Songs [Still!] Waiting for a Rock Band

“Tenerife... It was at that time that I had the urge to communicate what music meant to me. And there I was, buying records... and then a mixer, and I tried my hand at being a DJ, and I worked on the radio... And I wanted to have a rock band to melt my feelings with music and others. But that remained a fantasy, a dream. And so I started writing poems, lyrics, songs inspired by other songs and by that time I was living.”...“Tenerife... Fue en aquel tiempo que sentí la urgencia de comunicar lo que la música significaba para mí. Y compraba discos... Y una mesa de mezclas y ugé a ser DJ y trabajé en la radio. Y quería tener una banda de rock y fundir mi emoción con la música y con los demás. Pero esto quedó en un quería, en un quise, en un sueño hasta hoy no cumplido. Y así es que empecé a escribir letras, poesías, canciones inspiradas unas por el momento y otras por las de otros.”- Manu Rodriguez, Edinburgh December 2015Poignant and personal, introspective yet outgoing. Young and carefree, yet heavy with the weight of age and responsibility. These pieces of poetic lyrical prose are like photographs, well thumbed and cherished. Each is a vignette, a window, through which we only see what the writer chooses to reveal. In a real, immediate sense, these might be songs - rock songs, even.  I have even been putting some of them to music, with Manu’s blessing. Even so, these elusive lyrical fragments are, in their own haunting way, still, waiting for a rock band.- Calum Carlyle, musician, Edinburgh April 2016 3