NEWSLETTER 3 - 17 JUNE, 2002

I know that I indicated that newsletters would be published about once a month and that this is the third in about the same number of weeks, but a lot has been happening.

I got a call last Friday to play at the Sandringham Hotel at Newtown. Royce, the manager, used to work at the Mortdale pub and is a really great guy. Apparently their booked act cancelled and they needed a replacement.

I had some nerves, what with Newtown having a reputation for being a trendy suburb and all. I had no idea what sort of audience I would be playing to, nor what sort of music they were used to. I started with some acoustic numbers (You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, Norwegian Wood, With or Without You, World Where You Live, Weather with You, Sad Dark Eyes, The Loved One) before turning to keyboard. 'No Woman No Cry' went down particularly well and 'Brown Eyed Girl' seems able to be played for any audience. The second and third brackets were on electric guitar with 'Another Brick in the Wall' attracting a few pommies from the TV room where the English were beating Denmark. Most of the second and third brackets were bluesy rock such as Sunshine of Your Love, Cocaine, Walking all of which seemed to go down well.

There have been some changes to the site since the last newsletter. The 'Latest News' page has been updated.

On the ORIGINALS page I have deleted one sample each of Time to Train the Horses and Six O'Clock Swill. These samples were causing my browser to shut down and I didn't want to inflict that on subscribers and guests to the site. Could subscribers please let me know if they have problems with any links.

One subscriber apparently cannot play the MP3s on Windows Media Player. This is the only complaint about the files that I have had. I don't know how to stop my computer playing the files on Quicktime and the computer at home defaults to WinAmp. The files work on both these programs and I have tried the Windows Media Player on a friend's computer and the files work there. Someone has suggested that the problem may be that the MP3s are created at too high a speed for some modems. Does anyone else have any suggestions or complaints about the files not working. Obviously working samples of my work are an integral part of the concept of the site and I would like to cure any problems that are occurring.

I finished the recordings of 'The Fall' and 'Unvictorian Victoria' last Thursday and four samples of each song, plus a link to the lyrics are now posted on the Originals page. I would welcome any comments about the songs. Please also let me know if there is any problem with any of the links to the songs. They were all working at the time of writing this newsletter.

The site is presently not registered with any of the search engines as I was waiting until it was more complete before going 'cyber'. However, I am told it will take some weeks for the search engines to get it up and have decided to go ahead now and hope that all is ready by the time it is made public.

I have completed the text portion of my first entry in the 'Influences' page.  The page will be dedicated to Jack Bruce. The text will hopefully be up by the time you receive this newsletter but will be added to in the near future to include photos, MP3 samples of Jack's work and links to other sites relating to Jack.

If any subscribers would like a CD with complete versions of the five originals presently recorded let me know and I will send one out to you.

Please keep your comments coming. I am really grateful for all of the constructive suggestions I have received so far. Hopefully you will notice that on recent pages I have abandoned the use of coloured highlighting. A number of people, including myself, felt that this not only did not look particularly impressive but made reading the text difficult.

Some photographs have been sent away for 'touching up'. They include some early Sirrah photos, some later Sirrah photos, an original 'Sirrah' business card and some MidLife Crisis. I will arrange for some photos and hopefully a homemade video to be taken of my next gig at the Mortdale.

For those of you who are interested Lugarno Soccer Club Over 35s have returned to the winners list in recent weeks and had a 4-1 win over Carss Park yesterday. We should be back in the top four by now.

Look after yourselves, keep in touch and feel free to let others know about the site.

Best regards

Brian Ralston

aka SelfTORT

PS (with further apologies to Slackie) The Jack Bruce Influences page is now up but not complete. I have been having troubles with the MP3s and cannot guarantee that they will work. However, on my Windows media player they work perfectly - the problem seems to be my Quicktime player (that I don't want anyway). Could you try a few of the samples for me and let me know if they are working or not.

I've put Lorro's link up and would invite you to have a look at his site. Apart from also being a Jack Bruce fan he is a really good bloke.