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Shine On
From the mid eighties to the early nineties I fronted a rock band called Shot in the Dark for whom Ralph Stringer, the keyboard player and I wrote the songs. After the band came to an end we continued to write together, we even got a publishing deal for a time, but never saw a penny…. Anyway a while after that we came up with the idea of writing a Christmas song and Shine On was born.
We recorded the track at The Monroe Production Co in Holloway Road, North London with a fantastic producer Roger Benou who we had previously worked with on Shot in the Dark’s album “Someone Started Shouting”. In fact I’ve recorded thirty odd songs with Roger over the years.
We were joined in the studio by Nicki Hooke, a wonderful singer who sings the outro and harmonies. I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with Nicki on various projects since.
(You can follow her career http://nicolahookesoprano.org)
Track info
Pilch – Acoustic and Electric guitars and Lead Vocals
Ralph – Keyboards and Backing Vocals
Roger – Drum Programming, Bass and Lead Solo
Nicki – Outro Vocal and Backing Vocals
So we had this song that we really believed in and each year I would punt it around trying to get someone to cover it. Whilst lots of people had good things to say about it no one would actually take it on. Someone said starting a Christmas song with the line “Soldier in a foxhole fighting someone else’s war” was too in your face…
Fast forward to last year and I was at a Christian Festival in the summer called New Wine, and for some reason “Shine On” kept coming into my mind. One of the speakers was a guy called William Paul Young, an author who wrote “The Shack”. He was doing a book signing of his new work “Cross Roads” so I went along. Lovely man, chatted to him for about five minutes, he wrote something in the front of the book and I went away happy. Later I looked to see what he had written, it said “You are the melody, sing hope”,,, he had no idea I was a musician….the dye was cast.
So here we are now, we put it out there last year and people seemed to like it and the events of recent times sadly just seem to make it more relevant. Massive thanks must go to Mark Ratcliff of Fellow Productions for the video, to Ollie Tigwell for creating this site and Lilly Tigwell for the artwork. It was great to be joined in the video by Nicki and Ralph along with the fantastic rhythm section of Peter Doyle on drums and Pat McCarthy on bass.
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