Text in this rather fetching blue-green is by Hugh.

Propos:

It was 1960, and I was nine, an age when all one really wants to believe is the unbelievable. I chanced to read, in a schoolboy annual, the abridged memoirs of a World War II fighter pilot. I particularly remember the way his account ended, in the first mad euphoria of peacetime, with himself and a friend taking their planes, strictly against standing orders, up for a jaunt. Despite having fought aerial battles flooded with adrenalin, for once they were able to simply enjoy the ecstasy of flight as they rolled and looped in those friendly skies like otters in a pool, unthreatened and free.

Several years later, Bob Dylan was to memorably ask: “Are birds free from the chains of the sky?” My childhood vision clarified into a new realization. All freedoms are subject to gravity. All liberties are freighted with obligations. Thus, in the same way that my 1995 album Negotiations and Lovesongs explored the tension between fidelity and integrity, so this one explores the dynamic that must exist between commitment and freedom ... music for grownups? Maybe.

Hugh Featherstone, August 2006.

Production:

That two of these songs have already appeared on Live at the Chapel is probably due to a fault in the space-time continuum, for which I advise the red pill. The versions here are in fact the originals. The basic tracks were laid down at the “Tone Zone”, Hauset, Belgium, in the autumn of 2003, with additional recording and all engineering, mixing etc. at “while-others-sleep” Göttingen, Germany between April 2004 and April 2006.

Produced for blutopia.networks and DTMCI by
Frank-Stefan Kimmel at while-others-sleep.de.

“Friendly Skies” reaches your ears courtesy of Brauner microphones, Millennia pre-amps, Furukawa cables and Pauler Acoustics mastering tools.

The ideal way to enjoy this album is through a truly fine sound system (with all the irritating gizmos and filters switched “off”), while curled up round a mug of cocoa in your favourite sofa or “comfy Eames chair” after a long walk in the rain. A compressed, frequency-mutilated MP3 through a pair of cereal boxes or plastic bottle tops will never equal the real thing, but feel free to try.

Personnel:

Drums and percussion – Christian Archontidis

Bass – Grischka Zepf

Occasional keyboards and synth-bass – FSK

String arrangement on “The Kennedys” – Hans Kaul

(violins – Henning Vater, viola – Franziska Buttkus, cello – Lucile Chaubard)

Harmony vocals – Kim Bastian, Julia Hansen, FSK and HF

Lead vocals, all acoustic and electric guitars and various subliminal stuff – HF.

Packaging:

All sleeve art, 3-D modelling and layout by PhilBY at nemodreaming.com

Booklet photos by David John Ursa Major Design

Publishing:

Copyright in all songs, words and music: Hugh Featherstone and DTMCI. For more background, go to hughfeatherstone.com and turn left at the pub.

Patrons: thanks to the Colonerus brothers at DTMCI for enabling us to finish this project. Thanks to David for services above and beyond. Thanks to the divine Miss Hansen for bringing her skills to The old frontier and When the Kennedys ride again. Thanks to Walter Kraushaar for creating the Stageplayer “Hugh Featherstone” acoustic 6-string and Stageplayer “HF Custom II” acoustic/electric baritone guitars. Thanks to Tom Launhardt and Karsten Kobs for building a masterpiece I am proud to own and hope one day to be worthy of. Thanks to all the musicians who worked on this album and to “A Panel of Experts” who will have the task of bringing it alive on stage. Respect to Uli, Steve, Kai, Rollo, Big Murph and the Hammer Brothers for the trucks. Thanks, as always, to FSK for sound advice, good company and great cappuccino.

One night a songwriter wakes up with a new song in his head. The song calls to him so urgently that he is forced out of bed to find paper and pen. With the dawn, he finds the scrawled results of his nocturnal labours. So it wasn't just a dream then. As he reads, he realizes that this isn't half bad and reaches for his guitar to try out the chords.

Later, in the rehearsal studio, he plays the new song to his fellow musicians. "You know," says the drummer, "that isn't half bad." "Let's do it," says the bassist. And they do it. It seems to go down well at the next couple of gigs, and the lighting guy says his sister says it's her favourite and wants to know if she can get it on Napster.

Not all songs come that easy. Many have a long and painful birth, conceived on hard and humbling lessons. But the muses decide to smile on our scribe, and at last he has enough songs, the right crew of musicians and the financial wherewithal to get into a recording studio.

Each stage of the production, from first takes, through mixing to mastering, demands tough decisions: what to leave in, what to cut out; what to tweak and what to leave well alone; where is the balance and what is the order?

Somehow the album is finally finished. And despite the inevitable compromises, the wee gems that got lost in the cut, the backing singer's flu, our songwriter is quite justifiably proud of the final product. Look: even the cover design shimmers delightfully before your eyes.

