Smile For The Camera

Now, don’t get me wrong – our photo session last Saturday was a great success, and we reckon we have got a few shots that will almost definitely make the album sleeve – and possibly the one that will make the album cover.

However, with every great photo come a few fairly bad ones – as will be documented below. We’ve found out over the years that without Emma in the band to take the focus off the rest of us, we generally are one of the most un-photogenic bunch of people around. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why she likes working with us, as she knows when a photo is taken, even if she looks bad, she’ll look good standing next to the rest of us.

But what the hell, we’re an acoustic roots band – the roots scene is full of fat men with stupid beards.

Anyway – example one of a bad band photo:


This is the ‘better’ one of the two on offer today. We’re actually looking here at a Bracknell chav kitted out in full tracksuit with a hood. There were many around that morning for us to choose to look at, but I think his lime green attire fixed our gaze, with comments such as ‘why would you even think about wearing that’ and ‘I wonder how many kids he’s fathered’ being branded around.

Ben however preferred to look down at the comedy clown shoes he was wearing that day…..

This second one is just horrendous, however I’m fairly confident we did say at the time it would be rubbish.


The original plan was to have Emma stand on the bench, with us around her – however, we didn’t take in to account the main road and copious amounts of houses that would have been in the picture. So, cue good idea to take a close up shot with the camera looking up at us. This idea has led me (Phil) and Gethin to look like we could be Siamese twins, with Gethin sporting the cheesiest grin I’ve ever seen and me being possessed by a devil like presence. Ben seems to be almost an afterthought in the photo (some might say he’s an afterthought most of the time – not I though, I’m always standing up for the guy).

So there you go, just a brief glimpse of the photos you won’t be seeing on an All Things Considered record in June – however next week we’ll be starting our competition to win these photos printed on a fine set of drinks coasters – a prize money can’t buy...

New dates

As promised, a few new live dates have now been confirmed. We're having a busy time in March, playing The Jazz Club, Reading on the 8th March, and The Tup, Guildford on the 11th, as well as The Spice of Life and Good Intentions all within a few days of each other! Also confirmed is a Portsmouth date in September at Roger Courney's renowned open-mic night.

More to come soon, including some festival slots hopefully, keep checking out our schedule at our band website to be kept up to date!

We've been recording!

Hello everyone. As promised, today we have the lowdown on yesterday's recording session...

The plan was to put down some guides for our new song, currently nameless. However, we only wrote it last week, and on top of the fact that you could probably count the number of times we'd played it on one hand, we only had an hour to do it, as Adrian was running his Artree Music open-mic night later in the evening. You certainly can't say that we ever shy away from a challenge...

But, we just about managed it! With Adrian only slightly late to start his night, and just a little bit of copying and pasting (whoops, forget that I said that!) we had some reasonable guide parts down. Unfortunately it went slightly downhill from there - while Ben did his usual lightning-fast almost-one-take-wonder trick with his bass part, he had slightly less luck with his harmonica part, although he did play us something that was either the Sailor's Hornpipe or the Blue Peter theme-tune, we're still not quite sure which... That combined with my equally bad attempt at playing my violin (I must write parts that I can play in the future!) meant that, unfortunately, we can't quite yet offer a sneak preview of how it's sounding...

However, we've got something almost as good for you to enjoy - a little snippet of how The Finer Details is coming along:

We hope that you enjoy it, and we'll be back next week, after taking some photos in a field near Bracknell (life in a band is so glamorous...) and another recording session on Monday. We might even have some more snippets of album tracks for you if you ask very nicely!

New post tomorrow...

Afternoon all.

Yes, we know, we said we'd update on Mondays and Thursdays, but we're in the recording studio this evening, so we thought we'd delay it until tomorrow in the hope that we can give you a bit of a sneak preview as to what will be on the album...

So, we'll see you again tomorrow!

Cupid - Draw Back Your Bow

They say Valentines Day is the most romantic day of the year. Whether or not that’s just the greeting card companies telling you that is something that could be debated – but even so, it’s the time of year when we bestow gifts and affection on our loved ones in a big international show of human emotion.

This year’s was a little extra special for one member of this band. For a while now we were all wondering when Darren would pop the question to Emma. Would it be on one of the 5000 holidays she seems to go on every year, or maybe he might have waited until her birthday? Well, we got that answer when the deed was done on Saturday night – with the answer being a big fat yes! Suits and hats at the ready people – we have a wedding to go to!

