Everything stems from dreams ...

Young Man stands on trees

Everything stems from dreams; half remembered or lucid but most often tangential, sparsely populated and illusory. Sometimes these dreams have led to songs and sometimes songs have led to dreams.


The name Woodman Stone came in a dream in which he fought for liberation in the garden of his childhood against an occupying army. There were tunnels and woodland hideouts and the name of Woodman Stone was renowned through the countryside as the leader of the resistance. He fought against tyranny and evil, seeking to restore freedom to the humble denizens of the English countryside. 


It was one of those dreams that seem to occur in real time, lasting for days and weeks; eventually he woke with the smell of damp earth in his nostrils, looking over his shoulder, brushing last autumn's leaves from his hair.


The dream then faded into the recesses of his memory for many years.  In 2010 Woodman returned to music after a lengthy absense and started recording an album; he had no name for the project until he woke one day in the summer of 2010, recalled the dream and realised that the name he had been searching for had been there all along, simply waiting to be rediscovered. All true.

Damaged forever by the rain

So there he was with a guitar donated by a man he hardly knew who believed in a future that never happened, standing on some bleak Yorkshire cliff being filmed by a young soap star diversifying helplessly into management. The suit was a pale green tweed.  The shirt is long forgotten. Sepia was big at the time and somewhere in Leeds there may remain a video of four young men taking themselves too seriously.  It was a beautiful song and the windswept clifftops and lighthouse fulfilled every soft focus cliche of the day. The guitar never looked quite the same again; the light drizzle that fell that afternoon got into the wood and raised the grain, cracking the varnish and worse.