About Me
Penny Priest and Martin Thomas both live in Ludlow, Shropshire, UK. When these two songwriters met around ten years ago, Martin agreed to Penny's request to have a go at playing the mandolin on one of her songs. They have been working together on stuff ever since, with Penny constantly fighting against her folk-proneness, and Martin over the years helping her to learn to love it. Between them, they produce honest and heartfelt songs, sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting, about family, people, places and events they have been touched by. Prior to an appearance at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival in 2006, their last solo performances were about eighteen years ago. Back then, Martin was busy doing the folk circuit and winning song-writing awards, whilst Penny was doing Manchester, including her track on the indie album, 'Manchester North of England', and supporting Nina Simone at the Apollo
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Penny and Martin are currently working on new songs, hopefully to be recorded and uploaded shortly. If you are missing the songs previously posted up here, please get in touch and we'll see what we can do..........................................................
.................................................In the meantime, Penny has been converting old cassettes to MP3 - so the songs currently available on this Myspace are work which Penny did between 1986 and 1988 - OVER TWENTY YEARS AGO!!! Unfortunately, Pen is still grappling with conversion techniques and equipment so these recordings are rather hissy and the ends are chopped off!
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The songs are as follows: The Greatest Girl was recorded at BBC Radio Humberside when Penny was 16. Penny laid down the guitar and vocals and then went away. Unfortunately, in the interim, a seriously dodgy, screechy keyboard track was added, to what Penny feels was an otherwise good production.
Tracks 2, 3 and 4 were recorded at Out Of The Blue studio in Manchester, courtesy of Polygram Records. Backing was provided by a motley crew including musicians from the band, Microdisney, and Manchester music journo John Don't-Give-Me-No-Fanny Slater, who was also Penny's manager at the time. The track, Sometimes, was on the indie album, Manchester North of England. Penny had a shit time in the recording studio that week and the day they finished she went and recorded Let Me Hide, with someone from BOP Cassettes, in a cellar somewhere in Manchester, with just her and the engineer. She was fairly pleased with the result.
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