The Story behind 'THE JOURNEY'
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During the winter of 2005 Cliff Hall approached recording artist, writer / producer Nigel Hopkins with an idea for a new Jet Harris CD, to be written by Jet, Cliff and Nigel. Unfortunately during the early days of writing, a rather heavy schedule of commitments for Cliff mean't that he couldn't continue with the album, so Jet and Nigel continued onward with the project together, aided by a specially chosen team of dedicated professional musicians. Nigel's aim; To produce a 'World class Jet Harris album!'
As Jet and Nigel got to know each other, it fast became obvious that they both had an awful lot in common (almost a mirrored life), and some very spooky coincidences started to come to light.
Both Jet and Nigel suffered from alcohol addiction for quite a few years, and it came to light during conversation that they had both managed to give up drinking at around the same time. Along with this, there were other things like: They had both passed their driving tests in the town of Blackpool; They also drive exactly the same model car (without knowing it of course!); They had both moved from the Decca record label to the Fontana label in the same year, and more! It seemed that this was meant to be!
Nigel and Jet's idea for this project is to produce an album that combines the early Jet Harris sound with a very modern production, and one that they hope will appeal not only to his long standing fans, but also to younger people (to everyone hopefully!), and while Jet still enjoys playing all his old hits (and will continue to do so I may add), he felt that it was time to create something new and more up to date to add to his already large repatoire. But for Nigel, above all, it's vitally important to keep that trademark Jet Harris sound prominent in the mix.
There have been some criticisms about not using live drums on the tracks, but the truth is not all of the tracks use programmed drum samples, as we have a very live Bob Jenkins on drums too. This also applies to live performances. (read the Jet Harris Interview on this site).
It soon became apparent that an official single release may be possible, and that it should be a very special high quality CD. A tune named 'San Antonio' (by Jet) was set to be the track for pre-album release.
Unfortunately, releasing 'San Antonio' diverted everyone away from writing more material for the new album, as CD pressings, artwork, website construction (more about that later!) and a pile of admin work took up most of Nigel's time. All of this plus some rather unfortunate technical problems in the studio, stopped any chance of releasing Jet's new album CD in time for the end of 2006 (which was the originally planned release date!) We are very sorry for this, but we know it will be worth the wait.
(Pictured left: Nigel Hopkins)
As was said earlier, a website www.jetharris.net was set up specifically to update everyone on the album's progress, but unfortunately things didn't go the way we planned. The website administrator (unavoidably) had to go abroad on buisness for a few months, and that (added to problems like our lack of HTML knowledge, and the website not recognizing log in information, and with no way to retrieve it) left us high and dry! Of course this meant that now we couldn't even let visitors know of the situation, which was immensely irritating and frustrating!!! So that is why you are here now reading this. No one is really to blame, but we had no choice other than to create another website that was more user friendly! The old site is still active for anyone who wants to purchase a copy of Jet's special limited edition single 'San Antonio' and just as a point of interest, there are only a few of these signed vinyl effect CD's left out of the one thousand pressed. There won't be anymore! and the single will only be available as an mp3 download, though it will appear on the album.
Please check out the 'Hot Off The Press' page for any new developements!
All of the photo's on this page © The Official 'Jet Harris' 2007 Album Pages.