Album I – White Horse

In 1980 I wrote my first song with lyrics: In Their Minds. After that, songs started flowing and soon enough I had a plethora of songs, which I was hoping, eventually, to play with a band.
The Album - White Horse includes the first 8 songs I ever written.
We had in our house a big bottle of White Horse Whisky full of coins and as a 17 year old I thought ‘White Horse’ would be a cool name for a band.
Back then, home recording was not even a dream for a young musician and for many years I just remembered all the songs I wrote and composed.
At some point I collected the lyrics into a hand written book but the music was yet to be recorded.
In 1984 I met Amir Kertes, a piano player, and we started working together on arranging some of my songs, while working also with 2 girls on backing vocals.
Eventually we found a drummer, David Abraham, and a bass player, Kobi Kent, who agreed to join in though their musical taste was different.
Amir bought a synthesizer – Roland Juno 106 and we started rehearsing in an old small house in Jaffa, ISRAEL.
The repertoire included some of my early songs: Purple Wine, Going In The Morning, Autumn Lake, Rain Prayer and Check With The Devil and some later songs that were even more into the Progressive Rock genre. Also we played 2 of Amir’s songs, one of them was a song we co-wrote: ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’.
Another song we played was: ‘Temples Of Light’ and Amir suggested we’d name our band – ‘Temples Of Light’. I suggested adding ‘Theatre’ to the name and so we became ‘Temples Of Light Theatre’.
After rehearsing for a year and with the help of a high school friend, Daniel Recht, we got some live gigs and even some newspaper exposure.
Amir was eager to record the song ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ professionally so he convinced his older brother to invest in this project. After attending a reahersal his brother thought ‘Autumn Lake’ should be the song to record but Amir insisted on his song and so we ended up in a new recording studio working on ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ and another song of mine we played called ‘Viking’.
Unfortunately our bass player decided to leave the band just before we started recording and while in the studio we found out our drummer could not play with a click so recording live was not an option. Eventually Amir and me recorded all instruments using a rhythm machine that did not sound that great. Another disappointment was to find out the end result that sounded great in the studio sounded awful on a regular cassette which was the only way get the songs back than.
This adventure led Amir to go study and work for a while as a recording engineer and I purchased a 4 track home recording studio by AKAI and recorded demos by myself.
Of course, in those years Punk and new wave music were on the rise and Rock and especially Progressive Rock were declared dead and not much in demand. Not to mention the fact that the songs were in English in a Hebrew speaking country.
Definitely, the timing and place were totally wrong for such a project to succeed.
By 1986 I decide to move to London and try my luck there and the band members went to separate ways.
40 years in the making, these 8 first songs did not change much. The arrangements and the recording makes them as close as possible to what I imagined when composing them.
Playing these songs basically with an acoustic guitar, the lyrics, melody and structure of the songs is just as I wrote them originally.
Though I had many different musical projects through the years, going back to these songs is, to me, like a time travel to the past or to an alternate universe were these songs would have been a part of a known and successful band – ‘Temples Of Light Theatre’.