You may be interested to know that a new Pete Atkin CD is about to be available.    (Apologies if you are a regular visitor to www.peteatkin.com and this is therefore old news to you, and especially if you have already placed your order.)

The new CD is called MIDNIGHT VOICES, and it’s subtitled ‘The Clive James-Pete Atkin Songbook Volume 1’.   It includes brand new recordings of fifteen of Pete and Clive’s most requested songs –

Touch Has A Memory

Laughing Boy

Senior Citizens

Thief In The Night

Be Careful When They Offer You The Moon

Thirty Year Man

Sessionman’s Blues

The Flowers And The Wine

Payday Evening

Between Us There Is Nothing

Perfect Moments

The Hypertension Kid

The Faded Mansion On The Hill

Beware Of The Beautiful Stranger

The Master Of The Revels

The album features the superb band that performed at St George’s Bristol last June – Pete himself on vocals and acoustic guitars, plus Simon Wallace on piano, Mark Hodgson on bass, and Roy Dodds on drums – with the addition of Mike Outram on electric guitar, Alan Barnes on saxes and clarinet, Clive Bell on shakuhachi, and Sarah Moule on harmony vocals.

These new versions don’t attempt to replace or to reproduce those much-loved original 1970s recordings, nor do they set out to be different just for the sake of it.  In some cases tempos and treatments have stayed remarkably close to the originals, and in other cases different rhythms and arrangements which have emerged organically from more than thirty years of performance reveal new aspects of why we loved them in the first place.  In every case they come up like new.

MIDNIGHT VOICES will be officially launched in early 2008, when it will be available from the usual actual and virtual retail outlets, but you don’t have to wait till then:  the Hillside Music online shop at www.peteatkin.com will be receiving stocks on the 8th of October 2007, and you can place your order NOW for the earliest possible delivery (allowing for UK postal strikes).

As always, more details are available on the website – including previews of a couple of the tracks – and particularly on the Midnight Voices Forum, where your reactions and thoughts on these new recordings will be specially welcome.

As you almost certainly know, the availability of Pete’s 1970s recordings has always been patchy at best, so with any luck these new recordings will introduce Clive’s and Pete’s songs to a whole new audience.   Overnight success surely can’t be more than a few months away.