Don’t Look Back

Or what Orpheus might have got right...

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A few weeks ago, I spent the morning listening back to the master for Communion for the vinyl and CD pressing that is going to be coming out in April via Last Night From Glasgow. It was first recorded in a single afternoon at the legendary Church Studios in London, eleven long years ago. Just me, a Steinway piano, an all-female string trio in a room together, playing together, in “communion” with one another.

It will be the first time that it has ever been released on vinyl, and the first time also that it will be getting a proper CD release (if you don’t count the few hundred copies I hand-pressed and sold over the counter at Rough Trade shops…)

And it got me to thinking about the old adage that we shouldn’t ever look back but should instead look forwards, and be firmly focused on what is ahead of us. As ever, you can’t get away from a bit of book-bothering when it comes to me, so this led me down the path of revisiting the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and what he might have got right with that fateful backward glance…

You see, Communion is quite an emotional listen for me for many reasons.

I think, in part, because I haven’t ever dared to reflect back on that recording for so many years and had fallen into that old trap of presuming an upward trajectory in all things artistic and creative. That this was a period of my life best forgotten.

But I was wrong.