The first track on this album takes me wistfully back to much younger times. My arrangement of Throw Your Arms Around Me had lain unsung for six years until a group of my friends agreed to perform it with me at a concert I organised in July 1999. With my characteristic flair for self promotion I shortened our original name ‘Miguel Heatwole Andsome Friends’ to its current form before we took the stage.

Later that year we premiered another rockapella arrangement, Can’t Stand Losin’ You, but then I spent the next decade establishing the activist choir Ecopella, while channelling my composition of art music into a song-cycle called Unrest, eventually recording it with the Song Company. One track from that project later made it into Andsome’s repertoire: a celebration of power napping called Rest.

In 2009 I restarted Andsome Friends and was delighted to have one of the groups original members involved. Terry Clinton’s original compositions are charmingly poetic and very popular with us. They frequently explore the idea of Change.

Our primary goal has been to record the album you are now holding and I selected Colours In My Head as the title track as much for the cover art it suggested as for its intensely philosophical lyrics.

A cappella mash-ups are a particular interest of mine, and here I interweave selected screen music from shows that entertained my childhood and youth. Swing A Cat is a collection of feline cartoons I liked in the 1960s, while Heroes Of Olde takes a medieval theme.

A couple mates of mine are gifted songwriters and from each I chose a work that I knew would work well with unaccompanied voices. Although contemporary, Russell Neal’s Bright Moon effortlessly captures a romantic mood of the mid-twentieth century. Clark Gormley might prefer not to talk about it, but his comic genius is the Elephant In The Room.

Your heffalump is supposedly afraid of rodents so perhaps a spirited rendition of The Rat Is Round might clear the room? And while we’re rounding things up we might circulate a warning


about a Hospital Mix-Up. Our alto Dallas once sang this to a group of urologists she encountered in a hospital lift. They uttered not a word.

Most of us adore going to folk festivals and we enjoy introducing Banjo Paterson’s legendary Man From Snowy River to our audiences. We usually try to make the introduction last longer than the song.

I wish it happened more often but occasionally I’ve started composing a song while fast asleep. “Fill My Glass” asked the alto in a surreal bar room, and I hope she forgives me for forsaking her seductive breathiness for a clear bell-like soprano tone.

However the previous scenario may have turned out, things look a lot more complicated for the participants in Wayward Waltz. We should all remember that polyamory is wrong. Never mix Greek and Latin in the same neologism!

Waste Hierarchy is an important concept. The idea is to use as few resources, and as little of them, as possible. If we can, we should re-use them and only recycle them when their usefulness is exhausted. By the time we get through the diminished intervals and diminuendos, the re-used perfect fifths and the baroque style fugue of this piece we singers are pretty well exhausted ourselves!

Some years ago Terry watched the weather change several times in one afternoon. His Forecasting is an energetic and uplifting reflection on things not staying the same.

I feel sure that Andsome Friends won’t stay completely the same. A new emphasis on gigging is on the cards. No point making an album if there are no opportunities to promote it! We’ve already begun learning pieces for our second album and are looking for a bass to join us. What I trust will not change is the love, hilarity and witty banter that charge our rehearals and dinner parties and which make it such a profound pleasure to share music with very dear friends.

- Miguel Heatwole, 2019