Tuesday 20 February 2001

Today and yesterday became unexpectedly free after the record company (no names) backed out of the Prefab Sprout project I was going to start on this week. So while that's on hold, I can get going with The Gentle Shepherd, gathering all the original musical material I can get my hands on.

Rob Mackillop's going to send me a copy of the Robert Bremner guitar versions, and I spent this morning in Glasgow University library looking at some of their original editions. The most spectacular was one copy of the Glasgow quarto edition with the beautiful aquatints by David Allan, which had bound in with it Allan's original pencil sketches of various 18th century shepherding types on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

A brief internet search when I got home turned up a few affordable copies in antiquarian bookshops around the globe, so hopefully in the next few weeks I'll have my own copy of the 1808 quarto, which also includes Allan's illustrations. I sometimes think the internet was invented expressly for the convenience of record and book collectors.

I had a word with Calum Malcolm yesterday about mixing our next CD - it's all been on MO disks on a shelf in the corner of his home studio for the last year. If we're aiming for a summer release, we'll have to get it mixed to stereo soon - he's working for The Blue Nile just now, but presumably he now has a gap in his diary where Prefab Sprout was going to be.

This week's other task is dredging up two years' worth of old Concerto Caledonia accounts, so that we can finally agree this year's with the Inland Revenue. Riveting huh?