I've started playing with a new line-up , still using Eddie Myer on stand up Bass but now also Adrian Oxaal on Guitar and Cello . Did a gig in Brighton last night and it sounded good enough for me - good enough for folk. The boys were smokin'!

There are no poets 

Just put up a version of El D'orado that I played with my great friend The Sandyman

I have just signed a deal with Ho Hum Records and will be releasing a single followed by an album this Summer .
I will be starting recording next week . This following a Christmas where all my studio equipment and recordings were robbed from my home so here's to a brave new year!

Watch this space and keep believing

GG

"At a time when even Iggy Pop has to sell his body to an insurance advert to pay the bills, we know we're in an economic crises kids. Hence why escapism is needed more than ever. Enter Scottish Troubadour Lucky Jim (aka Gordon Graham) and his new single 'Wheels'. Tinged with longing and urgency from the start, the song is a beautiful ode to Grahames' love interest, focusing on the simplistic and sincere message of wanting to give more than able. Sprinkled with lyrics as beautiful as they are aching, like "If I had money in my pocket, I would give it to you, I would buy you all the things that you never knew" It's a song filled with 'Ifs" and "If only's" but not in a victimised way, more in a optimistic "Here's to the future" sense. Driven by a hypnotic acoustic guitar melody and later followed by sparkling piano lines and synths, which are both a light and dainty contrast to Lucky Jim's gravel based vocals, making Tom Waits sound like a choirboy. In short, an enchanting love song full of disire, aspiration and the potential fortunes of tomorrow. There's hope yet for us Iggy!" Drew Lovell Grapevine Online 2009

Lost Soul Band : The Land Of Do As You Please
Author: John Clarkson
Published: 28/10/2008

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article.aspx?id=4861



For about a year from the last part of 1992 through until towards the end of 1993 the Lost Soul Band were one of the great hopes of Scottish rock music. They attracted a fervent following in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. Although they played several well-received shows at the Borderline and Mean Fiddler in London and toured across the UK with Irish other indie hopefuls the Four of Us in November of 1992, they, however, never caught on nationally. By 1994 they had slipped into oblivion, but left behind a brace of under-rated singles, and a minor classic in their first recorded, but second released 1993 album,'The Land Of Do As You Please'.

"It's just impossible for us to sound like other people", Gordon Grahame, the Lost Soul Band's vocalist, guitarist and lyricist, boasted in a 1993 short promo documentary about the band made by their record company, Silvertone. Indeed that was his group's greatest virtue, but also much of the problem. While the rest of the world got into grunge and mourned the death of Kurt Cobain, the Lost Soul Band harked back at one level to the R&B/soul of Van Morrison and at another to the funk of Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament. They were a band out of step with the fashions of the music press and out of time.

The Lost Soul Band had formed in Penicuik, a small town eight miles outside Edinburgh, in 1989 and, as well as Grahame, also consisted initially of Mike Hall (keyboards), his brother Brian Hall (drums) and Richard Buchanan (bass). They were soon joined by Gavin Smith on percussion.

The group's debut LP, 'Friday the 13th and Everything's Rosie', was a part tongue-in-cheek "country" record. Hastily recorded in three days, it was released somewhat confusingly by Silvertone in the summer of 1993 as a means of raising publicity for the band before 'The Land Of Do As You Please', their debut album proper, came out in the autumn.

The subtitle of 'Friday the 13th and Everything's Rosie' was "Excerpts from the life of a spiritual cowboy" and could have equally applied to 'The Land Of Do As You Please'. Similarly-themed, it was written from the subconscious perspective of a young man who had moved into the big city, as the now Edinburgh-based Grahame had done, and who was finding his way in the world and with women, God and his music.

