HeyJaredGregory Spawton
Songwriter and bass player for progressive rock band, Big Big Train. This Substack is about the life of a musician in the twilight years of the age of rock.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
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- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest issues
Woodcut Tour Diary (opens the original)
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The Stables in Milton Keynes has become a very popular prog staging post. It’s a well-run venue, with a good PA and a slightly different seating arrangement than the usual rectangular theatre. The only downside is that it’s a few miles out of town, so it’s not possible to find a good coffee without getting an Uber and facing a road system of a million-roundabouts. But, for the band, in this early part of the day, there is time to kill, so me and Alby do just that while other band members sleep i
Woodcut Tour Diary (opens the original)
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For the Woodcut and Other Stories tour we will be playing two sets at each gig: a first set featuring BBT back catalogue material and a second set where we play the whole of the Woodcut album.Two sets equals two hours and ten minutes of music to learn and to get tight, so we have allowed eight days of band rehearsals at our location down in a former military site in Portsmouth (those eight days include a day-and-a-half for technical setup).Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new
What Is Prog? (opens the original)
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Over the last few weeks I have been sitting for hours at a time in my airless, windowless and extremely hot practice room, learning the parts for our autumn shows. Sometimes, whilst I try to get my parts into muscle memory, I find that my mind wanders and I start ruminating on some of the great questions facing mankind: is there a God? What caused the fall of the Roman Empire? And, most challenging of all: what is Prog?Recently, the BBC broadcast a good-in-parts Prog Proms, filmed at the Royal A
The Loneliness of the Long-Song Writer (opens the original)
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My experience as a songwriter is that it can be a lonely affair. For sure, I’ve been involved in a lot of co-writes over the years in Big Big Train but, for the most part, those co-writes have involved a handover process where either myself or another band member has done a lot of initial work (in terms of getting the essential chord sequences and melodies together) and then sent the song onto other band members for finishing off. Examples of this sort of co-writing approach include The Wide Ope
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