Happy new year, ye blog-hunting Ancient Olympian wrestlers!

I handed my new record over to (my pal) Steve today. He's going to equalise the volumes and get it mastered. It's called Motorways Died Young (and it comes with another bonus LP called This Is Not Just Food, This Is Not Even Food), and it should be ready to post within about 4 weeks. I think the record is as good as I can make it. I can't wait to organise the album launch in the next few weeks. Sorry for speaking cheesy showbiz lingo, but it's true- there's no business like showbusiness, and my album launch is gonna be the glitziest, hottest partee in town that night. Or else someone gets fired.

I listened back to My Heart's In The Humber (first record) this evening, while reading for uni and generally footering about. I now realise that, no matter what happens with the new record, M.H.I.T.H. will always be my favourite Jocky record, and to be honest I don't have it in me to make another record that's as well-written, ambitious and important as that.

'important?', you say...

[Long story short, the first record is more personal, with better melodies and more intense songs, than the new one. It's also a more important record, because without M.H.I.T.H., and the fairly positive reaction it got, there wouldn't have been another album.]

Since I pressed the first record in January 2006, I think I've listened back to it twice, all the way through. When I first made it- back in 06 when runaway climate change was but a 90 per cent certainty, and getting a sensible career seemed worthwhile - I thought M.H.I.T.H. was kind-of rubbish, in that nobody would dance to it, it was full of cheesy confessionals, and it would sound really hollow and tuneless, when performed live. These things are all still true, unfortunately. But it was the best I could do- it contained virtually every song I had ever written at that point, performed as honestly as I could, without the help of able musicians, none of whom were willing to help with it. It didn't have any clutter, and the mistakes were all honest mistakes that sort-of added to the charm of the record.

The new record is the best I can do with the current set of songs, written from mid-05 to late 2008. There's nice musical collaborations with my new musical buddies - James Greig and Adam Stafford - and, now that runaway climate change and mass-murder by a gas-guzzling ruling class (i.e. us) and faceless corporations seems a dead-cert, the record has a bit of an apocalyptic theme to it. I hope it still sounds worthwhile and not-over-indulgent-except-as-justifiable-musical-journey-from-an-interested-outsider's-artistic-viewpoint-kind-of-self-indulgent.

Anyway, after completing M.H.I.T.H., I didn't really think I could say much more about my personal whims - and didn't really want to carry on sharing them with the world as I get older - so I didn't think I'd write another record at all. But about nine people - maybe three from Frightened Rabbit, three or four from Falkirk, Lorna, Kevin and Andrea Marini - said they really enjoyed the first record, and asked when there would be another. I said I didn't know.

Until February 2007, I didn't know if there would be another Jocky record. The plan was always- bugger off to Edinburgh, sort self out a bit, and put musical aspirations in a shallow grave. But (1) Edinburgh didn't work out that way, and (2) that February, I listened back to M.H.I.T.H. for nearly the first time, and I realised it wasn't too bad. Quite characterful. Okay, the musicianship is pish, and the individual songs tend to get whapped out at open mic nights for really dreary sympathetic applause and question marks about the writer's delusions of ability, but as a piece, the record communicates a bit of frizzy, cardigan-wearing, vinyl-borrowing bourgeois charm. I realised it was not an embarassment, as I had obviously made a record that made me happy and proud. So I set about writing another record- I had maybe eight new songs that could do with being recorded, and had quite enjoyed meeting all those earnest young men with home studio equipment, amplifiers and girlfriends (REAL girlfriends, not goths) that you tend to encounter through indie music. Trouble is, I have probably only bought about a dozen albums since the start of 2005 (mainly by Malcolm Middleton, Ivor Cutler and Glasvegas. In fact, these are the only albums I've bought in that time, really). So what the hell am I supposed to write about? Especially since my own existence has been really pedestrian and uneventful in these years. And I've fallen out of the habit of sitting around, idly strumming my guitar and thinking of things to sing about...

Enter a vaguely-apocalyptic vague-concept album, which is kind-of about modernity, alienation in a modern world, and the geo-political criminality we've grown up around. Thanks Thom and Brett, as ever.

Motorways Died Young. Out 10th February 2009. Probably the last Jocky album, ever. Fuck off, just fuck off.

Brits grew to love nettles

Medicine stopped

Cholera returned

The people who measured life expectency died

Guns stopped

[Estimated timescale- this century. ETA of the much-awaited second Jocky album- Fck knows.]