There comes a time in the career of any great band when a certain staleness seems to set in. Inspiration is hard to find, performance suffers from a lack of oomph and the creative juices just don’t seem to flow as they should. I became aware of this the other day when I noticed the band members just sitting around guitarist Dee Sharpe’s granny’s living room playing on their phones and doing a lot of sighing. It was time to take action.

Beatles fans might recall when the boys took off to India to recharge their batteries with the help of a charismatic guru. Our budget doesn’t extend to such measures but, as luck would have it, our local Indian restaurant has recently started offering guru services in their garage behind the kitchen. I immediately signed us up.

After a couple of days in the inspirational company of Guru Rajiv Patel, with the bonus of some excellent biryani and rogan josh, I have to say the results have been dramatic. We are firing on all cylinders again. Even our notoriously grumpy keyboard player Gene Poole-Skimmings proclaimed that he felt like a new man. In fact he felt like a Nashville session musician. The other members agreed completely. Everyone felt like top Nashville session musicians. They couldn’t wait to get into the studio and record this new version of one of our favorite songs. It’s as if they were totally different people, as in top Nashville session musicians. Amazing.

Our sound engineering team of Max and Minnie Mumsetting joined us for the last couple of days and I have to say the effect was just as dramatic. Listening to this you’d swear the song was recorded in a top Nashville studio by an equally top sound engineer used to working with the likes of Garth and Dolly. If it had been recorded in such a studio, it would certainly have been that of the Beaird Music Group.