New Recording – Harriet Quimby

Thanks to Tom Chester of Blank Tape Studios for helping us produce this recording. It’s the song that won us the Edinburgh Songwriting competition last month.


Want a copy for your iPod? it’s here (it’ll cost you a quid which helps us with the recording costs)

And here is Harriet herself in her purple satin flying suit

Harriet Quimby 1875-1912
1 August 1911, First woman to receive a US pilot’s license
16 April 1912, First woman to fly the English Channel
1 July 1912, Thrown from her plane and died at an air show in Boston Massachusetts

Think of Harriet when you fasten your seatbelt

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We’ve Won an Award!

Yesterday we went to Edinburgh Folk Club to take part in their annual songwriting competition. And our song ‘Harriet Quimby’ was given first prize.

Here’s Harriet flying the English Channel in her Bleriot monoplane, the first woman to make this flight, in 1912. She was the first woman to receive a pilot’s license in the USA and died, very sadly, later in 1912 when she was thrown from her plane at an air show in Boston (don’t forget to fasten your seat belt next time you fly, and think of Harriet).

We’ll try to get a recording of the song on this site soon. Naturally we are very thrilled. The judges commented on the poetic quality of the song.

We’ll be back in Edinburgh on 1st July to sing the song again and pick up the cup engraved with Chris’s name as this year’s winning songwriter.

Our first recording

It’s a little rough round the edges but we are pleased. It’s a poem called Alone, by Maya Angelou, set to music by us.

Break a Leg! particularly likes this quote from Maya Angelou:

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

It came to us from the Music Empowers Foundation

If you click on the song name link in the player you’ll see that Bandcamp shows a charge for downloads but we aren’t expecting anybody to buy this, just listen to it online. There will be a more polished version later on.

Raising the Dead

We’ve only played our arrangement of ‘Lord Franklin’ twice in public but on Monday we clearly got something right because two days later this happens.

Chris has been playing the song solo for a while with no response from the Arctic so obviously Karen’s haunting clarinet part was needed to get things moving.

The Franklin Expedition has had a powerful hold on people’s imagination for the past 170 years and now there’s a rich new seam of material to add to the speculation about what happened to those 129 explorers in a part of the planet which is still mysterious and frightening.