Things are still really hectic in the world of MR, but thought we’d better keep you all up to date with the latest news!

The next gig is at Fibbers in York on 29th January with the mighty Stealer as support, £6 on the door, or £5 in advance (or with flyer). It’s going to be a top night and the last with our current set so expect a belter!

For more details of where we’re playing over the next few months be sure to check out our live dates page.

For those of you who missed the gig on 22nd Dec, here’s a review from Sphere Magazine:

The Duchess – 22/12/09The headlining band Morpheus Rising immediately evoke with their smashing beats and decadent riffage following a suitably epic intro. As is the theme of the evening, this band are all about stadium-baiting rock music drawing from legendary influences like The Cult and Iron Maiden. On ‘Save The Day’ the band pour all of themselves into the song and demonstrate a real emotion, intensity and grit that is rare within the contemporary rock scene on a national scale, nevermind locally.

‘Brave New World’ is another great standout of the set and it incorporates a touch of AC/DC at their most raw and relevant alongside some Saxon-style explosive guitar rhythms. Meanwhile, ‘Fighting Man’ is truly epic classic rock that if given the chance could really see MR challenging peers like Iron Maiden and The Mission on an international stage. With world-beating material like ‘Lord Of The North’ and ‘Quench Your Thirst’ in their back-catalogue Morpheus Rising should be celebrated as proud representatives of the classic rock genre in York. Indeed, they are one of the city’s standout groups in terms of their live performance and the desire that they put across to the audience is most admirable.

We look forward to seeing more from this lot in the New Year as they work hard to resurrect NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) music without using tired clichés and sticking to any particular blueprint. Morpheus play the closest thing to real and proper classic metal – so, come get some!

Dom Smith
Sphere Magazine – Dec. 2009

You can read the full review here.

We hope to have photos of the gig online soon so keep checking the media pages…

We also received a nice email from our German friends over at Underground Empire with news of a review of The Original Demos 2008, it’s in German but one of our friends has kindly translated it for us:

Review of The Original Demos 2008

It is hard to believe, but The Original Demos 2008 is really an actual product…

The band “Morpheus Rising” from York use the slogan ‘NWoBHM – The next Generation’, but they have also got influences from bands like Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy and Marillion. It seems to be very important for Morpheus Rising to be authentic, which they really know how to do. Whilst Morpheus Rising is a young, unknown band, Pete Harwood appears to be an accomplished musician which provides us with a very positive debut!

The guys from Northern England start with “Fighting Man” which makes me think of DEMON due to the epic atmosphere. The guitar sound is inspired by Blackmore and in the form of fine, hard, but melodious attacks we get a massage of our neck by the end of this song…

“Save the Day” has the same kind of composition; the vocals of Graeme Tennick (especially in the refrain) has got a bit of dirt like Algy Ward.

The number “Those Who Watch” is embellished by keyboards, and seems to be a bit like Marillion at the time when Fish was still part of the band. A striking refrain is central to this number as well, and you get to know that Morpheus Rising has got very talented songwriters, as the tracks get memorized pretty fast!

I feel reminded of Diamond Head’s Canterbury at times with the song “in the End”, before you get to hear “Lord of the North”, which has got a great guitar riff… You get to know about the subject through the lyrics , but it has to be said that the Brit-Lads show a lot of new-blood vikings how you can translate mythology into impressive, emotional and atmospheric themes without using current devices.

As they are pretty busy, I am quite sure we can count on new songs pretty soon, and I am really looking forward to that!

Stefan Glas
Underground Empire – Dec. 2009

The original review (in German) can be found here. [Apologies for any editing carried out in aid of easier translation to spoken English!]

Anyhoo! Now it’s time to go out and plan the dessert for tomorrow’s band get together (with dinner kindly provided by none other than Sandra, who some of you may know as our ‘Merch Girl’!)…

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo
Morpheus Rising

This may appear a little premature, but there’s a reason for it so please read on…

At the start of 2009 we had a business meeting as a band, setting out short, medium and long term goals. These inlcuded such aims as writing sufficient material to play good supports, establish a decent fanbase, play a number of supports across the North East, and possibly to play a headline gig by early 2010.

