We posted a new demo of a song we've had for a while, Places I've Been To Are Known. It's about the story of Donald Crowhurst and Teignmouth Electron. I've been obsessed with this story for a few years since I first heard about it when I was in Sydney a couple of years ago. I'd seen an installation by an artist called Tacita Dean. It was called ..Disappearance at Sea.. and consisted of grainy footage of a sun-bleached, rotting boat on a distant Caribbean island. It was baffling, but the description of the boat and of Crowhurst himself was too interesting to ignore. He was a competitor in the Golden Globe round-the-world solo yacht race in 1968. Dean..s work described how ..inexperience, deceit and an untested, poorly prepared vessel .. combined to bring about his demise... Later, I learned more about the whole sensational story: about how Crowhurst, a weekend sailor with a failing small business, had persuaded backers to finance the building of the ..revolutionary.. Teignmouth Electron so he could take part in the race. He felt the publicity from his inevitable victory would make him a hero, restore his fortunes and provide the attention a genius like him really warranted. Soon after setting off, he was keeping two logs: one in which he recorded his actual progress, sailing round in circles in the mid-Atlantic; the other in which he detailed his painstakingly imagined record-breaking progress round the world. The latter account of the voyage he cabled home, and pretty soon a hero's welcome as winner awaited him in the UK. With the end almost in sight, succumbing to madness, with the strain of the lies and loneliness overcoming him, he stepped overboard in the mid-Atlantic. His boat was found drifting alone, a modern Mary Celeste, with the logbooks aboard.

The story was later reconstructed in what has since become my favourite book: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Ron Hall and Nicholas Tomalin. It is a brilliantly researched, beautifully restrained book that reconstructs the tale expertly from the log-books while also managing to be simultaneously scabrous and heartbreakingly humane to the hapless Crowhurst as he is slowly driven mad by his self-induced predicament. It is a truly black tale, but so compelling that Chichester, himself one of the first to circumnavigate the globe, famously called it ..the sea drama of the century... Tacita Dean was interested in the tale as ..a story about human failing; about pitching his sanity against the sea.. and took Teignmouth Electron, rotting on a beach as a tragic symbol of his plight. The story usually ends there, with Teignmouth Electron disappearing from view.

Then, a year later, I was lucky enough to go to the Cayman Islands for a work trip. We were on the island called Cayman Brac and drove past this wrecked, dilapidated boat. I knew straight away that it was Teignmouth Electron, Crowhurst's boat. Nobody knew how it had got there - in fact, none of the locals knew anything about it. But later I learned that the boat had passed slowly into decrepitude, being put to work as a pleasure craft and a dive boat, before ending up on the Brac where it had been slowly rotting ever since. What on earth, I thought, would Crowhurst make of that? The cipher of such a story seemed to deserve a better fate. I took some pictures (one illustrates this song on the site), checked it out, and soon after we wrote the song about him.

Then last week I saw that the same people who made the Touching The Void film have made a film about the story which is due out in a few weeks. It's called Deep Water, and they've used all the old video tapes and recordings they found on the boat whe it was discovered. The trailers are on You Tube I think and it looks like it's going to good. With this news, and the fact we've been recording the song the last few weeks, Crowhurst is back in my life so I thought I would share the story with anyone who cares. Read the book by Hall and Tomalin, it's amazing. And we'll put the finished version up when it's done. This one is unmixed but the ideas are all there.