New album Flamingo Road out 7th November 2025
- Blake
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Flamingo Road is my new album and consists mostly of songs written this year inspired by events in my personal life and in the world at large. The exceptions are the title track and ‘I Want You’. The latter dates from 2019 and I have been meaning to record and include it on the albums I have released since then but never quite got round to it.
‘Flamingo Road’ the song was co-written with my dear late friend Magda McCaffry. Magda and I met at a meditation group I was running in Cheltenham in 1994. We ended up living in a Buddhist commune together for a short while, with her then partner, Tony. Magda played acoustic guitar, bass and violin. She taught me how to play folk reels and we eventually ended up forming a band together, Karma Truffle, in 2003, with, initially, Magda on bass and vocals, me on guitar and vocals and our friend Amanda Ranson on drums.
Magda introduced me to The Bevis Frond and gave me a copy of Hamell On Trial’s Choochtown CD, which became very important to me, serving as a principal inspiration for my first album, Solomon’s Tump. Magically and almost unbelievably, our band got signed to a London based indie record label – Ecto Music – in 2004 and, for a brief time, we were living the rock ‘n’ roll dream. Unfortunately, the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle was not something Magda enjoyed. By “rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle”, I mean travelling up the M6 to Manchester or Liverpool to play gigs at tiny clubs to the mates of the other bands on the bill and the bar stuff and finding yourself on the return journey home bleary-eyed in a Welcome Break at three o’clock in the morning (see my song, ‘Goodbye Cruel Pop World’). Magda quit before we embarked on recording our debut LP, What You Do Comes Back To You. She was far happier staying home making stained glass art, thinking up funny band names (it was Magda who proposed ‘Karma Truffle’ after dreaming up a series of fantasy luxury chocolates) and writing prose.
‘Flamingo Road’ was written after Magda had moved to live in Lyme Regis (sometime at the end of the nineties, I think) and describes her experience there – a not entirely happy one, it seems. I always loved the track though and a couple of years after she tragically passed away in April 2023 from a brain tumour, I recorded the song, adding some choruses to flesh it out.
I didn’t get the opportunity to see Magda before she passed. I hadn’t seen her for a few years. She had messaged me to say she had admitted herself to a hospice and I had arranged to visit her after work a couple of days later. Sadly, the next day I received a message from her brother, Gordon (a talented photographer), advising me that she had slipped into a coma and not to visit.
The last time I saw Magda was at a gig my tribute band All You Need Is The Beatles played at Stroud Subscription Rooms in 2018 celebrating fifty years of the White Album. Magda came along with her partner, Adam, a successful artist whom Magda would later nurse when he contracted cancer. (Adam would tragically die in 2022.) We spoke in the interval and reminisced about the old days. Magda was blissfully happy with Adam and was loving life with him in Stroud. She had had her first book, Mirror Dead, published the year before (under the pseudonym Magda McQueen) and I was chuffed that she had quoted the lyrics to one of my songs in it.
My guitarist friend Paul Kench (who had joined us in Karma Truffle) and I attended Magda’s funeral. It was a very emotional affair at a pub in Stroud and Magda’s friends (none of whom I was acquainted with) read tributes and poems in her memory. Everyone was wearing colourful clothes, as she had wanted, but, unfortunately, Paul and I hadn’t received this memo and turned up wearing respectful black suits and ties. What I most regret, however, is that we didn’t bring our guitars with us – I had no idea it was going to be this kind of event – and perform some of Magda’s songs. By recording ‘Flamingo Road’ and releasing it as the title track of my new album, I am attempting to make up for this omission.
I take some solace though from a story Gordon told me at that celebration of Magda’s life. When I learned that I would not be able to see Magda at the hospice, I had sent Gordon a copy of one of Magda’s songs, ‘Don’t Ask’, that I had recorded at home and which she had not yet heard. Gordon told me that he had played the song to Magda while she was unconscious, holding his phone close to her ear. He said that he saw Magda’s lips curve into a smile.
Flamingo Road releases on 7th November 2025 and is available for CD and digital pre-order on my Bandcamp page: https://thisisblake.bandcamp.com/album/flamingo-road