By September of this year we had achieved most of what we’d set out to do by mid 2010, and then some. We’d also started planning on the release of our first commercial single, Fighting Man, something which hadn’t been discussed at all.

Over the last 2-3 months we have spent most of our waking hours working on the recording, mixing, producing, manufacturing and release of the single. Our aim? To raise more money than we did with last year’s An Ordinary Man. We hired Paul Banks to produce the video, we hired WildKat PR for the publicity and we paid for everything from our own pockets…

At no point did we plan or discuss an entry into the UK charts. And we still don’t!

For those of you who have been inundated with our tweets and Facebook updates you’ll know that, as soon as it was released, the CD version of the single entered the Top 5 of the Amazon UK CD Single pre-release chart, finishing its time there at #1. Once released it then shot into the Top 5 of the Amazon UK CD Single charts and has remained in the Top 3 for 6 of the last 7 days. On top of that the MP3 version of the song has bounced in and out of the Top 100 of the Amazon UK Hard Rock MP3 charts… remaining within the top 10,000 overall of the 8.9 million MP3 songs available on Amazon UK.

These facts alone are justification to us for all the effort put into the planning of the single, and we expect nothing more. Many people have asked us about the possibility of entering the UK Charts this weekend, our answer? We simply don’t know!

What you must understand is that the UK Charts is actually a Top 200. The Top 40 is played on Radio 1 and most other TV/radio music stations, the Top 100 is published in publications such as Music Week and the Top 200 is simply used by the industry as a record of sales/performance of artists across the country. The figures to enter these charts vary massively dependent on the time of year, the TV programmes currently airing etc. Sometimes you can enter the Top 200 with as little as 200 sales, at other times you need 750. To enter the Top 100 you regularly need upwards of 2,000 sales and 4,000+ for the Top 40. We are under no illusion that, in order to chart this week will take considerably more than the usual figures due to the current spate of X Factor related artists and singles which are inflating chart sales figures and we are not expecting any miracles when the charts are calculated at 01:30 this morning.

As well as the overall charts there are also genre specific Top 40 charts calculated such as Dance, R&B, Indie and Rock. Could we appear in the rock chart? Again, we simply don’t know.

What we do know is this:

We are seriously indebted to everyone who has supported Fighting Man in any way over the last month. From the media who ran the story, including the Daily Star, The Press and the Northern Echo. the radio stations who ran interviews and played either of the songs, including BBC Radio York, Real Radio, Rock Radio, Garrison FM and Yorkshire Radio, to those who helped us build the ‘Fighting Fund’ in order to get the whole thing off the ground (they know who they are, and if you want to find out, check the ‘Special Thanks’ on the single’s sleeve notes!).

And most importantly a HUGE thanks to every single one of the hundreds (and we can confirm it is at least in the hundreds) of you who have purchased either the CD or the download from Amazon, iTunes, HMV or wherever you found to buy it from.

We can make as much noise as we want about the release of the single, and we can push it on every site/forum/network we have access to, but without the generosity of each of you it would have been for nought.

Thank you.

No matter what tomorrow brings, we are proud to have achieved what we have so far, you have helped us surpass our wildest imaginations and for that we are in your debt.

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo
Morpheus Rising
…supporting the Poppy Appeal and HELP for HEROES

We’ve said it before (on more than one occasion), and we’ll say it again (no doubt on more than one occasion!)…

It’s been a hell of a week!

As most of you will know, have seen, heard or read, Fighting Man was officially released on 2nd Nov 2009. That’s last Monday, 6 days ago. It was made available on Amazon UK 6 days before that as a limited edition CD Single. Since then it has reached No 1 in their CD Single Pre-Release charts and made its way, with what appeared to be alarming ease, to No 2 on their CD Single Bestsellers chart! It has spent 11 of the 12 days it’s been available on that site in the Top 100, with it’s lowest ranking having been 23 and sitting inside the Top 4 for for the last 4 days solid.

The single was also released as a download on somewhere in the region of 700 online and mobile music retail sites including iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic, HMV, Tesco Entertainment, Rhapsody and Napster. It’s also available to stream from Spotify and We7… The video is now also available on AOL Video, YouTube (where it’s been viewed over 600 times in less than 24 hours this weekend) and most social networking sites.

