Album Notes

Bahaudin was recorded in Warrington, Cheshire, in 1999 and 2000. It grew out of a nucleus of 3 songs written in Iona, Scotland, which found their way to the eventual producer, Nigel Stonier. A variety of lyrical themes and styles are bound together by an excellent band including Paul Burgess (10cc) on drums, Rod Clements (Lindisfarne) on bass and slide guitar, Nigel Stonier (guitars and bass) and Steve Millington (Horton Weavers) on keyboards. Also features Buffy Ashton, Thea Gilmore, Richard Sample and Gareth Darlington.

Extract from 'Behind the Music' page on the artist's website:

During a visit to Iona, where the Christian missionary St Columba founded a monastery in 563, some spiritual (or so I thought) songs emerged, which were to form the nucleus of my first venture into CD production.

These were recorded as demos in the music room of my folks’ house by Dan Simmons. It was sort of like the old days, except there was to be no synthetic backing, it was gonna be ‘rootsy’ (meaning it would have real instruments).

There then followed an expensive, protracted but worthwhile recording process at Frog studios in Warrington, Merseyside featuring some highly-skilled people. I didn’t come up with any more spiritual songs but I did the best I could and the writing styles were nothing if not varied.

Me and a friend went on a photo shoot at the time of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in parts of Britain. I remember standing in the Yorkshire Dales dressed as a monk and a vicar getting out of his Land Rover and shouting at us to get off the grass!

Armed with plenty of plush new product, I went on another holiday (3 years after the Scottish trip) and played in New Jersey, Syracuse and Toronto, fighting off headaches all the way and playing new stuff on the old mandolin.

A while later I heard from a fellow whose name really is Bahaudin (pronounced BA-HOW-DIN). He’s an economics lecturer in Florida and he found me while looking for his name on the internet. He recently told me there’s a ‘city of Bahaudin’ in Afghanistan. The original Bahaudin, who died in 1389, was the founder of a branch of Sufism.