone hold a special energy, without getting too 'hippy woowoo'. Like school fields or hills they've walked in. A lot of the album seems to be about that sort of idea in hindsight.

Musically, this song goes back to some point early in 2017 (!) when I recorded the basic guitar and drums with James Yates, whose fantastic drumming is all over the album. We recorded it live together in a house in the New Forest. UK, and for years I thought it was terrible and I'd played the part terribly. But it was fine! I was an idiot. It sounded great in fact, especially the drums. So years later I did a tiny bit of editing and added some more parts and, bang. It was done.

The video is a continuation of the idea from the video for 'Spiral Island' which has various scenes with myself walking through them. These were mainly gathered on a recent tour and trip I did to Germany and the Swiss Alps. It's been a fun idea to keep filming these scenes. They don't feel like much individually but I hope that as they build up and appear in context against each other they sort of mean more than the sum of their parts.