Despite all this exposure, and the apparent success on Amazon we still cannot seem to break into any of the National media, neither radio or the press will touch us. And the reason? You tell us! (We can only assume that, without the weight of someone like Warner behind us, we don’t rate very highly on the news scale.)

What is interesting to note is that, despite the fact that we have consistently outsold everyone except Cheryl Cole in CDs on Amazon, and entered their MP3 Rock Top 100 for a time during the past week, as well as the track outselling all we have released previously on iTunes, we failed to dent the Official UK Charts at all this week. No real surprise when you consider that we’re not available in shops and have no advertising campaign to back up the amazing ‘word of mouth’ campaign you have all spread for us.

The real reason for the lack of charts however may be completely different… We haven’t actually sold any yet!

Well, no CDs at least! (Yes, we know that you’ve ordered them in your droves, but read on…)

The method we used to sell on Amazon was their Advantage system, a reseller programme which allows companies such as WTG Music, our own record label, to sell through Amazon as an official point of sale. Now, we only found out about this system at the last minute and rushed to get our company, and the single, accepted for the programme, which they were. The problem was, the system is fairly rigid in its stock/inventory system and so, despite the single being available from their site, they didn’t actually order any stock! We chased this up several times a day for the first week and, eventually, got a response from a real person as opposed to an automated mail system. Here’s the breakdown of what happened:

Their system places new stock orders on a Tuesday and re-stock orders on a Monday. As our single became available on the Tuesday we missed the new stock order that week. As they hadn’t received any stock they also couldn’t place a re-stock order the following Monday as there were no sales to register that stock had been sold! (Still with us?) They did place a manual order for a good number of CDs on Wednesday this week (in order to tide them over until the re-stock order on Monday next week) which were shipped to them by overnight courier on Thursday. So, that should now be ok then, right? Actually the saga continues…

(If you’re still with us now then would you like a job as our business manager?)

Despite them being received (with proof of signature in our hands!) on Friday at 8AM the single is still showing as out of stock on their site. “No problem!”, we thought. It just means they’ve shipped out the stock to fulfil the orders already placed doesn’t it? Unfortunately we don’t think that is the case. Many of our friends have contacted us to let us know that their purchase hasn’t yet come off their credit cards/banks or whatever payment method they used. We can only assume from this that, despite having several hundred of our CDs, they have not yet completed any transactions or shipped them out to the customers.

Now, while we are more than sorry for the many of you who ordered the CD during the pre-order period and are now still waiting patiently for that lovely Amazon package to drop through your letterbox, we hope you’ll bear with us while we try to explain that maybe this delay isn’t such a bad thing for the band…

The single was registered for a pre-release period with the necessary companies for counting sales towards the Official UK Charts. This period of pre-release was drastically reduced due to issues we had with both the CD manufacture and the final production of the MP3 audio masters. This delay in shipment by Amazon is, in effect, like an additional week or so of pre-release sales. The fact that you haven’t been billed yet means that the sale hasn’t been registered, that fact means that any CDs we sell/have sold on Amazon between Tuesday 27th Oct and midnight on 14th Nov will count as 1 weeks sales (providing they register the stock they have and ship the CDs to you).

The downside? You have £3.89 in your bank account for a little longer which you know you haven’t really got. And you’ll probably receive emails from Amazon advising you of the delay in shipment and asking you if you want to cancel your order. (You don’t, do you?)

The upside? We might stand a chance of charting in either the Official UK Charts Top 100 Singles or the Official UK Charts Top 40 Rock Singles on Nov 15th! (You do want that, don’t you?)

When all is said and done we hope that you will be patient with us during this process. It is our first commercial release and we are learning valuable lessons throughout this process.

And we hope that everyone who has joined us on this voyage into uncharted territory will accept our apologies on Amazon’s behalf, and look forward to receiving your CDs in the not too distant future!

In the meantime, here’s hoping!

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo
Morpheus Rising
…supporting HELP for HEROES and the Poppy Appeal

There's been a distinct lack of posts on here recently other than updates about the new single, and in all honesty that's an injustice to all that's gone on over the last few months... So sit back, relax, put your reading glasses on and prepare to spend the night catching up!

A long time coming!

The first thing to tell you about is the BBC session (included here as a podcast!).

