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BiTS: Well, one of the strange things about COVID and the lockdown is that although people have

not been able to gig, it's been very productive in the context of people producing their own music
and some very interesting developments of people doing multi-artist performances or through the
Internet. Everybody getting together and playing and performing at the same time. Fabulous stuff.

JH: I think it's forced people to be more creative and I think that for me myself, I'd never really had

much knowledge of things like Zoom and those sort of communication tools that everyone seems to
have adapted over the last ten, 11 months, so it made me rethink. I went into last year on tour, so
we managed to actually get out on the road in February and March and then the tour was pulled
about halfway through which initially was pretty devastating. We'd worked for about a year to
record "Who Feeds the Wolf", and we'd got this big UK tour planned and then after that actually
last year we were supposed to be going back to Brazil. We were supposed to be going to Russia,
Spain, Germany, we had loads of gigs booked in last year, but fortunately, most of them have been

rescheduled but, yeah, the first week or so I was pretty upset, and I was like oh, my god, what am I
going to do if this goes on for, well, however long it may go on for? What am I going to do in terms
of creativity? As I said, I threw myself into song writing. One of the cool things that I think I did last
year was these weekly streams on Facebook where some of them I was basically playing brand new
material and testing them out with an audience in a way that was quite similar to how I used to gig

at Ain't Nothing But, when I first started out, where I'd go down on a Saturday, every Saturday
and play brand new songs and you'd soon pick up which were the ones that had the most impact on
the audience and which ones you should really take forward. It kind of rediscovered that element to
me and in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do if I was on a kind of polished headline tour
where you've got no room to experiment and perhaps make mistakes because you're having to bang
out a kick-ass 90-minute set every evening. Whereas with the acoustic stuff on Facebook in that
first lockdown, I was playing stuff that some of those songs have now ended up on "The Hammer

Falls" and they sound really great and that process was really important for the way that the new
album is coming together.

BiTS: I imagine you've got some studio facilities at home, have you?

JH: Yeah, actually, that was partly what I did when we had to come off tour. I reinvested a lot of the
money I'd made on the tour into home studio equipment because I thought if we're stuck inside for
three months, I need to be able to deliver something on the Internet.

BiTS: I'm not going to take any more of your time, Jack, thank you very much indeed for talking to
me. Just one thing, I'm not quite clear when your plan is to have the new album out? You say it's
not finished yet but when are you planning to get it released?

JH: We're about to announce a UK tour which is a kind of combo of some of the rescheduled dates
from last year, plus some new ones. That's going to be in October, and the new album will be
coming out around then. Yeah, we've got more studio time booked in March and then we're looking
to release a single shortly after that, but yeah, part of the reason that we want to wait is we want to

get the new album out and be able to gig it. I want to take my time over this one and yeah, we
thought we'd finished it and then I wrote two extra songs, so that's why we're going back in March
to record these two extra songs which I think they sound great and I was like no, we need to have
these on the record, they sound so good. Yeah, there's no rush for it. I mean I think we want to get