With Mike Hall acting as Georgie Fame to Grahame's Van, 'The Land of Do As You Please' opens with early single, 'Looking through the Butcher's Window'. "There is something missing from my life/ and I can't find the answer in amongst all these coffee cups and ashtrays/ cheese burgers and salt shakers", sings Grahame, always an outstanding lyricist, as Hall's chiming piano swells upwards and the other instruments surge in. "I can't fill it with guitar/I can't fill it with soul/I can't fill it with a nightclub/I can't fill it with rock 'n' roll" he mourns later .. howling in the chorus at the end of this jangling Celtic soul number and this most heartfelt of bruised love songs, "You're not here though. You're not here though." The other instruments, Mike Hall's now jaunty piano, a thrusting guitar and bass, Brian Hall and Smith's clattering drums and bongos, meanwhile all pound and race against each other, bringing it to a breathless close.

It is a fantastic start, but many of the other thirteen tracks on 'The Land of Do As You Please' are equally impressive. 'Heather' is a hazy, melodic folk ditty and acoustic love ballad, written about Grahame's then girlfriend after an apparently serious quarrel. "Made me feel so sad/I was just a lad", muses Graham in a seeming throwaway line, which nevertheless as do many of the other vocals on this record branches a gap between youthful naivety and a more melancholic undercurrent. Also on the first side of the vinyl version of the album is the elegiac, epic 'You Can't Win Them All', the Lost Soul Band's fifth and final single, which, with Hall's mounting piano at the fore, is about someone who has broken away from their roots but enigmatically lost themselves along the way ("You have never liked drink but there is Scotch in your glass/and you have taken up fags and you're crying in class").

'Everything's Going To Be Fine', the opening track of the second side, is an up-rock tempo rock number with a dark underbelly ("I hate myself for hitting you, babe/I hate myself for breaking your face/But that was the wrong time, wrong place/Everything's going to be fine."). Another highlight is 'God', an existential rumination on life's big questions ("Am I wasting my time with my music ?/I thought you gave it to me/I believe in you, man,/but do you believe in me ?"). 'Stranger Things Have Happened' starts out as a twee and fairly forgettable folk ballad but in a minute has soared upwards, with Gavin Smith's bongo beats taking central stage, into the glorious, raucous Sly Stone funk of 'I Used to Think (But I'm Alright Now)'. Best of all perhaps is the torch ballad and aching lament, 'You Must Have Been With Him', which captures with a real sense of poignancy and hurt the realisation that your love is being unfaithful to you (You have changed your brand of cigarettes/You have even started drinking gin/It don't take a fool to realise that you must have been/you must have been with him.").

Mike Hall and Brian Hall both left in early 1994. Gordon Grahame, Richard Buchanan and Gavin recorded a final Lost Soul Band album, the much rawer in sound, and the somewhat puerile-titled 'Hung Like Jesus'. Poorly distributed, it sunk without trace with even ardent fans finding it hard to get a hold of. By the end of that year, playing to increasingly diminishing audiences, even in Scotland, they had split up.

Grahame spent some time living and busking in Amsterdam, Paris and New York, before, after a spell living in Brighton, he relocated to London where he now records and releases occasional albums under the moniker of Lucky Jim. One of his Lucky Jim songs, the Lee Hazlewood-influenced 'You're Lovely to Me' was used in an advert for Kingsmill bread. Mike Hall plays in Edinburgh-based act the Leisure Assistants, who appeared on the soundtrack to Scottish cult film 'Red Road', while his brother now lives in Germany where he plays in an indie rock trio, Sophie So. Buchanan and Smith have both left music.

'The Land Of Do As You Please' has been long deleted, but is fondly remembered in Scotland and still can occasionally be found, usually at extortionate prices, in second hand record shops and on the web. The Lost Soul Band will reunite in its five-piece line-up for the first time in fourteen years this Christmas to play what they say will be two final gigs in Edinburgh and Glasgow. One can only hope that these shows will provide the Lost Soul Band with the worthy epitaph its members deserve.

