This is my first solo album and is called simply “Shirley Lee”. It had a working title of “London Ghost Stories” for quite a while, with the instrumental being the title track. Along the way, a couple of songs which related to this title got dropped from the album, so it no longer seemed appropriate. Hence we decided it should just be called “Shirley Lee”.

I play in a London band called Spearmint. After we had released the fourth Spearmint album proper, “Paris In A Bottle” in 2006, it felt liking the closing of a chapter for the group. We initially set to writing some quite raw songs to counteract the attempted grandness of the this album, and we started playing these live. We closed the shows for the album with a couple in April 2007 at The Luminaire in London, where we played a range of tracks from all our albums. The gigs felt a little tired to me – it was definitely time to try something new.

Follow the links above to read about the writing, recording and finishing of the album, along with my thoughts on each of the songs…