I'm Neil and this is a wee website to gather together some of the various creative projects I've done over the years. Partly it's an archive and partly it's a live works-in-progress type blog thingy.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, the title is a Mackem / Pitmatic rendering of "home-made in Sunderland"
It's a good few years since I've done any web-coding and I'm very rusty so it's likely to take a while to get this all sorted out. Plus there's quite a lot of material to be added, so please bear with 's....
9/10/25:- I'm a lazy sod
Well, I've been off work all week on holiday and I've done basically nowt so far. Absolutely bugger all. There's plenty of stuff I could and should be doing, but instead I've mainly been pissing about on Youtube. Shameful.
Still, that's just been the past four days. I have done some stuff since my last update. Been to a couple of gigs. I saw Dead Wet Things, supported by Critch and Seizure at Indie in town - good gig but weird seeing DWTs playing behind a crowd barrier. Critch were pretty good too, though I was kind of floored by the realisation that probably none of their line-up had even hit puberty the first time I saw DWT. What the hell happened to the last 10 years? Second gig was at the Museum Vaults: TV Face and Imaginary Friends (not the American band - these are from Sheffield. I only realised there were two bands with that name when I tried looking them up on Bandcamp. Sadly, nada.) Both good. I've seen TV Face before, and bought their new album. Incidentally, I also recently bought the new Stereolab album after randomly hearing their new song, which is even newer than the album (itself, only released in May this year) and consequently isn't on it. Anyway, I think it's my favourite song of 2025.
I've also done a little more work on the interior set for my Neibolt St project and had the maddening realisation that I've gotten the entire scale wrong: I've made everything too small, so I guess that means I'll just have to do some tweaking to lower the camera placement and maybe the focal length and hopefully it won't look too different from everything I've already rendered for the external shots.
As for music, there's been more recording sessions with Budd and I've most recently been writing and recording some lyrics myself for a couple of tracks: some verses and choruses. We now have 8 songs more or less done and are still fumbling for a concept and title. I was really meant to be writing more beats this week but... haven't. Though I have done some work on a beat that I'd previously forgotten about and hadn't yet shown Budd, so I suppose that'll be a nice surprise for him. If I can get it finished. It's also been sort of in my mind to do another quick solo EP, though I haven't finished that DnB idea I posted about a month ago. I'm thinking another short four track project. I went on another VSTi downloading binge the other day so there's a few new toys I'd like an excuse to play around with. I half-expect there'll be something released before the end of the year, which would be nice. I've had some years recently when I've struggled to get a single project finished in one year. Last year I managed two and I'd like to try and keep that kind of pace going. The Feral Microbes EP was fairly substantive with 9 tracks on it, so a shorter and looser wee bit of fun could be cool.