Ether City gave their second performance in a week and a half at a guerilla gig last night in West London. Starting off with James playing a couple of songs solo on acoustic guitar, then trying out a new one on keyboards with Captain on drums, the bill next saw three songs from guest Andrew Casey, before Ether City launched into their set. The band played:

SUPERVILLAIN
LENNON AND MCCARTNEY
RIGHT NOW
SABOTEUR
HOUSE ON SAND
LOLITA

Being asked for more (with the audience dancing by the end of LOLITA), they launched into a version of Bean's new song JUST A BUD, featuring a rare lead vocal from Captain. They then called Victoria Culley up from the audience to sing Gershwin's 'Summertime', backed by the band, before finishing off the night with an improvised blues jam.

Of the new songs, SUPERVILLAIN and JUST A BUD featured in their gig in late July, and SABOTEUR, written by James and Bean, made its first appearance in this show.

Ether City played a private gig last night in Surrey. The band stormed it and played some familiar and some new - favourites LOLITA and RIGHT NOW were specifically requested, and two new songs, JUST A BUD and SUPERVILLAIN, got their debuts. People who'd seen the band before said it was the best they'd seen them, and the audience as a whole may well have been the best the band has played to.

Several new pictures of the band have been added to the photos section. The photos were taken earlier this week during a rehearsal.

There's a new newsletter out this Friday (June 13th), so make sure you sign up if you haven't already. The link is on the right.

Rehearsals and recordings continue this week after a brief hiatus during which two band members moved home!

Today the band are putting online a new recording; called 'Ragina Townshend', it's their first purely instrumental track. Without wanting to get into the dangerous business of defining musical styles, it's a bit like a jam session, and features probably more instruments than any previous Ether City recording; with some making an appearance for the first time here.

You can find out a bit more about it, as well as listening to or downloading it, here.

Subscribers to the band newsletter will already know about this; so do sign up if you haven't - sometimes the songs sent to the mailing list don't even end up on the website for everyone else.

The link to 'photos' at the top is now live and will take you to the new website gallery, containing photos from the band's first rehearsal right up to last week. Photos follow the usual format of being presented in thumbnail form, clickable to turn into the larger version on a separate page.

There are just 36 photos there to kick us off, but the gallery will grow. There's currently also a random photo shown to the left of the main gallery which may surprise you from time to time with some forgotten gem or something you haven't seen before.

There has been a problem with the server hardware of the company hosting this website; some issues still remain but the website is at least up again and working.

This has now been set up, and there's a link on the right-hand side of this page. If you were subscribed in the past, you still are; but if not, it makes a difference to be subscribed to this newsletter; you get the band news before everyone else and in addition, the band like recording mp3s and videos which they only share with subscribers; so do sign up.