The BBC run a great series of programmes across the UK for unsigned acts called BBC Introducing, Morpheus Rising have appeared on the BBC York show a few times previously with both Those Who Watch and Lord of the North having been played on occasion. When we first contacted Matt Seymour about getting airplay he was most supportive and after playing us the first time invited us to do a session for the show.

That was way back in the dim and distant past of early this year... For many reasons all the dates we were offered were unsuitable, firstly Grae was away with his 'real' job, then Pete and Andy were away with Marillion and Mostly Autumn, then Grae was away again, and so it dragged on. When we finally had sufficient time together as a band Matt was away on holiday! We were finally offered a slot in early September which appeared suitable for all involved and we agreed to do the session, then disaster struck! As is so often the case with bands in our situation, Andy found himself having to fulfil a commitment he had already made on the night of the session and we thought it was going to fall away again. Luckily for us Gow, a friend Gibbo had worked with in a previous band, agreed to stand in for the purpose of the session and, after a couple of intense rehearsals we were good to go!

The 'secret location' used for the BBC York Introducing sessions has a great natural sound to it and we were looking forward to recording on the night, but we ran into a number of issues due to the structure of our material and the need for Pete and Daymo to be totally aware of each others playing. In order to record the sessions live the crew normally face the cabs away from the musicians so they don't wash over into the vocal 'booth', this presented serious problems for both Pete and Daymo as, in order to maintain the tight twin guitar riffs and harmonies which are the crux of our sound, they need to hear each other clearly. Nevertheless we soldiered on and eventually reached the point where everyone felt comfortable enough to record the session. The end result has it's moments of greatness, and more than it's fair share of obvious 'live' moments! It's quite amusing that the most together track of the four is the cover which we'd only rehearsed twice as a band before the session!

All in all it was a great experience and we're looking forward to the opportunity to do more of the same. A huge thanks to Gow for his help on the night and the amount of work he put in to ensure we didn't miss Andy. Kudos!

The gig that nearly wasn't!

Around the same time as the session we were preparing for our gig at The Junction in York.

We'd been planning this gig since shortly after the Boardwalk gig in Sheffield. We were confirmed as headliners and started promoting the date on our sites and the various social profiles we have. Things were looking good and fans from Manchester, Glasgow and Newcastle were all making plans to pop along and ensure it was a great night.

Anyone involved in the live music, especially on the unsigned/independent side, knows that almost nothing ever goes to plan and even when the plans are solid, things can still fall apart at the last moment. Shortly before the gig we received a very apologetic message from the promoter saying that the supporting bands had all pulled out for one reason and another and they were going to have to pull the gig!

Naturally we were having none of it! After the disappointment of losing the Roundhouse gig in Manchester and the U-Fest festival being cancelled the month previously we weren't prepared to let this one go. We put the word out across Facebook etc that we were looking for support acts and, at an alarming rate, the ideas, offers and suggestions came flooding back. All we had to do now was to convince the promoter that we could pull it off.

We succeeded in saving the gig, however word that the gig was to be cancelled had got out and many of those who had planned to travel to York for the gig made alternative plans for the weekend, who wouldn't? Despite the fact that the attendance wasn't what we'd hoped, everything else on the night went amazingly well. The musicians among you will know how it feels when things just... 'click'? Is that the right word? Anyway, whatever the word is, it happened.

Pig Iron opened the show with a great selection of classic rock covers ranging from Maiden, Sabbath and Saxon to the lesser known, but equally as worthy Budgie! Next up were Lost Effect, normally their ties with Pig Iron only run to Pete on drums but tonight was to be different. At the last minute Dave (bass) had to pull from the gig... Were we going to have to cancel after all? No! The vocalist/bassist for Pig Iron valiantly stood in and saved the day. He did a great job considering the fact he had a sound check to get the gist of the material, and none of the crowd were any the wiser from what we could tell. Yet more kudos to a bass player! (Seems to be thread forming here?)