As I have mentioned quite a few times already I am playing 2 reunion gigs with my old band The Lost Soul Band in Scotland at Christmas. I checked today to see if the tickets had gone up for sale yet and was surprised to find that our listing was attributed to Lost Souls a Polish death metal band. I realised that if I hadn't checked the tickets out we may have been playing to 500 angry Metal heads.
Not being one to balk at being called to task I would have had to dawn some black eyeliner and turn the amps up to 11.
Stranger things have happened...

Tickets are now on sale for my Lost Soul Band gigs in Scotland

This was forwarded to me

It's from The Great Scottish Music Biography

Lost Soul Band

Formed: Penicuik, Midlothian… 1989 by Gordon Grahame, Mike Hall, his brother Brian Hall and Richard Buchanan; Gavin Smith would soon make them a quintet. One of the most criminally overlooked bands to come out of Scotland in the past fifteen years, The Lost Soul Band somehow slipped through the net - a fact all the more galling when one casts a crirical eye over the surfeit of suffocatingly average dross clogging up the current music scene. In Gordon Grahame, The Lost Soul Band boasted a songwriter of breathtaking depth and ability, a man more than capable of following in the footsteps of spiritual mentors Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. He also possessed a stage presence to be reckoned with, attracting a loyal following in Edinburgh, Glasgow and even London where the band gigged regularly at The Mean Fiddler and The Borderline.

A debut single, "Coffee & Hope", arrived in 1991 on their own "Lost Oyster" label (by which time Gavin Smith had joined on percussion), followed later that year by "Save It". Infamous for the stone Roses affair, the London-bases "Silvertone" label were savvy enough to sign the band for a third single "Looking Through the Butcher's Window". As with "Trashscene" (also released in 1992) the latter track offered up a taste of the love shows' rootsy sucker punch, yet it took kitchen-sink mini-epic "You can't Win Them All Mum" to really sum up the band's world weary pathos. Memorable performed by Grahame on BBC2's "Late Show" the song previewed the long awaited debut album "The Land Of Do As You Please". Finally released in autumn 1993, new fans could've been forgiven for thinking the record was a greatest hits set, including as it did no less than five singles. While Grahame's genius shone through on the likes of "Goodbye Beautiful World" and existentialist masterpiece "God", the album as a whole was arguably less cohesive than the hastily recorded "promotional" set which preceded it. Apparently recorded in six days and released as a means of raising the band's profile prior to the debut album proper (confused yet? You should be…), "Friday the 13th and Everything's Rosie" popped up out of the blue in April '93. Subtitled "Excerpts from the life of a Sottish cowboy" with a sleevenote outlining the band's attempts to create their own brand of spiritual country, the record was spontaneous, raw, bittersweet and at 16 tracks, surprisingly consistent. It wouldn't be going too far to say the band had captured something of the essence of Gram Parson's fabled "Cosmic American Music" while Grahame's way with a Dylan-esque lyric encompassed all the encrypted heartbreak, black humour and surrealist poetry which such a comparison implies.

Despite rave reviews from the likes of Select, GQ, Time Out, The Guardian etc, The Lost Soul Band were a band seemingly out of time, largely ignored by the grunge-fixated likes of NME and Melody Maker. Their subsequent demise was barely even noted in the mainstream music press. Although Grahame went on to record a much more oblique, noisy solo internet album "Travelled Some Way" (2000), and play the occasional gig (prior to the Edinburgh Oyster Bars being "stylized" in the name of "progress") , it's surely something of a tragedy that as a singer/songwriter he remains a relatively unknown entity. As does his erstwhile musical companion, The Sandyman, who deserves a mention here for not only his backing vocals on "Friday the 13th" but his overlooked talent as a singer and the many late nights of rootsy brilliance he brought Edinburgh punters back in the early-mid 90's.



!!

I was the singer for a band called the Lost Soul Band several years ago.
We made 3 albums during that time.
We will be doing two reunion gigs on the 28th and 30th Dec in Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively.
If you are not familiar with the material check out our myspace page by clicking on my top friends.

G