Live From The Other Side (2003)

Live From The Other Side Cover Art

Over the years I had played quite a lot of solo shows in different parts of the world. There was a venue in Newtown, an inner city suburb of Sydney called The Sandringham Hotel where I had established a residency and I played there each time I travelled to Australia.  I would play four shows over a month on say a Thursday night and I would arrange the tables and chairs in the room so it looked cosy and I would light candles, have tea lights on the tables and burn Nag Champa incense. I had made a couple of live albums before but recorded on cassette – this time I had a mini disc player! One of the most annoying, fiddly, small buttoned, frustrating devices ever known to digital man. This particular trip I recorded all the shows and realised that one of them sounded particularly good. I sent the discs to my friend Dan Grigsby in New York for mastering, to try and get the best sonic possibilities out of this primitive recording. So this is one show from then with the talking removed as in those days I would talk as long as I played. The record featured 17 songs all performed acoustically with songs plucked from all the previous solo albums. It also featured poetry and my reading of Federico García Lorca’s stirring poem Cry To Rome.