1999 finally saw p-a-d get round to recording some of the tracks that had remained tucked away on 4-track recorder for nearly ten years. installing the roland virtual studios at tollbooth marked the turning point for the material, and p-a-d became able to give life to the breadth of sound he'd been hearing in his head.

a long and very silly recording session with helen turner sparked the creation of the thread for his debut solo album 'postcards from aunt cordelia'.

stream of consciousness

"Looking at the mayhem that was the studio one day started me musing on the chaos theory. butterflies and tidal waves are all very well for extreme analogies, but i think that so many of the things that we do or experience and consider inconsequential, actually have more far-reaching effects than we imagine. this can be a really positive thing, the smallest smile, the briefest kind word might change someone's day irrevocably. we only ever think of chaos in a negative way."

"having found a perfectly acceptable way of looking at this subject, i just felt compelled to obscure it all again in another analogy. then helen turner was level checking one night and slipped into this amazing little old lady / mrs merton voice and for some reason i just turned round and asked 'cordelia' to pipe down. and so she was born. a couple of glasses of cabernet later, and h had put down the introduction for p-f-a-c."

figurehead

"cordelia has a knack of being at crucial points in history and tipping folk over the edge from letting things ride to becoming landmarks in time. she was the woman who prompted abe lincoln to sum up edward everitt's 3 hour speech to the troops at gettysburg which bored them all senseless, and in 3 minutes, lincoln went down in history forever. she cracked the smile for da vinci that turned him from mad inventor to immortal artist."

"cordelia is the corporeal realisation of all those decisions you make in your life that have such a dramatic effect on the rest of history - even if only your own.  there are so many little crucial turning points in all our lives where we could end up in two very different places."

fulcrum

"i think the whole of history works this way.  it's a scary thought when you spend any more than a second thinking about it.  does jesse jackson lie awake at night thinking if only he'd knocked MLK out of the way, he'd still be alive today.  it's as real as one more grade at a-level that could have changed where you'd gone to college - the people you met, the partners you may or may not have ever met."

"one of the really interesting things that came out of the project to ask people to leave me messages about their our cordelia moments was how many of them focussed on very very chance encounters that led to them meeting incredibly significant people in their lives.  people who helped them make other crucial decisions - even just lifted a mood to make something else possible."

"so it's really all about the little things in life.  though the tracks aren't thematically connected per se, they are all linked by the drive to find the richness in life and hope in the butterfly's wings!"

"we all need cordelia in our lives.  the album explores some of the moments when she's stamped all over mine...."

footnote

"if you are wondering who 'george' is in 'cordelia's request'..."

"after the silliness that led to helen becoming the 'spirito di cordelia', we found that during those somewhat tense moments that can crop up during recording, cordelia had a gift for covering issues that were difficult to address, or defuse tense situations."

"i'd had this idea that cordelia had been around at these key points in history, and one of them would have likely been cordelia supplying the pen to sign the declaration of independence.  naturally, this would have led to cordelia and george washington meeting.  it then transpired that george was also a fellow cordelian traveller.  so naturally they kept in touch over the years - mainly by.....

postcard!!!!"

Q - E - D