At long last I have been through all my catalogue of live recordings, including Al’s raves. Twenty-five volumes, starting with our launch of Sudden in a shaft of sunlight at Chapel off Chapel and continuing from the end of 1998, through 1999 and to early March 2000 at Bennetts Lane. Week after week working through standards and originals. The band began a few years prior to these recordings, because King, Dude and Dunce was released in 1996 and so we’d played together a bit before that. But I’ve put together two volumes of a new Browne – Haywood – Stevens album, entitled Enchanted Ground. The title comes from Emily Dickinson, a poet whom Al admired:
Exhilaration is the Breeze
That lifts us from the Ground
And leaves us in another place
Whose statement is not found –
Returns us not, but after time
We soberly descend
A little newer for the term
Upon Enchanted Ground –
Volume one comprises standards or non-originals, and volume two is originals. Most of volume one was not on our studio recordings, but a number of the originals on volume two were. There are some surprises. Probably you’ve never heard me play like I do on ‘Minority’ unless you were at the gigs where we played it. We’ve included Graeme Bell’s ‘Czechoslovak Journey’ because Graeme was a giant of our scene and became a good friend of mine, and obviously Al knew him too. Tunes like ‘Bye bye blackbird’, ‘Last night when we were young’ or ‘When you wish upon a star’ we performed a number of times but never took to the studio. And a couple of originals like ‘A matter of infrastructure’ or ‘Sooty’s return’ or ‘Creative control’ were never recorded (by us) in the studio but were written for the band and, you might say, created by it.
I’ve written a little already about the experience of hearing all this music again, and I have found it tremendously moving. Al’s drumming just sounds so like him, and the way you can hear him expressing delight even as the pieces go on is so charming. The time we spent at Bennetts Lane was full-time education for me and I’m so tremendously grateful for the opportunities I had there. It was such a lot of fun, and I hope you can hear that if you listen to these recordings.
There is, as the kids would say, a shitload of music here. Perhaps you’d like to go one volume at a time. Perhaps you prefer standards, perhaps originals. The choice is obviously yours.
It is digital only, and available at Bandcamp. Volume one, and volume two. Cover art is temporary so a final version will be dispatched to any purchasers as soon as it’s available. The album is going up today because it’s Bandcamp Friday, where they give us all the dough.
1/v/2026