Well, after a lot of hard work and perseverance, James’ posthumous second album Aperture has been completed. The album began life as a multitude of different projects on James’ laptop. Some were nearly completed, some just a basic idea and some were 20 minute epics with multitudinous jumbled sections and hundreds of instrument tracks. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that James had made many different versions of the songs over the years…

Erin Lyons of the Oxford Mail wrote this touching article about James and the project to complete his album.

The tracks for the latest album, Aperture, have been arranged and edited, overdubs recorded and Tom’s been transcribing and practising some of James’ (very complicated) drum parts.

Well, it was a busy year for all concerned. James’ Tonmeister buddy Julian has been both mixing the album and playing guitar for Franz Ferdinand. He’s managed to mix most of the tracks so we had a listening party on James’ birthday on the 29th December and they are sounding great :)

A few people were asking about the song Overland which I played a James’ funeral. We’ve just recorded it with my band Jabba Cartel – you can listen here or see the live video here