Life is like a bowl of Choco flakes

I was standing in the queue at the Tesco Express in Combe Down last night when I had a moment of inspiration. I was on my way back from practice and had stopped off to pick up some milk and bread for breakfast and I had the sudden urge to buy myself a pack of Kelloggs variety cereal - don't worry folks, there is a point in here somewhere!

So there I was stood in the queue, looking down at my collection of over-priced minature snacks and I realized, that in many ways, Balustrade is a bit like a box of Kelloggs variety cereal. No, we're not corporately branded and unneccssarily packaged, rather we offer the music fan a diversity that you can't always get by sticking to one genre (or in this case cereal). For those who want the sugary sweetness of Coco Pops, we have the poppy-ness of Walking or Say It Again. While for those who want something a little more mature we have the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes that is Dream the Dream or Love Songs for Travellers. I have no idea where this would leave WestCountry Blues or In the Westcountry, however safe to say it is most likely to be in the bin along with the Special K.

What promoted me to be so philosophical while standing in that queue was the fact that we had just finished arranging a new Balustrade song which I can exclusively reveal is called 'The Pitchfork Rebellion'. TPR (to give it it's young and trendy abbreviated name) is a really nice traditional folk song which Carter claims he overheard heard in a pub near Norton St Phillip while he was off on a cider tour of the Somerset lowlands when he was 15. So we decided to dust if off and give it the Balustrade treatment and what a great little song it is too. Not only is it a wonderfully up-lifting story of class struggle against the might of an over-bearing papist monarch, but it's also a historically accurate tale of local uprising and it's always nice to know that the many years we spent at univeristy looking at old manuscrpts isn't completely wasted.

There's no news yet on when (or if) TPR will ever hear the light of day, however keep those pitchforks sharpened as you never know when the next West Country revolution might strike!