Blog: From A European Viewpoint

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A few months ago Mr Marcel Plaum contacted me on behalf of the Cologne PopFest to ask if I'd be able to contribute some sort of PRIZE for their fundraising raffle, to cover costs incurred by it not being able to go ahead this year. I had a bit of a THORT and considered the usual options (i.e. any number of CDs from the Unsold CD Mountain in my cupboard) and realised that anybody who would LIKE one of our CDs probably already HAS them by now. Thus I came up with a plan to offer something UNIQUE: me writing a new song!

I realise that a) me writing a new song isn't really UNIQUE and, more importantly, b) that this is possibly even LESS likely to be something that most people would actually WANT to happen to them, but if nothing else it would at least save everyone the trouble of navigating the postal system. With all that in mind I was DELIGHTED when, a few weeks ago, I got an email from the WINNER, Mr S Dietrich, who was actually PLEASED to have won it. PHEW! What are the chances?

We had an email discussion around what the song could be about, and he suggested that I could write a song about the UK leaving the EU which he could use for an upcoming edition of his radio show Emma's Housemates on Indie Lounge Radio. This sounded like a VERY good idea, with the only difficulty for me being that he wanted a "non-bitter" tune from the European point of view. I'm happy to write from the European point of view because as far as I'm concerned I AM European, but being non-bitter about Brexit is a bit harder!

It was a challenge but I think what we eventally came up - Goodbye To Great Britain - turned out pretty well, and I recorded a version of it featuring my new found MAD MIDI SKILLZ. Stephan suggested that I put it on BANDCAMP ready for when his show went out, and so I DID!



The cover image is (I think) Charles Fox departing somewhere or other, from an eighteenth century political cartoon what I found on the (EXCELLENT) Open Access At The Met site. These Open Access sites are GRATE!.

Stephan played it on last night's show (which should be available on his Mixcloud soon) so I think that means I'm now free to show off about it. I'm really happy with how this all worked out - it was a GRATE bonus bit of songwriting to finish off the year of ROCK with, so I hope you like it!

posted 22/12/2020 by MJ Hibbett

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