Martin Plumley

Guitarist

Band Sightings

Available Recordings

Involvement with Spirits Burning

"Through Bridget really. I had become involved in the recording side of things to help out with her work with Mooch and Spirit's Burning. Bridget was reworking some song ideas for Earth Born and I started working out guitar parts to help with song structure. Initially we worked on Earth Born and Storm Shelter. I got involved in setting up our transfer of files to Don and my interest in recording technology has grown alongside this project. As I got more into Electric guitar sounds and FX using the Variax and TonePort I ended up playing guitar on Always. I'm probably the least experienced musician on the album and was really nervous about sending off my Always guitar tracks. I was over the moon when Don said that he liked them. I've listened to lots of the tracks on the CD as they've evolved and it's been fascinating".

Recording For Earth Born

(Martin plays on Earth Born, Always and Storm Shelter)

"I've talked a fair bit about our home studio set up on the home recording page but basically we used our little setup to record Bridget's vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, drum machine, trombone, clarinet, sax, apache drum and probably others I've forgotten about. It's been brilliant to see Bridget's first tentative steps with the digital recording and then her growing confidence and now she's probably more knowledgeable in most areas than I am. Lovely! The technology that is available in this area is fantastic now and is helping to fuel the explosion in quality home produced music."

Statement

"I grew up in Bristol in the late 60s and 70s. Hmmm...never been in any bands or recorded anything before this but been messing about on the guitar for 30 years. My first obsession was with the Beatles and then 70's heavy rock and reggae. Then I developed a love of music which reflected my experience of being English (Julian Cope, XTC, Billy Bragg, Robert Wyatt, Tom Robinson, Ralph Vaughan Williams) and I love political and protest music. I also loved everything Talking Heads and David Byrne related - surely one of the most influential bands ever.

Since meeting Bridget my confidence in my own abilities (musical and otherwise) has grown and grown. I admire Don's approach to the evolution of this project, personally and musically. He has been totally unprecious about his own song ideas and very willing to let people take his ideas and run off in all sorts of directions with them. The end result speaks for itself. I'm amazed, too, at how musical ideas flow out of Bridget. It has been fantastic to be able to share this musical journey with her and I hope there will be much more to come.

My own musical direction seems to be going in a more acoustic direction at the moment as I find myself listening hard to people like John Martyn, Nick Drake and Bert Jansch so we'll see where that takes me."

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