Peepswat's Weblog

Don’t Quote Me On That!

peepswat — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:39:13 +0000

Do you remember in the last Blog, I said that all of our master tapes were unusable? I obviously didn’t have all the facts.

One of our sound engineers, who worked with us in the early days, has come across a tape recorded 4/3/1992 which has 4 versions of “I WANNA MAKE LOVE TO YOU” on it. Currently Jon, Graheme and myself have been transferring it to digital and making tweaks to improve the sound quality!

So, now I can exclusively reveal the full track listing for “ON THE RISE” :

“Where’s Red”, “Winter Sun”, “On The Road”, “I Wanna Stay”, Claire’s Song(Love From Afar), “I Wanna Make Love To You”, “Iron Into Gold”, “Edge Of Sanity”, “Feeling Hot”, “The Sun Is Clouding Over” – plus 2 bonus tracks “P.P” (Perfect Paula) and “I Wanna Make Love To You” both 2008 remixes!

We’ve got some more sessions booked for October so we’re still hard at it to try and get some new music out to you all by the end of the year if we can!

Don’t forget to join the Vanden Plas group on Facebook or view the videos on Youtube or even check how we sound on our Myspace site or go to our label website at Yewtreemusic.com.

After 16 years we’re back, bigger than ever and reaching a whole new audience thanks to the WWW!

The Good News or The Bad News?

peepswat — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:16:19 +0000

Hello to all of you who’ve recently become members of the Vanden Plas group that’s on Facebook. What a lovely looking bunch you are!

I also wanted to mention the team at Yew Tree Music (Claire, Jane, Debbie and Lisa) who tell me that the number of visits to their site has doubled since they released information about the reunion. It’s gratifying to know that there’s a real BUZZ in the air about VP reuniting again.

NOW. Do you want the good news or the bad news?

The BAD news is that our original master tapes haven’t stood the test of time and they’re in a very poor condition. Even with modern remastering techniques they couldn’t be restored. So, we’ve had to scrap the idea of a remastered re-issue album I’m afraid.

The GOOD news is that we’ve decided to re-record the old songs instead. So, “ON THE RISE” will still happen but it’ll now be 10 songs from our past, performed today. The 11th track will be the re-mixed version of Jon’s song “P.P”.

I can also exclusively reveal two of the ten tracks will be “Edge of Sanity” and “Iron into Gold” which will be familiar to the Graheme fans reading this!

Three piece suits me!

peepswat — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:46:48 +0000

This week I wanted to share with you how special it is for me to be back with Jon and Graheme.

We really click when we’re sparking ideas off each other which, of course, I don’t get when I’m working on solo albums.

It’s also nice to have that comfort of having close friends around you. People who know you inside out. People who’ve seen you through lots of different experiences. People who appreciate everything you have to offer without you having to keep banging on about what you are contributing.

I also wanted to let you all in on a secret!- We have discovered a song that was written in 1992 and was intended for our first studio album. It’s a song called “Vanden Plas” and we have been working on a demo of it this week for possible inclusion on “Terms and Conditions” or even as a bonus track for “On The Rise”.

We have uploaded 6 videos of our Pyramids performance now so check ‘em all out on youtube and go to MySpace to hear the 2008 version of PP that I worked on earlier this year.

This track was the catalyst for us all realising we should all be playing together again.

VP revisit The Pyramids.

peepswat — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:56:30 +0000

This week we have been looking through our archives. It’s not the audio tapes that have been getting our attention though, it’s a video tape!

The tape in question shows Vanden Plas performing at The Pyramids in Southsea, Hampshire back in 1992. We’ve had a great time reminiscing about how brilliant we felt at the time.

We all look so young, except Jon, who is totally hidden behind the kit, so you can’t see how young he looks anyway!

We couldn’t resist having a little bit of a tweak so we’ve edited the soundtrack for the song “Where’s Red?” and extracted that part of the show to present it as a standalone video.

We’re going to do it for all the songs eventually, so keep your eyes on “youtube” and our “myspace” page as it’ll be uploaded soon.

Barking up the right tree.

peepswat — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:29:54 +0000

Hello to all the “Vanden Fandens” in the UK and also people from Germany who keep contacting us. Apparently, there is a Heavy Metal group there also called Vanden Plas but they haven’t been around as long as us! – We’ve got the video and the paperwork to prove it!

We’ve agreed this time around that we should all have an equal say in the decisions about the music and the business and as Jon is out of the country for the next fortnight, at Le Mans (spectating, not driving), we can’t really do any writing or recording.

Graheme and I are still busy though, we’ve been designing a new logo for the Yew Tree Music site (with input from Jon via e-mail) which you can now see on the Vanden Plas page!

We plan to have a full track listing for the new album by October…and…some EXCLUSIVE photos of us at work in the studio..phew!

Finally, I wanted to repeat a phrase I heard recently at Yew Tree, when somebody handed in a rather good demo they were told they were “Barking up the right tree“