www.ianedmundson.uk

Untruths | January 2026.

Entries for December have now been moved to the archive.
Don't worry if you missed them, it was all rubbish.

December 31st 2025:
A very happy new year to all but one of my readers. I hope we all get the new year that we deserve.

January 1st:
Our New year's eve gig last night was pretty good. Two spots - the last finishing at 11pm. We had a bit of a discussion about an offer that had come to us to do a jam night at a venue in Leigh. They wanted us on Sundays doing 9pm up til midnight, which was no good to us. I said to them that we didn't really fancy hosting a midweek jam night. The band isn't available at all during February, so there is no rush to find anywhere else to do it. I'm a bit worn out with doing jam nights. They are a lot of hard work for not a lot of money. I was home just before midnight and able to help deal with two barking mutts, driven up the wall by the horrendous barrage of fireworks.Awake before 9am this morning, so up and into the coffee. I sent Paul (our guitarist) a message, saying I hope he's feeling ok. He was really struggling with some severe flu symptoms last night and he really didn't look well at all. I knew he had family things lined up today and that he would naturally feel duty bound to be there. I got a message back from him much later on, saying that he had been in bed for most of the day. I hope he's better soon.

January 2nd:
In the evening it was the final night at what was our jam night venue, Tilwalds in Tyldesley. I popped down for a quick hello and a drink. I would have stayed longer if any of the jam night crowd had been there.

January 3rd:
On driving duties for a relative, a trip for some radiotherapy treatment at the Christie Centre in Salford. I will be pitching in to do a few of these runs, along with other family members. It's really weird going back there 8 years later. It's not changed at all and there are identical people in the waiting room to when I had my own treatment. There's a general air of calm, though I'm sure that most of the people undergoing the treatment are probably not that calm, but everybody behaves. One Asian gentleman who was there, accompanying his wife, didn't know how to not look like he's staring at people. It was quite un-nerving to have such persistent eye contact with him.

A bit of book work in the afternoon. I had been passed some 1975 demo recordings by the band our book is about and they are radically different to what has actually been released. We are being sent some more of these recordings by an old friend of the band and they do constitute an interesting late addition to part two of the book. They have never been circulated. I also re-jigged part of the cover artwork. We have less than a month to go before we publish and I can't resist the temptation of doing a slight bit of tinkering with the artwork. It looks really good.

Evening TV: Runaway on Netflix, The Traitors.

January 4th:
A bit of recording in my home studio in the early afternoon. The song is one of my own that dates back to the mid 1980's and was about my late first wife Julie and her very early morning start to travel to her job. It's a reasonable enough version, which I started work on a while ago. I had a backing track down, so I re-did all the vocals about three times to get them to the point where I was happy enough with them before getting on with a final mix. There are a few more partly completed tracks to go at. I'm thinking of doing a CD of my own work to release later in the year. I don't care if it actually sells or not. I'll just get a hundred or so copies manufactured and send them to people.

Jaunary 8th:
Up early and got my wife to Wythenshawe Hospital for 9am for her procedure. I was able to get her home late in the afternoon.

January 9th:
Some hospital driving duties again.

January 10th:
I haven't felt like writing very much this last week or so. It's been a stressful time, with my wife having a heart procedure, which was VERY concerning, not to mention a couple of sick pets. The band lruched back into action tonight, which was a little bright spot amongst all of the murk that's our lives at the moment. The parking, load-in and set-up were all quite stressful, which is unusual for that venue. We were a bit loose in the first half, but we were properly warmed up by the time of the second half and that was really enjoyable. We filmed the gig and there are some clips up on YouTube.

January 12th:
Some hospital driving duties again.

January 15th:
I had a long, rambling message last week from someone called Will who had been looking at our Facebook page and our website, asking me for advice on how to get gigs for his band. I sent him a few quick paragraphs of what I thought was decent advice back.

He seems quite young and may not have much idea about how these things work. I don't think his band have any sort of web presence. What they need to do is get organised to go out to some venues and talk to them. They need to get some video together. They need a set list and something to show to venues to get them to take a punt on them.

There's been a string of messages since then and he was basically trying to get ME to sell his band to venues. Sadly, I don't have the time to manage someone else's band for nothing. I also have no great desire to become the next Colonel Tom Parker. My polite response excusing myself from working for them did not go down well. He got rather snotty about it all and blocked me. So he's probably now bugging someone else. I have missed out on that opportunity to make zillions and watch my proteges on Top Of The Pops.... oh wait... Good luck to Will and his band. He never actually managed to tell me what they were called. He seemed to be more focused on which venues paid what amount than getting his info out there.

I'm busy enough chasing up venues for my own band to play at, without the hassle of running another band. It's sometimes really hard work. I have historically always been the one who has ended up, doing the diary, creating Facebook events, building a website and doing all of the admin, messaging and contacting venues with details of my own band and pointing them to our page and our website which has all of our videos on it, a list of the songs we do, our gig dates and available dates and some photos and videos of us playing those songs live. I've been on web design courses and photoshop courses. I've also had to learn how to be a bit of an accountant and have won some diffiicult battles with Excel spreadsheets.

The people who run venues have other things to do than wade through messages from people looking for work with them, so you sometimes have to nag them a bit. Persistence and patience and politeness when you send that third message pays off. If you're reading this and you're running one of the venues that we play at, it means you've read my messages and been good to us. Thanks so much for taking us on and having us play for you. It's not easy running a venue these days.

In the evening I went for a drive out to pick up a quite powerful floor monitor so I can hear my own vocals better at gigs.

January 16th:
Lats minute revisions to the new book. We are on 223 pages.

January 17th:
Today would have been my late wife Julie's 63rd birthday. She only made it to 24.

In the evening we played at the Hindley Arms and had quite a good gig. It wasn't too busy for the first half, though those who were there were into it. The second half was really good.

We had a chat about one of the venues that we played at in December. We filmed the show and I was listening back to the audio of it. The crowd were really realy into it and enjoying the gig, though on the night the Concert Sec said he wasn't having us back because a couple of people left before the end. I told him he was really going to have trouble with some of what he had booked. We did absolutely nothing wrong. It was our fourth time of playing there and on previous visits, people had come up to us and said what a nice change we weer from some of the acts that they had booked. When you get a concert sec who look and thinks like a 1960's Butlins redcoat, you know that you're onto a loser. That's how clubs lose punters. Hard luck Dobbies.

top

All entries, text and images in this online diary are © Ian Edmundson.
Only a thick Brummie twat will reproduce them without permission and totally out of context to totally twist their meaning.
© www.ianedmundson.uk