Blog: Piano Planning By The Seaside

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On Wednesday I headed once more to sunny Brighton, for further ALBUM ACTION with Mr CJ Thorpe-Tracey. It was a lovely sunny day and as I headed to the station I thought "How delightful it will be to be beside the seaside"... as had approx 87% of all parents currenntly dealing with half-term in London, and so the train was RAMMED!

Once in Brighton I headed off to meet Chris, pausing only to buy a HAT in a HAT SHOP (I have a MASSIVE HEAD so was delighted to find a specialist supplier of hats of various sizes) and then to say hello to a member of Top Local Band The Highchurches who we bumped into in Dave's Comics (it would have been RUDE not to pop in). It was a highly auspicious start to what would turn out to be a highly auspicious day.

For LO! we had gathered not for the simple delights of Actually Making Music but rather for the much more important aspect of ROCK that is ADMIN. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the work of ROCK is about 95% admin - you wouldn't believe it from the LIES of Rock Biopics, who would have you think it is mostly doing gigs, taking drugs, and saying the names of your songs out loud, but even on TOUR you spend between 30-60 minutes doing the actual gig and the whole rest of the day trying to get to places, arguing about setlists, sorting out financial matters to do with merch etc, and saying the names of your songs out loud.

THUS, as two Wise and Experienced artistes we had given ourselves a whole DAY to do exactly that, with a proper AGENDA and list of things to consider, and that is what we did indeed do. We began with an excellent discussion about ASSETS, which is what you have to call PROMO stuff these days, and came up with various thoughts about getting pictures done, FONTS, websites, The Socials, album titles and even a DIFFERENT NAME for the act as a whole!

We then moved on to GIGS and Chris put forward a very exciting plan for some ACTION later in the year which I shall go into no further here but which will hopefully start to make its way into the public domain in a few months. It's basically a way to say to THE UNIVERSE that we exist as an ACT and it made us both Quite Excited!

All of this was conducted in The Fortune Of War pub, looking out onto the beach, but then we upped and strolled along the seafront to No Catch, the vegan fish and chip shop. This seemed entirely the right thing to do on such a lovely sunny day, but again clearly we were not the first to have this thought as they were SOLD OUT of the fish-style products so I ended up having a BATTERED SAVELOY! COR! It was very nice! It was not all SAUSAGE FUN though, as we used this time to go through RECORDING THORTS, talking through all of the songs and making our way to some production ideas and also SOUND PALETTES. Excitement reigned once more!

Full of GRUB we stomped back into Brighton centre and on to The Evening Star, where Chris and I had had our very FIRST meeting about this project just over a year ago. This time we finished our day's work with a discussion about the ALBUM what we are making, and how we plan to get it out into the world. It was all very exciting and full of POSSIBILITIES, but as Chris said, the big thing about it all is that we are pretty sure we are creating something BEAUTIFUL. It would obviously be NICE if the entire planet went mad for it and we have to spend our days fending off offers for Netflix Specials and Albert Hall residencies, but the key thing is that what we're recording sounds GORGEOUS.

Happily sated with this idea and all the planning for it, we said our farewells at Brighton station and I headed home, alongside all the parents and children who'd come down with me, THRILLED at what the future may hold for this album/PROJECT - all we need to do now is finish MAKING it!

posted 28/5/2026 by MJ Hibbett

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