The Gent Sessions (1997-98) - CD, Planned

These sessions came about as I felt I needed some recorded material that was more representative of me i.e. acoustic guitar and vocals, than the material that had been released under my Lawrence Woolfe pseudonym ("Bridging the Silence" 1993 CD on the Koch label). Really, Dave Foster (who's featured on the Bridging CD) and I decided to do some demos for the purpose of getting some gigs. Dave and I went over to Ghent to record at FlipFlap Philippe De Chaffoy's studios. Philippe who is featured on Nice and Easy does it is an excellent violin player who's featured on many other artist's projects here in Belgium and who I had met a number of years earlier through his connection with the musicians of the Woolfe project.

As is the way with these things we recorded more material than we needed and having finished these recordings got sidelined in putting a band together but that, as they say, is another story. Suffice to say that these recordings were quietly forgotten but not before I had thankfully had some input from Michael Klein at his London studio Heartbeat.

My perspective on these recordings when I recently revisited my archives, after much prompting from Bert Leysen with whom the Playing it all for laughs LP was recorded, was one of quiet surprise. We did indeed have a whole album of Ghent recordings which I had consigned to the growing vault of unreleased material with the idea of one day bringing it out mixed in with the Songs from the Archive material. Now I think these recordings stand by themselves.

Bob Theil