Who fancies a bit of a social? I’d love to show you what music we make now, plus there are loads of ingenious ways I want to thank you for supporting Many Fish To Fry before I hang it up and start work on a follow up.

Where: The Social, Little Portland Street, London.
When: 18th September 2012. Doors 7:30pm.
Tickets: £7, or £15 with a t-shirt

When buying your ticket you’ll also be asked to submit a photo of yourself (or something to represent you) so we can add it to our poster. As each ticket is sold, each spot will get filled with an image. Look out for yours at the gig too – we’ll have personalised presents waiting for you.

Everything is ready, all we’re missing is you. 100 tickets, 100 people getting together. Are you free?

Hope you can make it
Jake

**UPDATE** All tickets … Read the rest

This year I released 250 signed, numbered copies of a new live studio EP called ‘Ghostess Live Studio Sessions’.

They all sold out in May – I don’t even have one! They’re all gone. All except one, copy #1 / 250, and an auction has now been started to buy it, with all profits going to Nordoff Robbins – a fantastic music charity http://www.nordoff-robbins.org.uk

Their work involves using music therapy and music services to help a range of people with a range of challenges such as autism, dementia, mental health problems, stroke, brain injury, depression or life-threatening or terminal illnesses, such as cancer. They use your money to dramatically improve their quality of life. Shall we raise them a few quid to help?

The auction can be found here – http://r.ebay.com/IDwuFM and will end on Wednesday 18th July.

The winner will receive the last Limited Edition copy of the Ghostess … Read the rest

After The Social I’ll stop playing gigs and start working on another album.

But before then, I’ve got a busy summer with trips to Ireland and France, more UK dates (Norwich, Devon…), some great festivals and the house concerts won by the ‘At Your Place’competition. Take a look at the full list on my gigs page

The Ireland trip is long overdue. I’ve done support tours there before, and not to get all Irish Tourist Board on you but I’m proper excited about going back. If I meet friends, drinkers, crackpots and geniuses anything like the ones I met last time, it’ll be a blast. I’ll be touring with Liz Lawrence a very talented artist well worth listening to.

It’s been a great year for festivals too – Isle of Wight, Hop Farm and Big Session Festivals went really well. Still to come – Latitude, Summer Breeze, Tonefest, Secret … Read the rest

Winners of the house concert competition were drawn at the end of June, with 5 names picked at random from 150 entries.

I know some of you who really wanted to win didn’t get picked – I’m so sorry about that. We couldn’t pick everyone, and it’s important that it was truly random. There’s always next year…

We’ve now arranged all 5 house concerts:
Meemee Overton, Exeter
Rachel Challis, Birmingham
Deborah Parker, York
Andy Thomas, Huddersfield
Georgie Price, High Wycombe

Thank you so much to everyone who entered, and to our winners for agreeing to open their homes to their friends and family and to me. Bring it on! If you’re planning to come along to one, do post photos and words about it before and after the gig on my Facebook and Twitter pages.
x… Read the rest

Very proud to be launching our new tour t-shirts. What do you think? Click on the image to see it more clearly…
Massive love to Kevin Pollard who worked very hard to design them with me and also to Professor Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University who gave us kind permission to use the image from his paper on the history of human footprints.

They’re for sale at gigs and will also be online very soon. Well worth a catalogue pose…

… Read the rest

A while ago I asked around for support act suggestions and now I’m happy to announce most of the line-ups for the tour. Some came from people submitting links via email, some came from the open mic tour, some were booked by promoters without any input from me and others are people I knew of already.

If you’re looking to come along to a gig, it’s always good to show your support for the support acts. You can maybe start by taking a listen to some of them now? That way you might even know a song or two by the time you show up. After all – who knows who you might discover?

2nd May – Manchester – Deaf Institute – Ivan Campo
3rd May – Newcastle – Cluny – Leslie Roley
9th May – Nottingham – Glee Club – Chris Tye
10th May – London – Dingwalls … Read the rest