Collaborations

I haven’t written too many songs with other people, but I’m gradually moving them onto this page. Links in purely alphabetical order:

These pages are essentially a collection of songs written and/or recorded with friends. It originally comprised a CD called Twofer, but that isn’t currently available. It may be back eventually in a different form. 🙂 There’ll be at least one separate page for settings of verse by Housman, Yeats etc.

Remastered recordings from the era where I was regularly playing with Don MacLeod are now lurking on the Don MacLeod & David Harley page. They comprise some songs we wrote together or separately, but used to play together at that time. Most were recorded at Centre Sound in Camden in 1983, a couple were recorded at Hallmark, in Central London, and one is a recent rough demo of a song called ‘Heatwave’. The recorded version didn’t transfer well and I’ve actually changed the words since the 80s, but there is a link to the original recording if you really feel the need to hear it.

Don and I originally met at the Boundary Road club in Hampstead, where I also gigged at least once with Pete Wilkes. We recorded the slip jig The Butterfly, intending to use it as a play-out for The Weekends Are The Worst, for which Gail Williams recorded the vocal, but the vocal hasn’t survived the degradation of the tape. Gail did play bodhrán on the slip jig. The first part is the Dives and Lazarus tune (which I used for Weekends) with a second guitar overdubbed.

Thomas Anderson is a song written by me, but based on an article by Ron Nurse for the Shrewsbury Folk Club magazine in the early 70s. Pete Wilkes and I used to play it together, but for some reason we didn’t record it, or maybe that version didn’t get to the master tape. There’s a lot of the background to the story of Thomas Anderson, a late casualty of the Jacobite Rebellion on this page, as well as the recording.

The lyrics for three more recent songs were written by Alison Pittaway. Alison and I were once part of the team that ran the Jackson’s Lane folk club in Highgate, but only started writing together long after we’d both left London (for entirely different parts of the country).  You can find them here: Alison Pittaway & David Harley

I met Dave Kenyon at South Hill Park, Bracknell, where we spent an afternoon in the studio.  I took a tape of the very bare bones of Who Are We? back to Manchester with me, and added some words later. Unfortunately, by then I’d lost contact with Dave. You can hear that song on Dave Kenyon & David Harley

Sadly, I’ve also lost touch with Fiona Freeman, who wrote the lyrics to Marking Time. We sang together for a little while when I lived in Bracknell in the 70s. If this reaches you somehow, Fi, I’d love to hear from you. At the moment there’s only one song on this page, but there may be a couple more at some point. Fiona Freeman & David Harley

I never played in public (that I remember) with Peter Buckley-Hill, and we didn’t write any songs together, but there is a link to the SoundCloud page where he posted an album on which I played and sang. It’s all very different to (nearly all) my own stuff.

David Harley

 

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