Now all he has to do is pray that enough people buy it. How many lighting guys' sisters are out there anyhow?

To get people to listen to a whole album, there has to be at least one song with something which bridges their attention span, hits a nerve and releases either the endorphins or the paper hankies. It could be a hook, a line, a nifty guitar solo or a crafty chorus. And will they want to keep hearing it? Is it catchy enough to go straight to their heart like a velvet bullet, and stay there? As Carol King once wrote: "Tonight you're mine completely... But will you still love me tomorrow?"

Hugh Featherstone's new album Friendly Skies has more than a couple of catchy numbers, at least two of which are deeply moving. Which of the 13 songs will become your favourite is up to you, but I've already decided on mine.

Once again the Belgian-based bard presents us with a collection of songs which are strung loosely on a theme. In his sleeve notes he writes:

"All freedoms are subject to gravity. All liberties are freighted with obligations. Thus, in the same way that my 1995 album Negotiations and Lovesongs explored the tension between fidelity and integrity, so this one explores the dynamic that must exist between commitment and freedom."

If that sounds serious, it is, and most of the songs deal with the serious business of loss: lost love, lost opportunities, lost horizons. Like a modern day Dante, Featherstone reports from beyond the gates of the purgatory into which his protagonists have been cast. But nowhere does he abandon hope. In When the Kennedys ride again, a song which explores the dreams kindled by the social and political changes of the early 1960s, the promise of a shining future still awaits us, if we are brave enough to reach out for it.

But we're on a curve, my friend
It'll work out in the end
There'll be courageous decisions
There'll be no more divisions
They'll be dancing in the Plaza rain

And not all is doom and gloom in the Friendly Skies universe. The tragi-comic Slo-mo comprises the confessions - both tongue-in-cheek and foot-in-mouth - of someone who always unwittingly sabotages his own chances of happiness. A 21st century Jerry Lewis. I mean, you just have to laugh, don't you?

I trip right over my shoes in confusion
Mistake a dream for the news, my delusion
When opportunity knocks
I fall right out of my socks
and slip sideways and twisting and turning, diving into blue
This force of attraction that fuzzes up my view
When all that I needed and all I had to do
Was love you

As is the case in many Featherstone songs, love is the solution, the salvation, or as he puts it in Love is a stranger here:

Love is the revelator
Love, the illuminator

A pretty big claim for such a small word. But watch out, this is the force which holds atoms together, keeps the universe spinning and can lift us out of the hell we've let ourselves fall into. This is the card that gets you out of jail. More than just a romantic notion, this is Hugh's credo, and this song could well be a manifesto. In a world far below the press of dense grey clouds we are fed on a diet of baubles, TV commercials and junk headlines. But how to lift ourselves above the dross, beyond the clouds, into that wide blue yonder - aloft among friendly skies? Listen to this song and find out.

Love is a stranger here is the strongest song Hugh has put on disc for some time, perhaps his finest yet, and without a doubt the best song I have heard anywhere for years. And let me assure you, it has some pretty tough competition.

Despite its negative-sounding title, the general thrust is upwards. Like it's subject, the whole song seems to lift up and soar into clear space. Quite a feat, achieved largely by the structure of the lyrics and musical arrangement as well as Hugh's sensitive vocal delivery. The fine poetic language provides the feathers to the wings of Featherstone's voice as it glides effortlessly above the light mesh of instrumentation.

I first heard Hugh perform Love is a stranger here at one of his solo concerts and was immediately smitten by it. Having waited impatiently to hear it again, I have to admit preferring the guitar-only version. A version with an open string/keyboard accompaniment should help the song fly even higher. However, while listening on a medium-fi system, I found the drumming too busy and intrusive in some places, which almost distracted this Icarus from his aerial navigation and threatened to topple him out of heaven.

This is presumably one reason why the album's sleeve notes advise us to listen "through a truly fine sound system (with all the irritating gizmos and filters switched "off")". Quite right too.

Everywhere else on this album the drumming and percussion are spot on, most especially on Calling home where it's just perfick. A pacey, uplifting number in which the instantaneousness of modern international communications serves as a metaphor for world unity. I'm not sure how the Martians got in there, but a lot of people like Martians, so why not?

The backing vocals have a small but vital role on this track, and have surprised me into delighted laughter every time they first appear. The contributions of harmony singers Kim Bastian and Julia Hansen are a joy throughout; Kim Bastian having the lighter ethereal voice, while Ms Hanson's has a delicate trace of sensuality. On The old frontier the latter reminds me of the young Cleo Laine.

