It's doing its best to snow. Snow from Siberia doesn't often make it this far, I dare say East Anglia is covered in the stuff but all we're getting is the snow equivalent of drizzle (snizzle?) and the odd flash of wintery sunshine. I'm disappointed, if you're going to be locked down you might as well be snowed in too.
Mamma's Lament has finally emerged as a book/album on Amazon, those of you with a Kindle reader can borrow it for free or buy it for the princely sum of 99p (iPads or other tablet devices work just as well) and listen to the album through the usual music streaming services so please let me know what you think. Meanwhile I've been sending the physical copies to anyone and everyone I can think of who might help me put together a performance of the story and music together. I've sent it to the BBC Writer's Room which is their facility to help find and develop new comedy drama writers plus BBC Introducing which is their facility to find and develop new songwriters. Of course, neither of these facilities accommodate the idea that one project might do both, but you never know. I sent another copy to a friend of a friend who works in the mainstream Hollywood movie business and you never know about that either (although I'm pretty sure I do). Actually, this is a key motivational point; the odds of any project getting off the ground are spectacularly small and the ones that get finished are a tiny subset of those. If you think too hard about it you just wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, so I find it's best not to think at all, just send it, hope for the best and try not to mind if it doesn't work out. So far, I've had no calls from the BBC or Steven Spielberg, but I did get a call from a splendid bloke called Hugh Woodridge.
Hugh is a friend of my friend Si Honywill. Si mixed and mastered the album but in normal life he's a big league live sound engineer, Glastonbury, The Albert Hall, that kind of thing. Hugh is a big-league musical theatre producer who has done some massive West End shows including some at the Albert Hall, so their paths have crossed more than once which is why Si saw fit to send him a copy of the book and CD. He liked it enough to send 3 pages of detailed comments on how it could be better shaped into a viable stage production. After that he suggested a Zoom meeting so he could discuss it with me directly and offered to guide me thorough the process. So, for the next few months I'll be shaping. Happy days.
Gigs are still confined to on-line streamed concerts. The next one is on 22nd Feb, but I'll ping something on that nearer the time.
Enjoy the snow and check out Nobody's Going To Jail, the first Mamma's Lament video on YouTube. It's right there on the web page but here's a link anyway!
Jim