Notes

The Radar Bros. have, in a nutshell, never failed to deliver us amazing albums - albums that, once you take them to your heart, you wonder how you could have ever lived without them. The Singing Hatchet falls firmly into this category and regularly makes it into drunken conversations when we all get together and talk, dewey-eyed, about our favourite Chemikal Underground releases.

It's difficult to add to the praise heaped on this album contained in the reviews section (which of course you should click and peruse) so all we'll say is that The Singing Hatchet has become one of those albums that when we listen to it, it takes us back to 1999 when we met the band for the first time and had, quite simply, the best of times. Well, not all of us actually, because Jim came over to Glasgow himself to begin with and - maybe as a result of our hospitality, maybe not - promptly fell ill, smote by some biblical lurgy. I recall Jim emerging from his B&B near Glasgow Art School one morning, sporting a yellow/green/marbled pallor that the nearby art students would have taken days to recreate on a pallete.

God love him though because he soldiered on and accompanied us on a van drive up North to have his cobwebs blown away amidst the glens and heather. I'm sure his demeanour wasn't helped any by our gentle but insistent ribbing that maybe he couldn't hold his whisky - an outrageous accusation that we were all forced to regret in the ensuing years as Jim and the rest of his band set about 'bitch-slapping' us in the drinking department both at home and abroad...