LIVE AT CUPPA - THE ADMIRAL & PHIL JACKSON

 

Well, didn't it go well!!

Many, many thanks to all who joined us on the 27th September 2025 at to Sarah and Ian at the beautiful CUPPA in Felixstowe for hosting us.

This gig was a long time in the making. Back in January 2024, John and Phil got together, excitedly, to plan a gig, originally visualised as John Halsey & Phil Jackson 'With Cake'.

John actually got this thought whilst wondering how to get people to the gig. He remembered once seeing a band in Australia called 'With Beer'. a genius idea. Obviously people knew what they were getting! The promise of beer! Hence 'With Cake'... The promise.

The idea was that John wanted people to hear some of the actual recordings from the album within the gig. So, we planned two halves of us chatting and performing with an interval in between, where we would play through the PA 3 or 4 of the recordings while John would go around the audience serving them cakes. A fun thought, I'm sure you agree.

We were pre-empting ourselves a little as the album / CD had not been finalised and physically made. So, we thought we better sort this out first. We were also still not 100% sure of the album title.

So time passed as it does and John starting feeling it all wasn't quite right and he wasn't even sure he could deal with being the main attraction at the front of the stage. He hadn't played with normal drum sticks for a while either... yada, yada, it all mounted up. His whole life he's always been "the noisy one at the back", as Neil Innes used to say. So, this was left as is and looked very doubtful that we would do any gig at all.

Soon after this, the Neil Innes tribute concert was announced to happen 28th November 2024. So this suddenly took all attention and John couldn't avoid getting back on those sticks.

After this gig, John said to me (Phil Jackson) "I want to bring the album out in the new year and get it going". We were back on the trail and I said to John - "For it to happen we'll have to do an event". John agreed and we put all our ducks in a row, got the CD finally together and got rolling! And here we are!!

So... we took some time fashioning a gig that made sense. John decided he would like it to be a bit like the radio show 'Desert Island Discs'. Where the guest talks about their favourite songs , hears a snippet of them and talks about what they mean to them.

We did this. But were conscious of there still being some live moments. We knew that once we got going, natural things would happen and we'd go with a silly story or song that might crop up as well. I think it really worked and suited the situation. It made John comfortable, that was the main thing.

John regaled us with story after story... people were gripped and gripping themselves, interspersed in the stories were snippets of recordings from the album, some notable recordings from John's long career and some of the songs performed through the evening were 'Satelite Of Love' the Italian jingle 'Lovely Lemons', 'Don't Knock The Pudding', 'Living In Hope' and a few other well chewed, choiced cuts! - (not easy to say).

We decided to film and record audio so we could save it and show it for posterity. This will come in time as and when we can edit all of this. Big thanks to Ian at Cuppa for making these recordings happen.

The Donkets are very happy and proud of 'Songs Of The Donkey Shed'. It was made lovingly, with a lot of fun and we hope you all get to hear it and enjoy it over and over... and over again. Get your copy now BUY SONGS OF THE DONKEY SHED

Lots more ahead to announce. Thanks for stopping by, folks! x The Admiral + Phil & Ken