Well, the first sales figures for Forlorn Hope and Glory are in! They come from iTunes Europe, and the early leaders are… (Drum roll, please…)

Turn Me Up and Dead on My Feet (Again).

It comes as a slight surprise to us that these two songs have been bought individually by far more people than any other song on the album, but we find that sort of stat extremely interesting. This doesn’t include full-album sales, of course, which to be honest have exceeded all our expectations, too. Many thanks to everyone who has parted with their hard-earned cash to support a small-time independent band like us!

Don’t talk to me about CD Baby. Really, don’t. A full three months after they received Forlorn Hope and Glory, they’ve finally managed to deliver it to a second company (after iTunes). Users of Napster can find it here:

http://free.napster.com/view/album/index.html?id=13443475

It turns out, upon an exchange of decreasingly polite e-mails, that since August they have managed to submit our new album to a grand total of three companies (it should coming to Lala “soon”). That’s a less-than-impressive rate of one per month. What baffles me is that they give three months as the period it should take to appear everywhere (not just make it out of the door), and refuse to investigate any inquiry until that amount of time has lapsed. What would have happened if I hadn’t asked?

Anyway, in related news, A Head of Steam (our first album) is still finding it’s way to new pastures. We’ve been on Amazon.com for yonks, but at last Amazon users here in the UK can join in the fun:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Head-of-Steam/dp/B002GFY1ZM/

Let’s see how long it takes Forlorn Hope and Glory to appear on Amazon now that I’ve kicked up a fuss…

We’re still catching up with our extreme backlog of correspondence (we promise we’ll get back to anyone who’s been in touch in the last few weeks), but here are a few more things we’ve stumbled upon that warrant a hearty Home Guard thanks:

To kick off, as per the previous post, our good friend Susanne played our song One for the Road over the weekend on her Rock Show. It’s been brought to our attention that it’s not the first time we’ve been played on Warm Web Radio, so double thanks are in order!

Staying with the Scandinavian ladies, writer of the Acuvi blog Eira posted a Last.fm journal recently entitled “Too good to be ignored”. You can read it here:

http://www.last.fm/user/Acuvi/journal/2009/11/06/351fns_too_good_to_be_ignored.

“An indescribable mix of so many genres of music, so perfectly combined” – we’ll settle for that! We encourage you to check out as many of the unsigned artists listed as you can, and are truly grateful to be found amongst such fantastic company. Thanks, Eira! We’re not so arrogant that we infer anything by being mentioned first, but are truly honoured just the same.

And then there’s Ian and Mike, who have both seen fit to leave reviews for our albums on CD Baby:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/homeguard

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/thehomeguard

The fact that the reviews are positive is secondary to the fact that anyone would make the effort to write them at all. Thanks so much, guys!

It’s been what seems like an eternity since the last update, for which we apologise most humbly. An unfortunate combination of iffy health and lack of Internet connection has contrived to put The Home Guard out of public action for the last few weeks, but what better way to return than with this news?:

We’re on the radio tonight.

At least, we have it on good authority that Rock Show presenter Susanne is planning to play one of our songs on Warm Web Radio some time between 8pm and 10pm (UK time) later. Though it’s based in Sweden, you can tune in from anywhere in the world with this link:

http://83.172.80.207:8000/listen.pls

We got it to work in iTunes by clicking on Advanced > Open Audio Stream, and pasting the above in the box. Unfortunately Windows Media Player throws a wobbler with .pls files, but the likes of Winamp, Real Player or the highly recommended VLC (which plays just about any format you can throw at it, including region-protected DVDs) support them natively.