I had lots of lovely feedback after the solo gig I did at the beginning of Martha Tilston's gig at the Rose Theatre in Kingston recently. A number of people asked some interesting questions which I thought it would be good to share the answers for here...

which CD has the 1st song you played on?
you mean "fallen guru", I'm afraid none at the moment as we are yet to record it. It's quite a new song and she's just getting used to being performed live., but hopefully she'll be ready to be recorded soon.

are you on facebook?
yes... the band is in the form of a page. You can find us at...
//www.facebook.com/pages/sugardrum/289395918859

why are you giving away CDs for free?
actually no one asked me this, but I thought it would be good to answer it just in case people were thinking it.

We have a new ep coming out of brand new recordings and I felt it would be a nice thing to give away the few remaining copies I had left of the current eps. That and I also hate taking money from people for stuff, which made working in a bookshop for many years fun, but a little hard at times :)

so is fallen guru going to be on the new cd?
see answer 2 above. Basically no, not this time around, but hopefully on the next one. I have many, many lovely songs that I want to record, it's just difficult finding the time to record them all which is good I think as it's means there's always something new to wait to for.

do you play in London much? when are you playing next?
Mmm, that's technically 2 questions, but that's ok, I'll answer them with 2 replies... As often as is possible, but sometimes it's just an open mic at a folk club or singer/songwriters night. See the gigs page and/or join the mailing list to keep upto date as to when we are playing next. We've been very busy with the new recordings recently which hasn't left much time to do gigs.

What tunings do you use?
Alot of my songs are either in DADGAD, DGDGAD, EGDGBE, DADGBD, DADGF#D or normal tuning. As I've no idea what the notes are on the guitar and just play the shapes I see or feel it makes it easy to experiment with alternative tunings as I'm not confused by notes I expect to be there suddenly being in a different place.

You must listen to alot of other acoustic artists such as John Martin and Nick Drake?
Not really, I like them but the music I listen to and am inspired by goes well beyond the realms of acoustic and folk music. Check out my last.fm page if you wish to find out what I listen to on my ipod most. I believe we shouldn't necessarily presume that the style of music we create is simply the product of the music that we listen to.

Thin or thick crust pizza?
Thin crust, although it depends on how think the thick crust is. I made some pizzas recently myself but added too much yeasty dough to the base so it ended up like eating a shallow loaf of bread with some topping resting on top which gradually slid off the pizza as I tried to eat it. Mental note to self - don't make pizza base as if you are making a loaf of bread :)

Anyways, as much as I love talking about bread related foodstuffs, this is getting a bit too far away from being music related so I'll leave it there.

xxx