Dedicated to my beautiful family and in loving memory of Mum, Dad, Geoff and Vic


SLEEVE NOTES dated 2011

'We have recorded these songs for prosperity, I mean posterity. I’ve always written songs. Mind you, I’ve always done lots of other things too, but as a little girl I would often stomp about in Pooh fashion, singing any old thing that came to mind. Sometimes I’ve come up with a nice tune but essentially I’m a lyricist, ever in search of composers. In the eighties I wrote a few songs with Jonny Griffiths which were recorded by Harvey and the Wallbangers - he’d give me a tune, I’d write some words to it (the most difficult way of doing it); and I wrote songs with Johnny Miller and sang them in his band ‘The Cuties’– I’d hand him the lyric and he’d come up with the tune (the easiest way of doing it) and later when I moved from London to the West Country I wrote with James Warren - we wrote together at the same time, words, tunes and chords, and he very generously recorded some of them on FOOL’S GOLD, which I can’t listen to now because my voice sounds like the voice of a ten-year-old although I was in my late thirties; I’ve also written songs with Andy Davis and sometimes still do – he’ll write the music and has a strong idea for the lyric, I throw in suggestions and he says ‘no’. Sometimes he says ‘yes’. I tried to write with Pete but we haven’t yet found a way. It’s usually sadness which inspires a song for me, and my latest flurry of songwriting began after being doubly bereaved. I’d just written a couple of novels, not (yet) published (though you can find one of them on the internet if you look - Love In A Wet Climate) and had begun my third novel when my good friend Frank died very suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 60. Soon afterwards my dad died, very unsuddenly ten years after suffering a stroke which robbed him of speech and confined him to a wheelchair. For a while I was incapable of writing anything but lyrics, or doing much other than strumming my old guitar. I decided to buy a new guitar, to teach myself to play it properly and to play my songs in public as I’d finally accepted that they were unlikely to be covered. I found one particular chord sequence I really liked. No words occurred to me, so I used an old lyric – I have quite a few without tunes - ‘Thankyou For The Blues’. I reckoned it was a classic and felt so confident about it I asked Andy Sheppard to play on it. When he said yes I thought I was going to be an overnight sensation and felt really excited. Then one day, when I was chatting to my friend Tim in the Primrose café, discussing the problem of hiring studio time, Pete rolled up and said ‘I’ll record one of your songs for you, Sarah.’ So I went to his place in trepidation with my new guitar. I’d hardly ever played in front of anyone before but I thought ‘just do it’ and I did. What was great was that he picked up his double bass and started bunging something down on it straight away, without really talking to me much and I thought, ‘Oh, he likes it’. That was ‘Tu M’As Dit’ which we still play now at gigs. I presume it’s one of my better ones but I can’t tell; I can’t judge my work until years after producing it; I rely on other people to tell me what’s good and what’s not. Anyway, Pete was at a point in his musical life when he wasn’t doing much of his own songwriting, and we liked hanging around together and eventually one song became eleven, including the title song ‘Who Needs A Man?’ (the answer is in the song). In the end the original recording of ‘Tu M’As Dit’ wasn’t up to the standard of the rest, so we had to do it again. We recorded three songs with Andy Sheppard eventually, including ‘Thank You For The Blues’ (though it wasn’t Pete’s favourite) which I reckon started it all. And maybe I was a bit right about it because Keith Warmington picked it out as the one to play on the radio when I went on his show to promote the album. In the meantime, while we played, recorded, chatted and ravaged his wine cellar, Pete and I discovered that we had loads and loads in common and became fatefully attached. I say ‘fatefully’ because our meeting was inevitable. He is my nemesis. One day I was recording ‘Never Again’ which was inspired by my disastrous entanglement with a French man who turned out to be a bit of a rotter, and the very next day I wrote ‘You Got Me’, which was about Pete! We ran off a hundred copies of WHO NEEDS A MAN? Pete had a printer with a bay for CDs. I designed a cover on folded paper which we fitted into plastic wallets. We got them ready for my fiftieth birthday party. At first we sold them for a mere £10, then £5 then £3. I was not an overnight sensation. With Pete’s encouragement (and his discouragement of my guitar playing) I bought a piano and started practising it, and with some great recordings under my belt I started gigging. Henry Shaftoe gave me the first, upstairs at The Lansdown, as part of his Discerning Ears promotions. It was a great night. Venue called the gig ‘pretty damn good’ and my songs ‘gems’. (Nothing quotable about the album, unfortunately). Pete played double bass, Henry was on drums and then we asked Rach Hall to play violin with us. We called ourselves Ménage À Quatre, and then, after Rach left on a year long European tour, we became Ménage À Quoi because I never knew who’d be playing with me. I’ve dropped the idea altogether now because although it’s a good joke, no-one gets it. Meanwhile Pete, inspired (I believe) by all the effort and energy he’d devoted to my project, wrote and recorded his own album LEVEL MINUS ZERO which is fantastic. It was proving quite difficult to get more than the two of us in a room at once, and Pete wanted to play more guitar than bass so we tried a few gigs as a duo. I wrote many more songs which we added to the repertoire as we went along and earlier this year I decided it was time to record some of them. In April we began. We set a date in November for an album launch thinking there’d be plenty of time to get it together by then, not realising how many hurdles and drawbacks and interruptions of various kinds there’d be. It’s always the way anyway, you work right up to and beyond a deadline if at all possible. We chose the Folk House, Park Street as the launch venue because we’d just gone down famously well there in March, and we very much liked Richard, the sound man, and we asked Dan Ashton to promote us again. Tim had brought his brother (and my old friend) Si Fish to see us. Si loved what we were doing and offered his percussive services to each of us separately more than once, but it wasn’t until we were recording ‘The Stars & The Moon’ that we took him up on the offer. He lifted the whole thing and eventually played on every track, joining us for the launch gig too. Nina Trott (of Radio Banksa) completed the song with Pete’s string arrangement. Andy Davis (of Korgis and Stackridge fame) supplied organ and piano that I couldn‘t play, and rhythm guitar that Pete couldn’t play, we got Clare Lindley and Brian Mullan to add violin and cello to ‘Love You Forever’ and Mike Willox gave us some vibrant jazz piano to replace my static chords on ‘Let Me Sleep’. Pete spent feverish hours mixing and remixing. We had three different ‘Final Masters’ before settling on the absolutely definitive version that you hear here. The CDs arrived on the Friday afternoon, the wallets arrived on the Saturday morning (I had to run with one to the BBC to be on Dr Phil Hammond’s show) and we launched IN A MOOD that Saturday night. These fancy gatefold sleeves were designed the following week. And that’s it, in a nutshell. The rest of the story is in the songs.'