Then it was our turn. For the first time we actually made the most of our intro (O Fortuna for the purists, Old Spice for the fogies!) and left it to the last minute to appear on stage, coming on from stage front no less! Having the video footage from the night rest assured that any closer would have Andy et al to start playing the opening riff to Save The Day with their guitars still in the stands! (Except Pete of course who opened the riff from off stage with his radio, show off!)
From there on in it was great fun. That's the only way it can be described. Everything just 'clicked', the movement on stage was much more natural, the response from the crowd was animated and most importantly loud... we had a front line of faithful metal fans moshing away inches from the monitors, and when Pete decided to make the most of the radio on his guitar again and disappeared into the crowd during Lord of the North it was just priceless! (I think he's been spending too much time with a certain Mr. H of late and now looks for interesting escapes while on stage.) The set was done, we came back on for the encore without the crowd quietening down a jot, it was awesome.

At the end of the night we mingled with what was left of the crowd and the staff. The feedback was consistent, it hadn't just been us who thought it was a good night. Even the security guys on the door, normally the most jaded people at any gig, were full of praise. It's just a shame that the problems encountered in the planning meant we didn't get the crowd we'd hoped for, their loss!

It was a great night and we might even be able to put some of the home video footage on our site once we get the audio from the desk synced to it (no mean feat without a timecode!).

One in the Bank!

At the same time as the session and the gig were being planned and executed we were also working on the recording and mixing of Fighting Man. Part of this process was shooting the supporting video which many of you will have seen by now on YouTube.

Last year's single, An Ordinary Man, was an entirely home grown affair. We recorded the track and shot the video on no budget and we were really happy with the results. This year was a different story. With the intention of making Fighting Man a chart eligible single release we knew that we had to look to someone else to shoot the video for us. The someone else was Digifish Media Productions, the company headed up by Paul Banks of Shed Seven fame.

On a cold September night, in a dark industrial estate we all took turns being 'made up' by Jo Sweeting before throwing ourselves at the mercy of Paul and Ollie...

Once the stage was set and the lighting arranged we proceeded to run through Fighting Man for what seemed like an innumerable amount of takes. We had smoke in our eyes, blinding lights and cameras in our faces, under our noses and wherever else they decided to try a shot from. All too soon it was over and all we could do was wait for the roughs...

Within a few days we got a message from Paul letting us know that the first 'take' was ready for us to view, in all honesty we'd have gone for it straight away. It was great! On a closer look there were certain elements we felt were unsuitable or needed tighter sync with the track etc and Paul busied himself over the next few days with making the minute changes we requested, when we saw the final version with the poppy field footage at the end we were blown away!

Paul and Ollie have done us proud and have produced a video which we feel represents the best of what we do and still has a relevance to the causes we're supporting with the single. More Kudos! (At least it's to a guitarist this time!)

Back to the future...

That just about brings us up to the stage we're at now. The single is available to pre-order, it's been submitted to somewhere in the region of 700 online, mobile and 'new media' music retailers and will be available worldwide from 2nd November.

The video's online and is being well received by all with over 1500 combined views on the various locations it's been posted (most of which are on our YouTube channel) and the PR campaign is well under way promoting the single release in a little over two weeks time.

The story of the last few weeks working on the single, getting it out on time, and making it available to you as well as promoting it is a whole other story, so tune in next week when we might just be able to tell you about some exciting gig news, a worldwide physical CD release and more news from the front, until then...

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo
Morpheus Rising
...supporting HELP for HEROES and the Poppy Appeal

When we released our single in aid of HELP for HEROES last year we were asked repeatedly about the possibility of us releasing a physical CD. At that time it wasn’t something we were able to pursue and we feel that we missed out on something special by not doing so.

This year we had the intention of producing a single but were constrained by finances (or rather the lack of!). We were eventually able to reach an agreement with a local CD manufacturer about producing the promo and then the retail CD but unfortunately we again ran into the finance issue when we received the final quote for the retail CD.

Today, at the last minute, we’re pleased to say that London based Key Productions have pulled out all the stops and have come on board at the last minute to save the day!

We should now have a limited run of the CDs ready to make available for the release date of 2nd Nov, we also hope to make it available through Amazon as well as our own store.

While we catch our breath and try to catch up with all that’s happened in the last week or so we hope you’ll take the time to watch the supporting video for the single… you can find it on the Fighting Man page on our site.

You could also request that the single be played by TotalRock Radio and Rock Radio (Manchester and Glasgow) as they both have promo copies of the single… so get cracking

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo
Morpeus Rising
…supporting HELP for HEROES and the Poppy Appeal