DEL & THE FALCONS PART THREE 2024

The boys in the band, taken on a sunny winter's day in Whitby, are Malcolm Willis, Paul Butler, Peter Embleton and Merv Jones. Photograph © Dorothy Butler.

**********************************************************************************************************************

Del and The Falcons in the 21st century

And so we continued to meet at Pigpen about once a month, playing and talking…..

It’s worth remembering that we four are the original members who first met back in April 1963 and continued until 1966 with just a couple of rhythm guitarists at different times for a few months, surely a unique record?

We decided to make sure that this time ‘round we had some evidence of our playing together and so enlisted our long suffering roadie/driver Keith to video parts of the sessions, just in case Peter Jackson fancied another project after making the Beatles Get Back…..!

We were contacted, via Stan’s website, by, sadly now the late Paul (Charlie) Clasper our original rhythm guitarist and so arranged for him to pop up from down south and join us for an afternoon of playing and reminiscing.

Malcolm then had an email from Derek Smith who was writing a book “Thornaby Lives 1892 to 1992” asking if he could meet us as he was adding a chapter about the bands from the area, so we met, chatted and found ourselves getting mentioned when the book was finally published. Not forgetting, whilst we are mentioning books the superb “ Boys in the Bands” that Chris Scott Wilson wrote where EVERYONE gets a chapter!

We then discovered the Forum music centre in Darlington, and this being, geographically, much more convenient started to book sessions in their excellent rehearsal rooms usually running from 12:00 noon until 4:00.

We continued to explore and introduce each other to different styles of music and then we discovered that the Forum had a recording studio. So we arranged to meet Chris Davison the engineer and booked a six hour recording session.

We decided to record live( Pete singing guide vocals) that is playing all the instrumental parts in one go so as to preserve the feel of the songs, only adding the vocals later and the odd extra guitar or harmonica etc, we then met a week later to mix and balance everything.

Then the coronavirus epidemic arrived and stole from us time that we didn’t want to lose.During lockdown. Pete started writing songs…..

He delivered to us finished versions that he’d recorded playing many instruments and we’d either modify them with some of our own ideas, or adopt them pretty much unchanged.

These songs were recorded as we continued to return to the recording studio where Chris is so used to us that he now does the first mix without us, we then have a final tweak so producing excellent recordings.

And so here we are, it’s now 2024 and we’re meeting every 4 or 5 weeks, family commitments and ailments permitting, and we’re still playing, recording and having fun
after 61 (SIXTY ONE) years ……and we’re still not finished!

.....................................

.......................... ........You can search this site with Google

.............................................

The Google monkey and bass playing monkey on this page were created by Dave Sutton graphics and free 3D animated gifs for web sites.

This website is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Copyright © Stan Laundon.com