It goes without saying that all of us in the band obviously wish them all the happiness in the world – they are two of the best people you could ever wish to meet. They deserve everything that they have coming to them, which will at some point probably include screaming kids, early nights and financial problems (speaking from experience).

Now this blog entry could go on about all the weird and wonderful people Emma has had hanging off her for years – but I think we’ll leave that for another day. We promised you a stalker story or two – and we will deliver – but this is probably not the occasion for it…….

Darren we'd just like to point out is a fine human being and not in any way showing any signs of stalkerism (which is a word I believe I may just have made up).

In other news – we’re back in the studio this week, hopefully putting down the base of what will be the final track we record for the album. It’s an interesting one in that we’ve only just written it – and by that I don’t mean only just finished it – actually having written it from start to finish in our last rehearsal. They say spontaneity is a great thing in the creative arts. I think we’ll have to see about that on Thursday!

We have also confirmed the date and venue of our launch party – which I would imagine will be the official album launch date. We’ll keep you posted with this info as soon as we have it, as we just have to cross the T’s and dot the……lower case j’s.

Until Thursday people

News - festivals and album launch!

We’ve been in negotiations about performing at a couple of summer festivals this year – watch this space for updates. Also, we’re very close to agreeing a date and destination for our album launch gig/booze up! All very exciting, so be sure to keep checking back for updates!

All Things Considered - Putting Faces to the Names

Shhh. Nobody tell the rest of the band I was a few hours late doing a blog update. It will be our little secret. Mmmmkay? Okay...

Well I think that its about time that we give you the opportunity to put some faces to the names. Who are these strange people? What do they look like? Well, scroll down and all of your questions will be answered. Let's start with the most important member shall we?


Yup, that's me. I'm Ben and I play bass. I would like to point out that, despite what the rest of the bunch would have you believe, I don't wear a Stetson hat while eating Oreos all day long and am, in fact, not a fake American. The fact I'm wearing a College Football T-shirt in that photo and writing this while watching NASCAR should probably be ignored, as it ruins my credibility. Moving swiftly on...


This lovely lady is our singer, Emma. Isn't she pretty? Normally, she is the nicest person you would ever want to meet. That is, however, until you try to take her picture. See, I kind of turned up with a camera at rehearsal on Tuesday without warning and it turns out that Emma can get quite camera shy. So I have a lot of photo's like this -


There are also quite a few she would not want to see. If we get enough requests in the comment section I may post them...

Up next is the person who, in 'the biz', is referred to as a musical genius. It is our ever inspiring violinist Gethin. Here, he can be viewed staring into the future towards his next inspirational moment.


It's a little known fact that he taught Barack Obama that look.


Now, I believe it is time to introduce you to our genius, but in a very different way, Adrian. He is our guitarist and is one of those special guitarists. He will sit there and play something that is original, brilliant and inspired. He will then have no clue what he actually did and if we don't make him record it straight away, it will forever be lost to the ages.


Now, finally, for the man who is quite frankly the bane of my life. It's our percussionist Phil. Looking past the fact he is a nice, funny and incredibly hard working bloke, I believe him to be pure evil. Methinks the only reason he has be around is for joke fodder...


Well that's us. We have a Photobucket account you can follow here, which we will be updating regularly with many more photos.

Have a good weekend and we will check back in with you next week! That is, unless I get absolutely slayed for my photo selections. In that case it will just be the other four...

We lead such exciting lives, AKA "Phil's Album of the Week, pt 1"

It must have happened to every blogger out there. It comes to Monday, time for a new post, and we come to that unfortunate point of realising that we have done just about nothing of note since our last post! Yes, I (Gethin) have moved house (watch out Tooting...), and there's been the usual neverending conversations trying to organise our diaries (so no change there!), but other than that life in the world of ATC has been a little dull. To be fair, this is mainly due to snow cancelling rehearsals, and inept promoters cancelling gigs, but we promise to try harder to be interesting in the future!

Anyway, in place of our lack of news, we've decided to put Phil's famous (check out www.folking.com) reviewing skills to the test, and see if he can cobble together an "Album of the Week" feature every Monday. And yes, we know, you're probably all inundated with people telling you what to listen to, but we promise it will be good! And to keep you interested, we've decided to put Thursday's updates aside for a chance to find out more about us, with some interesting stories from our lives. Well, we might do anyway, or we might just rant and talk about whatever we fancy, but we promise that you'll find out about Adrian's wigs, Ben's drunken antics and Emma's stalkers at some point...

Anyway, without further ado, I give you Mr. Daniels!

