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

So, sports fans, this afternoon was a rare trio gig with my dear colleagues Ben Robertson and Niko Schauble. Donna Coleman had very kindly arranged for us to perform at the Classic Cinema in Elsternwick, and we did two sets to a small but very attentive and appreciative audience.

I had decided, because these performances are rare and also I like music to mark life events, that we would perform the tunes I wrote with Sally in mind, for the last time. Since she dumped me in November and shows no sign of changing her mind, I feel these pieces can be taken out of the book; the only problem is that I like them so much and will miss playing them. Most of them I treasure for different and distinct reasons. Still, if they’re not current, they probably have to go.

So. We played ‘SJ’, which is the earliest, written one morning in a practice room at the VCA in about 1991 or -2 I think. It hasn’t been recorded for release; it was included on a recital program many years ago – in fact, if I found the tape of that performance that would give the more precise date of its composition. Future project. – and when it was my mum decided that the initials in the title stood for The Society of Jesus. She couldn’t have been wronger. It was good to take this to Ben and Niko because neither of them had seen or heard it before so we sort of premiered it.

Next up came ‘S.S.T.T.’, which opened the first Browne – Haywood – Stevens album King, Dude and Dunce. No-one has ever known what these initials stood for but I broke it today: they are Scholar, scientist, thinker, traveller. I wrote it for Sall when I think she was in Singapore doing some kind of study. She could tell you when that was I guess but I don’t know for sure. It might have been the summer of 1994 or -5. KDD was released in 1996.

‘In angel arms’ followed, another BHS number that appeared on Sudden in a shaft of sunlight. Sall’s arms, my goodness. Angelic.

That took us to ‘Cardigan patrol’, and I was able to explain (as I did elsewhere) that this related to shopping trips in the 1990s: Sportscraft, Witchery, Myer, wherever.

Then came the corker. I knew I was going to lose it when I played ‘Esj”, and sure enough, I did. This piece people find lovely and I’m glad about that but for me the feeling it contains is just epic. I could say it’s a portrait of Sall, and she’s very pretty too, so there may be something in that. I could say it’s a portrait of the way I felt about her when I wrote it, and that feels true too. I can’t be precisely sure what it is. But crying while you’re playing is risky. Anyway we got through it.

And that brought us to ‘The unmistaken’. Because this is no time for secrecy, I told the full story of this piece too. When we were together, Sall and I would be walking along talking about whatever and one of us would notice someone wearing a G-string. Now my idea is that these things are supposed to be invisible – that’s the whole idea. But frequently they aren’t, and they can seem even to draw attention to themselves. So when one of us saw one, the words ‘if I’m not mistaken’ would enter the conversation, and that was the tip-off for the other to look around. When I wrote this piece I played it over and over and I really thought I had captured something of Sall’s character. So she is the unmistaken and so is this tune.

‘Most miraculous accident’ wound up the first set, and this to me is the moment I met Sall. I remember seeing her the first time and thinking, fuck what a beauty.

After all that, it felt like we should do some standards, which I have never done with a trio before. So we played ‘You’d be so nice to come home to’, ‘Just friends’, ‘Last night when we were young’, ‘Taking a chance on love’, and ‘Everything happens to me’. This last piece is one of my absolute favourites and I had to recite the lyrics from the last eight because they are so heartbreaking and, I felt, not inappropriate: ‘I telegraphed and phoned, sent an airmail special too, your answer was goodbye, and there was even postage due. I fell in love just once, and it had to be with you – everything happens to me.’

A great pleasure playing with Ben and Niko. Champions both.

12/iv/2026