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  ANARCHOPHY started in Sweden during the final day of 2015. I was being shown a documentary about bob hund, a fantastic Swedish band my friend, Tom had introduced me to a few years before. We were staying with Tom and his wife, and he was showing me the documentary. Tom is the guitarist in my band, Academy Morticians. Tom is cool.
  
  As we watched the doc, we lamented how our own band doesn’t have the chance to mess around and experiment anymore. Back when the band formed we were all at school together. We lived along a shared bus route and jammed together most days, or at least most weeks. Songs came and went. Ideas were mooted and booted. Even then though, our experiments were always confined to the remit of the band: political punk rock. Were one of us to suggest an acoustic number, or some hip-hop, we would no doubt be lambasted for such blasphemy. Indeed, this rigidness in our musical approach led to our eventual break-up in 2001, and the formation of numerous side-projects specialising in music either more or less punk rock than Academy Morticians had been. It would take nine years before we got over it and fully reformed. Fourteen before we recorded anything new.
  
  Although the band was now reformed, we were older now, no longer living in each other’s pockets. Indeed, we didn’t even live in the same town, or even the same country. Tom, for instance, lived in Sweden, so getting together for a practice required carefully planned logistics, and as a result usually meant a practice for some specific end: a gig, rehearsing a new song, preparing for a recording. It was never just chilling together in a room with our instruments and having some fun.
  Tom and I watched bob hund having fun, and as well as the freeness of messing about musically to write new stuff, we also admired how much they played with genre. bob hund albums do not all sound the same, and there is as much digital electronica in their ouvre as there is raw guitar-based rock. They seemed extremely liberated, and watching them create was fascinating. So unlike the way Academy Morticians worked together. It was new year’s eve, and I started thinking about resolutions. I’d recently got a new Mac loaded with Garageband. I’d messed about with the programme before on an iPad, but had already clocked Tom’s own home recording setup and was envious. Once a week I teach a small Philosophy class in one of the music classrooms in my school because my own room is required for something else. Tom had the same device plugged into his computer for recording instruments that they used at school – a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 – and I had been thinking about buying one myself.
  
  My wife added the final piece of fuel to this growing fire. As we talked about the limits of writing music only for Academy Morticians, she remarked that it would be interesting to hear me write some more personal lyrics instead of my usual political screeds.
  
  A new year’s resolution was thus born: I would spend a large chunk of 2016 making music. Beyond that basic premise, there would be no other agenda. I would do it on Saturday mornings, when my wife was at work (we’re both teachers but her private school’s longer holidays come at the price of school being open six days a week instead of five). I would aim to write something each week. It didn’t have to be good. It didn’t have to be for anything. It just had to be. And I would try to write some more personal lyrics.
  
  At first I simply tried getting to grips with different aspects of recording. How to plug my bass into the computer, how to get the levels right, how to set up the mic. Then there was different technical aspects such as how to program drums, how to use loops, how to master a MIDI controller. Each week I experimented and each week I produced something, good, bad or indifferent. The first attempts were standard snippets of songs. Melodies, harmonies, basslines. Then one morning I asked my wife to give me a genre to try. She suggested hip-hop and I gamely accepted.
  
  The suggestion coincided with my recently uncovering several folders of juvenilia. Dark poetry written during bleak teenage years. It wasn’t brilliant, but it wasn’t terrible. More importantly, it shone a light on my childhood and reminded me of things I had buried over the years. I still write poetry occasionally to try and make sense of things in my life and at some point in the week I had scrawled a few lines about growing up in my fucked up excuse for a family. As I created the first nascent beats of a hip-hop song and began to write the music to go with them, I noticed the words on my desk and thought they would make a good verse. By the time my wife got home from work I had recorded a 1 minute hip-hop song called “Family”. I played it for her and she was impressed, as were others who heard it in the next few weeks.
  I continued to experiment with different sounds and styles during my Saturday morning sessions but as I wrote more conventional punk songs I kept coming back to “Family” and wondering if I could do more like that? I’d always liked hip-hop and rap since I was a kid buying the soundtrack cassette tape for the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and memorizing the lyrics to Ebeneezer Goode. Though my tastes developed towards guitar-led rock and punk as I got older, the hip-hop love always lingered, from classic albums by Public Enemy and NWA to The Roots and Eminem through to more recent purchases by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis and, more recently, Saul Williams and Scroobius Pip. There was always some hip-hop on my punk and musicals infested iPod (yes, Hamilton covered both non-punk bases and was bought as soon as I heard about it). And I had always written poetry which I toyed with the idea of performing. Indeed, in my songs, the lyrics were sometimes more important to me than the music.
  What if I wrote more beats and beds for some lyrics and experimented a bit more with this hip-hop idea?
  
  ANARCHOPHY is the result of these experiments. A stage name to separate this music from anything else I have done, but also a mission statement: anarchy + philosophy = ANARCHOPHY. I want this music to explore the personal and the political, to push and blend the boundaries that make me who I am and which make the music I like. ANARCHOPHY is an experiment. It is freedom of style and freedom of thought.
  
  Another Day Another Worry is a very personal song, and very unlike my previous political efforts. If you download the track, you get the bonus track "Family (Origins)" - the original 1 minute hip-hop attempt where it all began back in January.
  
  I’ll be posting more songs in the weeks and months to come, including “Extended Family” – the version of “Family” I went back to and finally turned into a full length song.
  
  I hope you like it. If you do, download it, share it and let me know. If you don’t, fuck off and write something better!
  
  - ANARCHOPHY ... more
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