Rob Cottingham reissues Behind The Orchard Tree

By Malcolm Dome
( Prog )
published

Cairo musician revisits the album that inspired Touchstone...

Rob Cottingham

Former Touchstone keyboard player Rob Cottingham has finished work on a new solo album, for which he's revisited the past.

Back Behind The Orchard Tree is a re-recording of his 2002 debut album Behind The Orchard Tree, with new song Out Of Time.

“I've wanted to do this for ages,” says Cottingham. “The songs are good, but I was keen to make it more ballsy. When Lisa [Driscoll, vocals] got pregnant, we had to postpone recording the second Cairo album until July, so I grabbed the opportunity.”

The album includes guest vocals from his eldest daughter Kerry, while Cottingham performed nearly all the instrumentation himself at his home studios.

“I then went to John Mitchell's Outhouse Studios for 12 days, where he did the guitar parts and I recorded the vocals, before we mixed it together,” he adds.

The album will be available digitally through www.cairorocks.com from mid-April, with a physical version likely by the end of the year.

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.