Murder In The Rain
Back in the mid-1980s I wrote many songs with my friend Ian
Erving. 
We played these
songs around many bars and clubs in The North East of
England and hoped for fame and fortune. I wore a daft hat.
Years later I decided to dust these songs down and record them properly. The meeting of minds between my 50-year-old mind and my 18 Year old one produced Murder In The Rain
The Return Of Mac Sweeney
The album was a tip of the hat to the classic Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe books and was inspired by the short stories of Killer In The Rain. I loved the language in these books and devised a character called Mac Sweeney who was to investigate the tragic death of a security guard Albert Macgennnis who was brutally murdered on his way home from work on 22nd December 1923. The violence of the streets of Chicago takes the listener to places like The Moon Club and The Sleeping City. Sweeney ponders on the lonely life of the Private Investigator remembering his tim in WW1 in German Nights and Dreaming By The Sea. Broken Musicians looks at the torn lives of Musicians within the nightclub scene.
Technological Breakthroughs
One person very instrumental to the album was my late
friend Darren O'Brien. He was the keyboard player of our
band and tragically died far too young at only nineteen
years of age. Darren was a technological genius and baffled
me with the brilliant new technologies at the time such as
Midi and sampling. 
I have been able
to recover his wonderful keyboard solo from a 4 track of The
Poison Of Love and placed it on the new recording. It was
very nice to have him featured on the album. Other members
of my old The Beer Pigs also contributed to making the album
75,000 Streams
To date the album has been streamed 75,000 times around the world and I am very proud of it. Murder In The Rain is a sentimental slice of my youth and it was a joy to record. Many videos of tracks from the album can be found on this site.
Recreating The Glenn Miller Sound
I have achieved many fantastic Music Technology developments with the recording of this album. One thing that I was very proud of is the recreation of The Glenn Miller sound for The Moon Club. This technology was certainly not available to me in 1987 and, to be able to achieve this sound for the record would have been beyond my wildest dreams at the time. I will be discussing this in my technology blog in the near future.
Marking The anniversary
The story of the album began on 22nd December 1923 and to mark the 100th Year Anniversary of the developments I released a special mix of the song and new video in December 2023. The video is available here.
The track listings are as follows:
2. German Nights - (D.A.Mackin and I.M Erving)
3. The Moon Club - (D.A.Mackin and I.M Erving)
4. The Poison Of Love - ((D.A.Mackin and I.M Erving)
5. When We Say Goodbye - (D.A.Mackin and M.P Mackin)
6. Bar Angel - ((D.A.Mackin and I. M Erving)
7. Dreaming By The Sea - (D.A.Mackin)
8. Banana Girl - (D.A.Mackin)
9. The End Of The Day - (D.A.Mackin and I. M Erving)
10. The Uderated Gentleman - ((D.A.Mackin and I. M Erving)
11. Broken Musicians - ((D.A.Mackin and I. M Erving)
12. The Sleeping City - (D.A.Mackin and I. M Erving)