Follow for free on my Patreon.
I post updates and new music every few days.
October shows
My October plans:
10/10/23 House Concert, Hamburg
11/10/23 House Concert, Hamburg
12/10/23 Tonfink, Lübeck
13/10/23 Prinz Willy, Kiel
14/10/23 Café Feuerwache, Hamburg
15/10/23 Deichdiele, Hamburg
16/10/23 Lítil, Hamburg
18/10/23 Hole Of Fame, Dresden
19/10/23 Lila Drache, Halle
20/10/23 FREE
27/10/23 FREE
28/10/23 Zucker, Darmstadt
Please contact me for any details about any of these - you are all most welcome.
'The Hills Are Alive' live at Cafe Feuerwache, Hamburg 20/06/22
Photo by https://www.instagram.com/idaorloff/
I started playing this long song again, here it is in Hamburg last week.
I’m releasing the complete concert from this night as a limited CD and full quality download for subscribers to my Patreon or Bandcamp. Please consider doing that via the links below. Each month I make a new release - new recordings, unreleased material or live recordings and this is the 25th.
'Luck Is Cruelty On The Wind' (Cafe Feuerwache)
Live in Hamburg, last November. From the 'Cafe Feuerwache' release available tomorrow as a full quality digital download and limited handmade CD edition on Patreon or through my Bandcamp subscription.
Hamburg concert this month
I’ve just added a special, acoustic concert in the Buchhandlung Blattgold, Wexstrasse 28 in Hamburg for next Friday evening - the 24th of September.
It’s free entry, with donations and I’ll be playing for an hour from 19:00. Spaces are very limited - I think about 20 people can attend. It’s 2G and you’ll need to reserve your place via email.
You can also just drop me a message and I’ll take it from there.
If you use Facebook, the event is here.
That’s all the info - I’m very excited to be playing back in Hamburg after almost a year away and hope some of you can make it.
Have a great week,
Stephen
20 concerts from 2020
I played just twenty concerts last year and here’s the pages from my diary for the last two. I scanned the rest and made a series of all of them that are over on my Patreon here now.
I’d like to think everyone that’s into my stuff considers supporting me directly over on Patreon but more than that I do hope I get to play more concerts soon, my word.
Bremen and Hamburg this weekend
Hi all
I have two concerts this weekend in the north of Germany - Bremen this Friday the 6th and Saturday in Hamburg on the 7th of March. Both are house concerts and if you’d like to join please simply drop me an email at thegreatpark@icloud.com. For the Hamburg concert in particular, space is limited and it would be sad if anyone wanted to join but wrote to me the evening of the show when it’s likely too late. So please get in touch before the weekend.
I’m back south next week for concerts in Switzerland - all dates as ever here and again please get in touch if you’d like information about any of those.
In Thun next week at the lovely Mundwerk I’ll be joined by my friend Geneva whose album I recorded and who’ll be playing her first concert in Switzerland. Come on.
Massive thanks to everyone who already signed up to my Bandcamp subscription deal. The first physical copies were sent to you all yesterday and I’m making more today. More to come later, it goes on.
Have a nice week,
Stephen
Fritzen, Hamburg (free download)
Photos by Jenny.
I recently got invited to play a concert in the wonderful little Fritzen design studio / gallery / shop in Hamburg. Was a real pleasure and a lovely visit and I wanted to share a couple of songs, some photos, brilliant sketches and illustrations from the evening. You can imagine the crowd were all hot creative folks so there was a fair bit of sketching, photographing and that sort of thing going on. Please click through the links, download the songs and share and all that - the people up there make lovely stuff and are incidentally the best hosts. Thanks Kathrin and all fine Fritzen folks.
Photo by Kathrin.
The following illustrations are also by Larissa Bertonasco.
Free download from Zürich and Hamburg tomorrow.
I got home late Sunday night and will leave for Hamburg tomorrow, so just enough time here to put some washing through, change the guitar strings and import all the recordings from the last 10 days of concerts. I haven’t had a chance to listen to everything properly but here’s a very quickly mixed song from the concert Sophia and I played at the beautiful El Lokal in Zürich on the 27th of October.
We don’t get to play so often and our rehearsal was the 20 minute soundcheck we took. Fine, is what it is.
I may share the rest of this concert when I get the time, so please check back for that.
I have a return to the north and a concert in Hamburg tomorrow night at Fritzen. Wohlwillstrasse 20, free entry from 20:00. Happy to see some familiar faces there!
More later, kind of running…
Stephen
Bag, laptop, hard drives, unreleased music and videos stolen
As some of you may be aware my rucksack was stolen last weekend after my concert at Kolibri near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. I had a lovely gig with a great crowd and a few hours later when most of the guests had left i was told to bring all my bags into the main room and we sat outside the venue chatting and apparently keeping an eye on the front door. Not so well as it turns out.
Suffice to say when I popped in to use the toilet I noticed right away that although my suitcase and guitar were right where I had left them my rucksack was not. Felt immediately sick. Inside the rucksack were the following
• Apple Macbook Air laptop. Kind of old but with a few weeks work that I hadn’t backed up yet. Also expensive to replace.
• Three external hard drives. Probably the worst thing lost - two were full of a brilliant collection of films and tv shows I had spent years collecting and were invaluable on long train rides and the other had six years of live recordings and videos I had filmed since coming to Germany. This included a couple of videos I had just edited for songs from the new album, stuff from my trip to Naples with my mother earlier this year, a session recorded just that morning on a boat in Flensburg and dozens of other concerts mixed and ready to be made available at some point in the future.
I know, I know - I backed things up but then I took the backup along with me and even kept it in the same bag as the original copy. Noob move.
The music / videos one is password protected - so that’s essentially worthless.
• Current diary. I write lyrics for my songs in my journal first, mostly whilst travelling. I also tend to fill it with contacts and random personal thoughts along the way. This isn’t worth anything to anyone else I’m sure. Paper and ink, straight to the recycle bin. But I lost a bunch of ideas and all the next big hits for sure.
• Nintendo Switch and many games and all my save files. Mother fucker.
• House keys, headphones, 100€, bag of sunflower seeds, biography of Virginia Woolf. Flotsam and jetsam basically.
For what it’s worth the rucksack looks like this:
I don’t expect to see any of this stuff again and I’ve already started making plans to replace things I need to carry on working in the way I have been, with a little more security of course. But, as is often the case with this sort of thing, most of what was stolen is worthless to anyone that has it. I get that you can sell the games console right away and perhaps wipe the hard drives and get rid of those for a few euros each. The laptop is password protected and has other security enabled but I guess someone will buy it and do something with it. The bag is quite tasty and in good condition I suppose.
Anyway, had a nice little trip up north - met some fine folk and had some lovely shows but this whole thing made a very distracting time of it. I recorded half a dozen songs on the boat in Flensburg that I hoped to share with you but they are really gone. I do have some live recordings still on my audio recorder and I will post some music in a few days.
For now this is a belated moan and perhaps a call out for anyone in that area to keep an eye out for a rather anonymous looking black rucksack with a book of depressing lyrics inside. Who knows.
From the lovely people at Fritzen.
I’m in Stuttgart today, getting set to leave for Thun tomorrow morning where I will play in the beautiful Schloss Hünegg. Details about that here - please come if you can, I need a lift.
Stephen