Still on the road!

Jez spends the next two months playing solo gigs around the UK, with highlights including a show on the Isle of Man (he last played there in the late 1990s!), a joint gig with Bob Fox at Hitchin in November, three more festivals (at Hartlepool, Denholm and Gosforth) and a return to many of his favourite venues, before the Bad Pennies reunite for this year’s Christmas tour. “Lost Christmas” is the tour title, and it kicks off on December 4th, ending as usual with two shows at Gateshead’s Glasshouse (formerly The Sage) on December 23rd…

In recent weeks Jez has been delving deep into his repertoire and dropping some quite rare songs into his live sets – songs like YELLOW HAIR, MADDISON (which he insists on calling “The Man That Won The Car”), MIKE NEVILLE SAID IT, LEATHER CAP AND TRAP LAD, TEARDROP TWOSTEP and SPITTING COUSINS. The Bad Pennies set at Banterfest last month also had a few surprises, including HONEYMOON TERRACE  and COAL MOUNTAIN  from the “Crazy Pagan” album, plus a guest appearance by Phil Beer on JACK COMMON’S ANTHEM to end the show – Phil engineered the recording session for Jez’s 2007 album of that name, as you might recall. 

There’s also a lot of new, as yet unrecorded songs in Jez’s current set, including SANCTUARY LAND, A MESSAGE FROM A MANDOLIN, FREEBODY’S WAKE, THE FROZEN ROMAN and most recently AN OLD MAN’S EYES, which has been going down particularly well. Could this be a familiar pattern, by any chance, working in new songs in a performance context before venturing into the studio to record a new album? Certainly the prospect of a new album has been mooted on Jez’s PATREON page (link at the head of this page), where many of these songs and more have been previewed already for subscribers. Time will tell.

Pic below by Dan Graham.