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Majk’s new single, “Aaargh! (Everything’s a bit sh*t)” is available on Bandcamp now. It’s an anthem for the 2020’s: I think it captures the zeitgeist quite succinctly. It’s not much of a spoiler alert to say that it’s one of the very few songs I’ve written that includes a naughty word… but I think it’s rather cathartic, and it’s got a nice easy chorus you can join in with. It’s also a taster for Majk’s new album, “Sweets From Strangers”, which is in production now, and details of a launch gig will emerge in due course.

On Friday the 3rd of March, Majk and his wife Beth will be performing a joint gig at a house concert in Craiglockhart, accompanying each other on some of their own songs and tunes, and premiering a couple of exciting (and comedic) pieces that they’ve been working on together. Trading under the name of “The Kale Thieves”, or “The New and Original F*ck-ups”, or any one of several dozen other silly band names that they came up with over lockdown, the gig will start at 7.30pm and run till about 9.30-10pm, followed by a folk session. Tickets £10 suggested donation: please contact Majk or Beth for more details/to be put on the list and we’ll send you the address.

Yes, the Edinburgh Fringe has well and truly started, and Majk’s first show was on the 6th of August, for which he has been written a lovely little review (see below.)

Majk has four more shows at the Quaker Meeting House (Venue 40): at 4.30 (for 1 hour) on the 7th, 9th, 10th and 12th. Tickets are £7/£5 from the Fringe website. He may be able to do one or two extra gigs here and there; and do watch out for him doing pop-up gigs with Venue Nine and Three Quarters!

Here’s the review:

Heroes revised

Majk Stokes is obsessed by heroes, mythical and real. Riffing on and affectionately parodying Dylan, Lennon and the Troggs, the local folk-rock, comedic-but-with-a-message singer-songwriter explores the inner life of mythical characters – what would Superman do when feeling blue? Does Q envy Bond? – and celebrates everyday heroism: small actions to save a burning world and the NHS and care heroes of the pandemic. In the searing “I’ll see you there”, Stokes issues a rallying cry for the possibility and power of protest in the face of the environmental crisis. And yet the call to action comes with a warm cushioning of humour – except for eating turmeric-infused porridge, this guilt-ridden middle-class environmentalist reviewer smiled as he acknowldged all the middle-class behaviours he exhibits listed in the parodic “Middle-class hero”. A real-life fox hunt, foiled by a tree-planter is recounted poignantly, and the set ends with the rousing “Re-wild things”, written as a fundraiser for a now-successful community land buyout in the south of Scotland.

“I write songs, I plant trees, I do what I can” is Stokes’ motto. Play your part and be there to listen, laugh and be uplifted.

Yes, the Fringe is here again, and it’s celebrating its 75th birthday this year, so it’s likely to be massive… everywhere except for the Quaker Meeting House (Venue 40) where I work, which due to licensing problems and other complications could only accept companies this year that are registered charities. As I’m doing my gigs under the auspices of/to raise money for the Quakers, that includes me, so I’m doing a short run of 5 gigs, at 4.30pm (for one hour) on the 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th and 12th of August and my wife Beth is doing one gig in similar fashion on Thursday the 11th. Please do come along and support the good causes we’re raising money for (the Grassmarket Community Project in Edinburgh, and Quaker work in the UK and abroad).

I’m hoping that this year I’ll also have a bit more free time to do pop-up gigs with my little pet project, Venue Nine and Three Quarters: this is a portable micro-venue, visible only to witches, wizards and those who appreciate lovingly created homegrown music and know where to find it. Bring your own magic wand.

This June, Majk has released a new single on Bandcamp: it’s called “Rewild Things”, and it’s raising money to support the Langholm Initiative‘s community woodland buyout project to buy 10,500 acres of woodland in Dumfries and Galloway (South West Scotland) to turn into a nature reserve. So far 5,200 acres has been purchased, and we have until the end of July to raise the money to buy the rest. Bandcamp actually pays artists for their work, so if you download it from there, all the money raised will go to the community buyout project.

Majk also has a cunning plan to get people to sponsor him for every download/listen on Spotify or similar (up to a certain maximum amount of money per sponsor: we don’t want anyone to be bankrupted by this!) Watch this space for more information.

He plans to do another series of “micro-gigs” in and around Edinburgh (and anywhere else he gets the chance!) to raise awareness of the project.

Please listen and download the song, and support this amazing project!

In the run-up to the COP26 Climate talks in Glasgow at the start of November, my brother Andy has started a little project called “Green Wednesdays”: with the climate crisis and the way everything is looking just now, it can be very difficult to feel you can do anything to make a difference, so a few of us are trying to take one small action every Wednesday. So far these have included planting some trees, going vegan for the day, cycling everywhere instead of getting in the car, making sure one’s pension fund is invested ethically and sustainably, and switching over to vegan cheese and vegan mayonnaise!

And I’ve been writing a new poem to go along with the project. This is the first section (there will be more):

Do Something Green

The environmental crisis

May have escaped your notice

If you’ve only been watching “Strictly”

And playing games on your phone

Or worrying about the prices

Of pints and cheese toasties

But it’s an issue we’ve got to deal with

And not one we can postpone

So if we decide to take some action

It might just get some traction

Each thing we do can make a difference

You know what I mean?

