We would like to make an announcment!

After spending the last three months of lockdown collaborating via shared files on Dropbox, we can now announce that Take it Easy with Croydon Tourist Office will be released to the general public on 4 July 2020!

Some of the music on this collection we have been working on since 2012, though some of the original recordings go back as far as 2005, while others are very fresh, having only been written and recorded a few weeks ago.

We will release the recordings on our Bandcamp page first, followed by all the usual streaming platforms a couple weeks after that.

We hope we see you there!

It’s been decided. This blog needs to happen more frequently.

Since the Covid-19 lockdown began, we’re been going through the archives of our recorded material. There were many almost-completed songs and many more fragments waiting for a direction. Looking back through it all has made us realise how much we have done together and how much we’ve forgotten about.

Our last blog post was published on the 9th anniversary of the very beginnings of Croydon Tourist Office. In some ways, it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but at the same time, it seems like ages ago that we had the free time to pop along to the cafe after closing time and record the sounds that we would make. But then, life is like that.

We are currently in the final stages of mixing and mastering our second album. While the album’s songs are sourced from various eras of our past as well as the present, the general nature of it all came together in the theme of the global pandemic. And as Robert told the rest of us after reviewing the current master test, there’s ‘such an underlying hint of menace. It seems like the perfect comment on the world today. But so much humour too.’

Some of the songs, like the ones about Belgium and unpronounceable Welsh town names, original came to life 8 years ago, while tinkering with ideas at Epicentre. Others, like the songs about Russian Dolls and Rum & Coke started coming together 4 years ago when we were making our last EP, but we knew they would be set aside for a second full length album. And others, like the songs about broccoli and falcons, came about purely through isolation and what happens when we throw each other ideas via broadband.

The nearly hour long collection features sixteen songs, but we ended up unearthing so many more in the process. We will hopefully have an EP of related material that will appear shortly after the album, and possible some additional surprises as well. But this first release will be a concentrated result of what the last three months of lockdown have brought together.

We should have more information for you in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, be sure to enjoy Robert Garnham’s solo release, Aviator.

https://professorofwhimsy.com/2020/06/22/aviation/?fbclid=IwAR2Pxm3PDMnOd6H6oj3kiYRh2QxYLBjC58r80ObhMHPFJQmn7grkDDMenIc

Isn’t murmur such a great word?

Life has been busy for all involved in Croydon Tourist Office. But that all changed for pretty much everyone in March of this year, where lockdown meant working from home, staying in doors, and finding new virtual ways to do things.

We were all just as busy as ever, but suddenly there was a need to be creative and if being creative meant that we needed to do everything via the Internet, then so be it.

We realised that others that we know would be just as isolated as we were, so we opened the doors to collaboration to anyone who wanted to be involved. It was like a virtual way of working that’s similar in a lot more ways than we thought to the way we used to work when stringing microphone cables around a little cafe in Paignton all those years ago.

9 years ago when Robert and Bryce wrote and recorded Three Bears, we had no idea what would lay ahead. And to be honest, we still don’t know what lies ahead. We just know that Croydon Tourist Office generate things that we never expected and certainly never things that we would come up with individually.

Over the past three months of social distancing, we have been more productive than we have been in awhile. We signed up with a distribution company so our music can now be heard in pretty much any place you can hear music and we revisited music we were working on for the second album and finally made sense of it all. In as much as we make sense of anything, that is.

And then we remembered we had this blog, which hasn’t been touched in about three years. Sorry about that. Life did pull us in other ways for a bit. We never stopped sharing ideas with each other. We just needed to wait for it to be the right now.

So, the murmurs are correct. The right time finally arrived.