Phil’s Album of the Week
OK – far be it from me to dictate what you people should and shouldn’t listen to (I try to with the others but they generally just ignore me or have already come up with a reason why they think my suggestion is shit), hopefully you’ll find the odd gem in my ever increasing CD collection.

My first is an album that has been out a while, but is still relevant due to a re-release with their original EP added as a bonus disk. I’m talking about Fleet Foxes, by (funnily enough) Fleet Foxes.

This album has basically taken the music world by storm, figuring highly in all major music publications top 10’s of 2008 – and unsurprising really, as if you can find a better interpretation of Californian Americana out at the moment, I’ll eat my hat (if I actually owned one – but I’m sure Ben has a spare Stetson available).

Brilliant harmonies all the way through, blatantly inspired by Crosby, Stills and Nash - classic Americana instrumentation but without a pedal steel or a banjo in site – and in Robin Pecknold, have someone with the potential lyrical and arranging talent of Dylan or Neil Young. It’s a winning combination that will serve this band well for hopefully years to come.

Stand out tracks are the staggering ‘Mykonos’, which you’ll find on the EP and also ‘White Winter Hymnal’ and ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’ on the main record.

And – considering this is only £8.99 in most record shops (well – HMV, as lets face it that is the only record store these days, but that’s a whole other rant you can look forward to), it’s worth the investment.

I’ll be writing about all sorts on this page – not just folk tinged records, however if folk, roots and acoustic music is your cup of tea, visit the great Mike Wilson’s blog at www.mikewilsonmusicblog.blogspot.com for some excellent in-depth reviews of both albums and gigs.

Welcome To Our World

Imagine being in a band…what could be the worst thing that may happen to you? Cancelled gigs? Unable to make rehearsals? Double bookings? Band squabbles?
It's been quite a week for us and we've had to put up with and cope with all of the above. We've been snowed in and unable to make it to various events which we have had planned and so have had to survive a whole week in each others absence, musically frustrated!
As if that wouldn't be annoying enough, I (Emma) managed to double book an appointment we had made to go and shoot photos for the artwork for our album cover and inserts – not pretty! Adrian gave me jip over email, bringing me close to tears at my office desk…begging forgiveness before getting in a huff with him for talking to me 'so rudely' when it was me who was in the wrong all along – what a girl!!
Still…thanks to Phil & Gethin's calming influence, and Ben's confusing sense of humour we managed to come to an alternative, though perhaps not ideal, agreement and life in All Things Considered is back on track.

In The Beginning

So – how can an unsigned acoustic roots band try and get people who have never heard of us, or indeed our music, interested enough to buy our record when it's released?

Well – I'll tell you how – by getting you good people to read countless ramblings about us until such time as you feel part of our extended family.

You'll feel the warmth and camaraderie that oozes from every one of our collective pores. Look and listen on in amazement at the musical wonderment we create each and every week, holed up in the recording studio with no windows and enough air fresheners to re-fragrance an entire levellers gig.

You'll meet us all and get to know what we're like, what makes us tick, what makes us angry and most of all – what our favourite sandwich filling is, because as everyone knows that is what defines a person. There are no egg and cress lovers in this band – I can tell you!

You'll find out why Emma loves her sports car more than she loves anyone in the entire world put together (libellous???? Nah). Why Adrian can write a masterpiece – perform it 100 times and then instantly forget it if we haven't played it for more than a day (frustrating??? Yes), and why Ben insists on going to bed wearing a Stetson, eating Oreos, drinking milk and making everyone call him Hank (fake American??? Without a doubt)…..

You'll hear amusing gig stories – like the time we helped draw a raffle to the Bullseye theme (although there was no speedboat on offer I'm sure - if I remember rightly - there was a tea service from 1983 and there were definitely his and hers watches). You'll hear interesting stories from the studio where we continue to put together an album that will change the world……well, hopefully.

The plan is for you to be able to see photos and maybe even video footage of us hard at work (in the studio that is – this is a family blog), and also snippets of the odd album track and also new ideas we might have come up with.

Basically – you get to know us, get to like us and then you'll be chomping at the bit to part with your hard earned credit crunch sapped cash to own a copy of our first, and currently very best album.

So why not follow us using the many bells and whistles this modern day interweb provides. Grab the RSS Feed of this very site by clicking feeds2.feedburner.com/atcuk or you can let us chip merrily at you over on Twitter by clicking http://twitter.com/ATC_UK. We’ll be updating twice a week – currently we reckon on a Monday and Thursday, so stick it on your calendars.

Now, if everyone is ready - get set for an education!