So how about, on Wednesday,

Be environmentally friendly:

Cut your carbon footprint

And do something green!

The Edinburgh Fringe is back, even if not at quite the size and volume of previous years. The Quaker Meeting House, where I work, hasn’t been able to open its doors as a real-life venue this year, but we wanted to tell people that we’re still here and doing what we can, so we’ve taken a heroic leap into 21st century technology and created an online venue, and with the help of Sandy Butler I recorded a show, appropriately entitled “Heroes”. It’s a charity fundraiser concert, with some new songs and one or two old favourites, covering (amongst other things) Quakers, protestors, the secret life of trainspotters and what it means to be a hero in the 2020s.

In these difficult times of ongoing weirdness we really need to re-think what being heroic means, and we’ve got potentially very little time to do it. Later this year we’ve got the COP26 in Glasgow, and that’s where we really need to make sure the politicians listen to the environmental science and take action. Preventing climate catastrophe: what could be more heroic than that?

To tie in with this theme I’m currently in the process of releasing a new EP, also called “Heroes”, and I’ve got a couple of new singles in the pipeline which I think are pretty on-topic. The show is is available online on demand for the whole duration of the Fringe (6th-30th August). Tickets cost £6 from the Fringe website and all net proceeds go to support the Grassmarket Community Project in Edinburgh and Quaker work in the UK and abroad. The EP will be available online very soon.

https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on#q=majk%20stokes

I’ve been busy! I was back in the recording studio a few weeks ago, putting the finishing touches to various new songs, including one track entitled “Please Hold” which is about phoning up BT or your internet service provider or someone like that and being put on hold for hours… and which is now available to pre-order on iTunes. The actual release date is the 12th of July: if 20 or 30 people pre-order it before then, all those orders will go through together on the release date and with a bit of luck I’ll get into the iTunes charts, simply because barely anyone downloads songs these days… and it’ll only cost you 79p, which is a much better return for a struggling artist than you listening to it on Spotify would be, unless you streamed it maybe 200 times. Look me up in iTunes or click on the link https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/id1573827474?app=itunes

With the help of the amazing Sandy Butler, I’ve also just recorded “Heroes”, my online show for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer: it includes various of my superhero songs, one environmental song and a song called “Real Heroes”, for all the NHS staff who’ve done so much to look after us all during the pandemic and all the essential workers who’ve kept the shops open and made sure that the country didn’t grind to a halt completely. The show will be available to download from the Fringeplayer website from the 6th of August, and all proceeds from ticket sales will go to charity.

… and my new poetry booklet, “Recycled”, has come back from the printers and will be available for sale very soon!

Those of you who have been following my activities recently will know that I put on another online concert, “Songs From Lockdown” , on zoom on Friday the 19th of March, as a fundraising gig for Comic Relief. It was my most international gig yet, with people listening in from the UK, mainland Europe, the USA and New Zealand. Thank you so much to everyone who tuned in on the night and donated: we raised a very impressive £935!

I think it was a good gig: everyone seemed to enjoy it, and it gave me the chance to bring together some of the new material I’ve written since we first went into lockdown last year. For anyone who missed it, I’m planning to send out the link to some edited highlights along with my next newsletter, so if you’d like to be added to my mailing list please drop me a line and tell me you’re happy to be on it. I think that will satisfy GDPR for the moment…

Sadly my newsletter has been having a few teething troubles: I thought I’d been really on the ball and got to grips with mailchimp and sent out the last newsletter from my business email address, info@majk.co.uk, rather than my personal one, but not everyone seems to have received it. Please check your spam folders! I’ll try and make sure the next edition actually reaches everybody.

… and in the meantime, I’ll be going back into the recording studio in early April, putting the finishing touches to a few new songs and hoping to release a 5-track EP, entitled “Heroes”, and a new collection of poetry, on the broad subject of recycling, reincarnation, re-creation and other things beginning with “re”, by the end of Spring. It seems like an appropriate time of year for things to be re-emerging and coming back to life…

Well, I think it’s safe to say 2020 was no fun for anyone, and 2021 hasn’t started off brilliantly, but at least Trump’s out of the White House now and people are getting vaccinated, so with a bit of luck we’ll be able at some point this year to start returning to some sort of normality… and start focusing a bit more of our energy on dealing with the climate crisis again (am I the only one who thinks that maybe we should just put Greta Thunberg and Jacinta Ardern in charge of everything?)

Anyway, this year I’m planning to bring out a poetry booklet, get back into the studio and record another album (and hopefully a couple of singles), and- while we’re still using zoom for everything because we can’t meet in person- put on at least one more online concert, hopefully at the end of February. And with a bit of luck, at some point this year we’ll be able to start seeing each other in real life and possibly even gathering for real-life concerts again too…

Well, life has still not returned to normal, and the winter looks like it may well be pretty hard. The news that there are vaccines coming through is great, but the virus is unlikely to call a Christmas truce and suggest a game of football, so a lot of us are still not going to be able to see our families and friends as we’ll be playing it safe and not risking passing germs on to them.

So with thoughts in mind of safety and preventing the spread of infection, here’s a sample of what I’ve been working on in the recording studio in November and December: it’s short public health film, and my first foray into Death Metal… https://youtu.be/ulP11io_Jpw

… and my first Christmas single, “Socks” will be available online as of Friday the 11th December.