The new album from the Touchstones has been a long time coming. Born in 1980s Croydon, gigged in 1990s London, recorded in 2020s Wiltshire and released in Brisbane, Australia, this is the toe-tapping tale of a beat that still goes on.

If you live any sort of a life you make a lot of friends in a lot of places. Most friends are passing through your life and become ‘of a time’. Although you remain friends you rarely, if ever, see them or even stay in touch (even with world-shrinking social media)… and then there are your besties! That inner circle of close friends old and new that are a constant, integral part of the fabric of your life.

Well, I have just packed two of my very best besties onto a plane back to the UK after a blissful visit from them, staying with me here in Brisbane, Australia, where I moved last year, and finishing off our new album.

Andy joined us from London and Sarah lives in Bristol. These two have been with me through thick and thin, and are also my oldest bandmates with musical collaborations dating back as far as… (whisper this quietly) 1983!

The Touchstones: Many years in the making

Andy and I have been the closest of buddies ever since he lived across the road from me when we were about 9. The first time I met him he was up a tree, which I now appreciate was a a pretty hazardous situation, because as I subsequently learned, if he can fall from something, or into it, he will. If you need something accidentally broken or tripped over, he’s your guy!

We’ve been through everything together; every formative moment. Our first girlfriends, our first guitars. He is, as they say, my ‘brother from another mother’.

We first started playing guitars together circa 1983 on a Beatles-infused journey which has never ended. We recorded a very rough and frankly silly EP called Dry Riser Inlet under the hugely imaginative band name Gavandy.

Introducing our Sarah

We’ve only known Sarah since we were about 14, when we started hanging around Croydon, London. We soon became permanent installations in her family home at weekends; sometimes weekdays, too

Abundantly talented, fiercely clever and ethereally beautiful, she’s also a crazy, devilish imp who consistently does the most inexplicable things and gets into random scrapes. We recently had to pause a phone call because she had superglued her teeth together! (Although I appreciate that lip balm and glue can feel quite similar if you’re not looking properly.)

Touchstones: the London years

Sarah joined musical forces with us in 1984, bringing some much-needed actual musical ability to the piece. We called ourselves The Touchstones, by which time I was already writing songs, so although we mainly played covers, we started playing some of my originals too.

We gigged together a little, reformed the band under several different guises, notably The Stickmen and Saturnalia, and gigged extensively across London for a few years during the 1990s, going down well at places like the Grey Horse in Kingston, the Orange in Kensington, the Half Moon in Putney, Dublin Castle and the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden, and various venues in places like Covent Garden, Earl’s Court, and Kentish Town. We made a studio recording or two, and did pretty well for a while.

London’s live music scene was kicking; every street seemed to contain an audience hungry for more, but eventually, adulting kicked in and our family lives took over. One by one, we scattered to different parts of Britain.

Picking up Loose Ends

We never left each other’s lives though, and a couple of years ago at one of our gatherings we hit upon the idea of re-recording two of my oldest songs for shits and also giggles.

By this time I had been ‘in the music business’ for many years, had put together my own home studio and was fresh from releasing a couple of solo albums. So we were all good for tech. Time to dig out the old Touchstones tunes!

Could we remember the words? Just about… but we had a great opportunity to update our old songs, without losing their 1990s London vibes.

We updated old favourites ‘All I Wanna Be’ and ‘Be Without Love’, sprucing them up here and there with a new lick of guitar and a fresh bridge section, and laid them down with no further ambitions. To our surprise, the results were so encouraging, and the process so much fun, that we thought we’d record two more songs! We got together in my basement studio in Wiltshire, England and, like Noah bringing the animals to the ark, we built up a collection of songs two by two over a number of weekends.

And whaddya know? We made a new Touchstones album!

After much wine-fuelled, late-night debating (which honestly went on for weeks, if not months), we decided to call the album ‘Picking Up Loose Ends’, which is the title of one of the tracks but also encapsulates what we are actually doing with this project.

The Touchstones debut album weaves the story of band that was born in the pubs and clubs of  1990s London, survived decades of relocation and reinvention, forged a friendship group still going as strong as ever, but hadn’t been committed to posterity until we finally tied up our musical loose ends in Wiltshire, and brought our sound back to life to share with the world.

London, Wiltshire and on to Australia

We thought we’d finished the new Touchstones album, and tied up all the loose ends, before I moved over to Queensland, Australia. But it wasn’t too long before Andy and Sarah both flew out to visit – because a few oceans can’t keep Touchstones apart for long.

It’s been amazing. We went to the beach, watched whales and saw the sights – all a far cry from Croydon – but while they were here we also decided to record a 12th track… right here on Queensland’s Redcliffe Peninsula (incidentally, also once home to The BeeGees)!

The singles ‘Pitching My Oar‘ (see below) and ‘Be Without Love‘ are out now, and the album drops on July 12, 2024.

For anyone looking for nostalgic music from 1990s London or Croydon, or new album releases from Wiltshire, Brisbane or Redcliffe, grab your earphones – we’re here for you. Enjoy.

Gavin x

Then and now: Pitching My Oar