Ian Norris did the pretty awesome cover art for the last 2 Tiger Mendoza / David Griffiths albums: “Along Dangerous Roads” and “The Shadow“. He has also just launched a Kickstarter to help put a graphic novel collected edition of his brilliant, self published comic Fixed Up about his life and loves and growing up in South Africa. Go check it out and, you know, back it!
My latest album The Shadow has been available online for about a month and it’s fair to say that David Griffiths and I have been a bit overwhelmed by all of the lovely comments and responses that we have had from various people since it came out. There is something that I wanted to make clear though.
This album and pretty much everything to do with it (apart from the amazing artwork by Ian Norris) has been a collaboration between Dave and myself as equal 50/50 partners. Some people have been alluding to the fact that they think that this may be Tiger Mendoza featuring someone else or even with someone else but that just isn’t the case. The specifics on a track by track basis are lost in the mists of time but Dave and I exchanged many ideas and not all of the ideas made it on to the album but we both pushed each other to come up with new ideas throughout the making of the album. It’s also fair to say that if you are familiar with the stuff that we have both produced individually the bits and pieces that we did come up with on each track may surprise you a little. When we started working together to produce Along Dangerous Roads the remit was I do beats, Dave does strings. This time the lines were a lot more blurred. We did talk to a few other people about some guest spots but for one reason or another they didn’t work out. Maybe next time.
It’s not just about the music either. For better or for worse (I think for the better) we produced and released the album ourselves with no external agencies, labels or management involved and the efforts to do so were once again split about 50/50 between Dave and I. So again, this project has been a real collaboration between the 2 of us.
That’s not to say that there was no external support at all. While the album was being produced we (I) played it to a few people and received lots of really helpful feedback. To all of those people, THANK YOU but especially to Mark Wilden who not only is a brilliant drummer and been a great support while helping to prepare for the launch gig on 23rd April but is also responsible for Dave and I meeting up when were practising for The Evenings reunion gig a little while back. So cheers!
So anyway that’s it. Thanks for reading and listening.
I was searching around YouTube the other day (as you do) and found this cool little travelogue video made by the guys from the Off To Somewhere blog. The music is my remix of Manu Delago’s “Hang Drum Solo” (aka Mono Desire) which you can still download from SoundCloud.
Earlier this year, Half Decent and I worked on a track which we were really happy with but for one reason or another we decided to hold off putting out. So here you go. As a b-side, there’s an acoustic version of our earlier collaboration “Punch Bag”, originally from the Monsters & Miracles EP, which started off as a demo for Theoretical’s CLIC Sargent fundraiser back in September.
The single is available to download now from Bandcamp on a free / PWYL basis and SoundCloud. Enjoy, tell your friends and don’t let the Christmas shopping get you too stressed.
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If you follow on Facebook / Twitter / etc, you may already know this but Little Red’s new remix EP “Teeth, We Have” is coming out on Friday 27th November and features 2 brand new Tiger Mendoza remixes. Listen to my remix of “The Huntsman” below.
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You can pre-order the EP (which also includes my remix of “Petals”) from Bandcamp. The band are also releasing an EP of originals on the same day called The Huntsman. I’m not on that one though but never mind.
Ok brace yourselves, this could be a long one.
You may have noticed that there have been a few changes around the site and on various social media channels. That’s to go with the changes that there have been behind the scenes which I’ll try to explain here.
Without going in to any ridiculous details, the “band”, if you could ever really call it that, that we once were, is no more. The reason being that for a band to be a band, there really needs to be more than 1 person involved and that’s just not the case any more. Just so we are all absolutely 100% clear, there was no big fight or anything ridiculous like that but Dan and Helena have decided to do some other things with their lives which means that they can’t do TM stuff so much any more and I genuinely couldn’t be happier for them. Seriously. It kind of goes without saying though that if the opportunity ever came up do play with either or both of them again, either separately or together I would jump on it. TM would NOT be what it is today, whatever that is, without them and they remain really, really, really good friends. They’ll be back, I’m sure. I’m just not sure when.
So where does that leave me? Well I did consider stopping this whole silly Tiger Mendoza thing altogether but thinking about it a bit more, I just don’t want to. Why would I? I still love making music and doing gigs and it’s not like I haven’t done solo remixes and gigs in the past. So Tiger Mendoza stays, but it just needs to change shape a bit. Which I think is healthy in the long run.
So what’s next? Well I currently have 1.5 / 2 projects that I would LOVE you to hear by the end of 2015. One is a second collection of tunes with the legendary Dave Griffiths and one is something I’ve wanted to do for a while but haven’t been able to until now. But trust me you’ll like it. Honest.
I’m not going to pretend that we have any kind of mega huge fan base but I do appreciate all of the support that we’ve received so far. Thank You! Feel free to get in touch via Twitter, the contact page or even Instagram (Please not Facebook though, the fan page messaging is rubbish).
There WILL be new stuff for you to listen to soon, trust me. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Ian