In 2022 I started tidying up the digital Zeptepi archives and re-evaluating what the band had done. The result was two “new” albums and a digital reissue for most of the old albums, complete with refreshed covers!
I’ll do another post about the reissues, but these are the new albums:
Sex, Drugs & Sea Shanties
This is a 10 track live album, recorded at the National Celtic Festival in Victoria back in 2014. We meant to release it at the time, but I wasn’t too sure about it and it never came out aside from a few videos on Youtube.
Listening to it now I think it’s actually pretty good, and it’s nice to hear the songs with Brian Caffrey on drums – he really brought something extra to the band.
We were going to record our set the following day too, but technical issues intervened, and all we have is a video recording of it – a shame, as I think it was a better set. Would have been nice to make one album out of the two sets, but them’s the breaks…
Gold in the Loft
A 20 track double album of bits and pieces. The first “disc” features two songs that didn’t make the Universality album in 2007 (History, Open Your Eyes), two songs that missed the cut for Stormclouds in 2010 (The Great Awakening, All Fall Down) and a few other oddities: Last Great Dreamer, recorded to order circa 2009 for my friend Liam Firmager’s “Ricky” movie soundtrack; Inbetweens, a cover of The Only Ones tune recorded in 2008 for a tribute project; a full-band recording of King of the Balladeers, a demo in 2011 which never got finished until a decade later; and Shadows, written and recorded in 2010 and then left to gather dust for no particular reason.
Also here is Learning to Fly, recorded in 2007 as a follow-up single to The End (from Universality) which I decided at the time wasn’t very good, and which I now think is one of our best songs!
The second disc is mostly from 2013 and includes all the songs recorded in the UK during a day-off on our tour of that year as an acoustic trio. Some of these were released on the limited edition Ladder Factory Sessions CD that year, but all nine songs from that session are included here. It also includes Ain’t No Grave, the only studio recording done by the final line-up of the band – indeed, the last thing we ever recorded (2014). Empty Pocket Blues finishes the album, a banjo tune recorded during the sessions for the Winter In The Blood album in 2011.