Kevin's commentary from 2009:

I don't know who actually needs this album. I only know it exists and that the time has come for it to be heard in all its raw angsty glory.

It has waited long enough - up to 8 years plus in a jumbled-up pile of CDs dating from November 2000 to April 2003.

It got underway with a good kick-start session that yielded 5 of the tracks heard on this 12 song collection. It ended with a last gasp attempt to revive it 17 months later.

And then it was shelved.

I'd moved on from the person I was a year and a half before and I wanted to express another side of myself. I was being reborn on the internet, reveling in my new-found cult artist status. These so-called 'Doomcloud' songs seemed just that, doomed.

One evening in March 2008 I was sifting through some old burned CDs of my demos over the last few years and started listening to the 'Doomcloud' ones - and found them so compelling that I couldn't stop listening. I sifted through over 3 hours of different versions (8 full takes of 'Ultrapissed'!), false starts, incomplete takes, half-realised ideas / sketches and alternate mixes.

Much to his bemusement I bunged the whole lot onto 3 CDs to top Hewickologist Gary Knight in London. He agreed with me that there was 'something there' after all - the ghost of a KH album maybe..

It so happened that Gemma Upton of the great Nottingham band O'lovely Lie had sent me a superb CD compilation of her work through this decade. I said I'd send her some of my stuff back and with that I compiled a 40-odd minute long version of 'DC' - Gemma liked it and so did I.

Months have a habit of flying by and following on from a traumatic 2007 2008 soon bought some very tough ones - boy, I thought I'd got it bad in 2000 - you have to laugh - or cry!??

With all that this going on this rather ill-starred set once again got itself sidelined. But by the end of 2008 the idea became active to put it up as a free download via kevinhewick.co.uk

And after further examination and a tidying up / editing session at Neil Segrott's studio 'Doomcloud' was ready to be set free on Valentine's Day 2009. Who said romance was dead?

I got to know him again, the punchdrunk (and sometimes drunk drunk) 43 - 45 year old who was single again after spending most of the 90s as a partner and family man. One thing endured, fatherhood was still upheld with commitment and love and hope, I got a house and enjoyed a whole new side to my relationship with my wonderful daughter as she turned 5,6,7... that side was me, my mum and my dad, we were all flawed human beings with good hearts and we made good of things. My 'Doomcloud' persona is pretty self-absorbed and selfish but I had something in my life that pulled me away from being just that, I gave that damn about our kid and was all the richer a human being for that.

But in those initial long days and nights back on my own I crumbled a bit, a lot even at times - and I wrote these unflinching and starkly honest lyrics about it.

It was high time for a follow-up to 'Helpline' but funds and the will to face my nemesis the recording studio were at a low down low.

Dan Britton, a fair old songsmith himself, invited me to stay at his house in Melton Mowbray for an overnight stay in October 2000. He set up a mini disc recorder and a mixing desk in his lounge and we slapped down versions of various things, I often using his excellent Yairi guitar, so good I went and got my own in the end.

After every successful take, Dan would fire a pellet from his air rifle across the room - not at me thankfully!

I remember us finally calling it a night and drinking beers and watching 'The People vs Larry Flynt' on Dan's TV..

He went out horseriding and left me to it for a bit the next morning, I mostly playing around with my 'American Pie' the great lost Hewick epic 'The Groupies Ball'..

Jock of my friends The Freed Unit burned the MDs to CD for me - it was early days for such digital transfers.I called it 'Lo-FI Stopgap' but maybe it was TOO 'lo-fi' lol...

Dan told me to try recording the songs in better quality with Robbie Murphy at his home studio so in November that's what I did and from those times at Robbie's place comes this album.

Robbie, Irish as Irish can be, a very perceptive and patient man, was going through his own trials at this time. For me, he was a constant source of wisdom, philosophy, and musical passion. He also shared my eclectic musical tastes - The Sugababes debut 'One Touch' was often given a spin during recording breaks.

After a flying start on November 6th, I lost momentum, by December I was panicking about 'not being done by Christmas'. The January 2001 sessions make pretty dismal listening. I stopped the project dead in its tracks until April and much the same happened - a terrific opening salvo on April 9th that is represented by 5 songs on this virtual platter then a tailing off thereafter.

So 'in the bin' was 'Doomcloud' that I even began a whole new album project with Gary Birtles at his Yellowbelly Studio in 2002 but that never got past two pretty fruitless sessions.

Through all this, I was banging away for three hours a time at The Shed in Leicester every Wednesday night but recording was another ball game.

With typical baffling KH logic, I suddenly decided to revamp 'Doomcloud' in 2003 and returned to Robbie's on April 13th to lay down a striking three guitar/vocal reading of the then-new 'An Object She's Left Behind'. That and a few bits from 2000/01 would be rushed out on CD for my impending trip to perform in Holland. But I missed my own deadline yet again and that WAS it... until now.

It brings back long walks down the Kingsway in Braunstone Town, guitar case in hand, then going past Winstanley School, kids on the street taking the mickey doing the twangy strummy mickey take they always do... on a meaner note the odd stone thrown too...

Love WAS tearing me apart, you'll hear that in every strum n' wail but as I said at the start of this ramble who needs to hear it now?

Maybe you do my friend, back in those long lost dazed days Robbie Murphy might have just coaxed me into pulling off communicating something universal as well as personal, something of worth, something honest and direct.