The old frontier is a wierdly warped science fiction yarn. A tattered temponaut returns from a failed mission to change history and is greeted by his controller(s) in a way which makes me think of a spider welcoming a fly. The chorus "Rely on us; we're on your side" sounds like a slogan for a corporation you wouldn't want to mess with. Pretty spooky.

Sidecar, meanwhile, is a driving instrumental with a hard-edged rhythmic heart and gloriously fuzzy edges (provided by Hugh's distorted Stratocaster guitar), and one of the stand-out tracks of this album.

This should be the theme tune for an offbeat TV series about an unlucky-in-love but sharp-as-Occam's-razor detective. The opening sequence would show the searchlight headlamps of the justice-hungry hero's car piercing a murky metropolitan fog. Suggested locations: Istanbul, San Fransisco, Saint Petersburg, Shangai, Budapest. (Send me a ticket and I'll start scouting locations right away.) On the other hand, you could just pack a picnic in the trunk and listen to this as you glide through a summer afternoon. Either way, a fine piece with incisive drumming by Christian Archontidis, Grischka Zepf's voluptuous bass and some deeply satisfying acoustic and electric guitar by Hugh.

Variously distorted guitar sounds feature frequently on this collection. It's like it's something Hugh has always wanted to do, and only now feels free enough to let rip. About time. This is what the man confided to this reporter:

"The distorted but very linear guitars on Sidecar are a doff of the cap to Rick Derringer whose trademark role with Steely Dan it was to provide such occasional nifty parallel riffs. All the electric guitar work on the album was done with my Stratocaster over a Petersburg 100 tube amp which we then compressed either a little, just enough to get it crunchy (Getting going, getting gone), or a hell of a lot to get it to sound like funky toothpaste (Sidecar, Slo-mo), only opening up the top end for a bit more gloss and expense (When the Kennedys ride again)."

So now you know. But don't tell anybody I told you. It's no secret though that Hugh is a great admirer of Steely Dan's slim but substantial body of work, and When the Kennedys ride again shares the same kind of wry nostalgia for aspects of 1960s culture which obsess Donald Fagan, especially the futuristic visions which were then the stuff of boyhood dreams. But where Fagan seems to bathe innocently in these dreams, Hugh can't resist lifting up the brightly painted stones to show what dark forms crawl beneath. Not for the squeamish.

The overall technical excellence of this album is due in no small part to the talents of producer Frank Stefan Kimmel, who shares with Hugh a keen ear and painstaking attention to detail. Having worked with Hugh on several productions now, he has also acquired a deeper understanding of his work and expectations. Watching the two work together at La Chapelle studios last year, it was evident that they can achieve maximum results with minimum fuss. Hand in glove. Like an aural architect, Kimmel creates sonic worlds and spaces that are worth listening to very, very carefully.

Refugees are not excluded from this album's asylum. A new citizen has become so comfortable in his adoptive land that he forgets he was once himself a refugee. He joins his voice to those who would draw the ladder up after them and bar the gates of their paradise to other supplicants. When he meets the Man who wasn't there, he sees a mirror which confronts him with his own hypocrisy. As ever Hugh Featherstone is willing to evince sympathy for someone whose erroneous attitudes are born of ignorance or a lack of imagination. The song also brings a new twist to an old tale with his adaptation of a witty nonsense rhyme by the legendary and prolific author A. Nonymous.

Yesterday upon the stair
You met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
You wish that he would go away

man who wasn't there takes it place in the canon of Hugh Featherstone's hymns to social consciousness, along with Union Dan, Solid state, The hiring man, Statistic, Candlelight and others. Some of them continue the traditions of the protest song. They do not address the powerful, who for the most part have immured themselves from such fleabites, but certainly are a wake up call for us down here to take responsibility for our planet and each other. This also puts this song thematically at the heart of this album, even though it's not that easy to sing along to, except for the lines "Longing to be, longing to be, Longing to belong", which are quite catchy. However, You would definitely feel a proper Charlie if you found yourself repeating that on the bus.

A few songs on Friendly Skies would fit stylistically well on Hugh's previous albums, and seem to cover older Featherstone territory, especially as they have taken a while to reach the light of a CD laser head. Indeed, this CD has been three years in the making. In the meantime, he has completely let loose with his songwriting to produce completely unexpected and often outrageous numbers like No regrets, Boxcar City, Blue-sky science and Moving to Berlin. These appeared on his 2005 album Live at the Chapel, somewhat upsetting the temporal balance of things (maybe we could send some temponauts off to fix this little problem). Whether they herald a whole new direction in his creative development or just a short detour, time and future recordings will tell.

For now though, this album could be seen as a bridge between lyrical latitudes. When you come to it, the strength and grace of its architecture, the fine curve of its arches and the brilliant glow of its illuminations make it well worth crossing.

David John

www.my-favourite-planet.de