VIRB

Being in Hope&Social at the moment is a bit like wearing a brand new pair of shoes. Daring shoes. They rub, they keep catching your eye and surprising you...but deep down you know they were a great purchase and that you'll grow to love them. Everything must come to an end and everything must have a startling beginning in one way or another. So it is for this. A new set of songs for 5 friends who know each other better than they should. A new feel, a new way of playing, a new outlook... it just had to be a new start. SO farewell FDH, I've loved you well and you've served me like nothing I've ever known but We're so much older now / We need a new home town / A place that we can call our own. I hope anyone who cares will understand and embrace this... it's still music and having a good time first... I hope anyone that doesn't care will start to.

And yes, we will still play the songs. The old songs.

So I'll keep this short as it's late and emotional but I will try to keep doing this more often. We'll also have a new site up soon with lot's of updates and tracks and free stuff for those who want to share. The band wil be out in a week or two (see the dates on the main page) and the EP will be on order very soon from Alamo Music - http://www.alamomusic.co.uk It's all good... stay with us...

These Walls is up for your listening pleasure. It's hard for me to believe now that this nearly didn't make it on to the EP or the album. Madness. One of my favourite tracks - especially now the great Neil Boyton has added Clarinets and we've retrieved 20 seconds of cello from the 4 hours of torture when Rich tried to track it.

And...3 more things:

If you didn't hear Annie Lennox on Desert Island Discs then please try and locate it online somehow - it was incredible. Not least because she played The Blue Nile (who are playing in July JUST GO...)

Our planned video shoot for Daylight Came had to be put on hld for one reason or another. Not without Jase, Wordy (legendary director of all videos Hombre and now H&S) and myself feeling the weight of the man. Turns out you can't shoot test footage for your video near the 3rd most sensitive army base in the UK. The police don't like that. They use words like "terrorist" and "past convictions". And make you go through the contents of your laptop. Jolly nice officers though. They even suggested we listen to my live version of Backstreets whilst they searched... both not very, and VERY rock 'n' roll.

Finally, we had a mail from an individual stating that they refused to download our FREE track from our site because of the forms they had to fill in. Essentially accusing us of trying to fish information to further our evil ways. Two points to make about this. (1) IT'S FREE. That's why we said it was free and made it free. It's free. (2) Having worked on this material for a year unpaid and unfinanced would it really be so bad to be asking for an email address (not that we are, it is FREE) to try and increase the fan base? You usually have to be pay for goods with... oh what's that stuff called... money, surely asking for you to commit to maybe us sending you one email isn't so bad for you to get our music that has taken 6 people 12 months to create (not that we are, it's FREE). Surely? My heart grew heavy with that mail. How do these people tie their shoes?

Anyway I'm off to see Bruce tomorrow night so nothing can bring me down.

Social Simon