My Second album 'Studs n' Sisters' took around two and a half years to make and took on quite a life of its own along the way to become something of a concept album (albeit an instrumental one), which certainly hadn’t been the original plan but was a real challenge and a lot of fun as it turned out. It was a genuine labour of love and a ‘true’ solo album in that I wrote, engineered, produced, performed and mixed pretty much all of the tracks featured. The concept is definitely ambiguous and oblique as far as they go – it’s all about films and features a number of imaginary movies that my cousin Jon and I cooked up, which are mostly pastiches of existing films. We even mocked up some excerpts for some of them, which involved getting Jon and my brother Sam to write scripts and hiring actors to play them out. The inlay booklet reads like a film guide book and was a lot of fun to put together. The front cover image was arrived at after quite a process of evolution (in one concept I was dancing with myself, with one of me dressed as a woman – the reactions from those exposed to this were fairly consistently along the lines of shock and disgust so I thought I’d abandon that – maybe next time they’ll be ready) and I am delighted with the end result. The album is musically, I believe, a natural progression from my debut and was naturally influenced by the live experience I gained in the interim in that it has a more energetic feel to it. I feel it represents the most melodic and diverse material I’ve created to date with my playing having been pushed to its outer limits. I also got to do an all guitar cover of ‘Material Girl’ by Madonna, which was enormous fun because it’s a truly great pop song and therefore deserves its place in the cannon of heavy metal…or something

Track By Track Description by CF