Northampton singer-songwriter Andy Crofts to go it alone with debut solo studio album

The singer-songwriter, who hails from Northampton, has confirmed he will be recording his first studio solo album this year.

The news comes after he released a live LP of a show at the back of last year called Live At The 100 Club, on which the majority of the songs were numbers recorded by The Moons, the band Crofts has fronted since 2008.

The Moons, which also features fellow town musicians Ben Gordelier, Chris Watson and Ben Curtis, as well as Tom van Heel, have released four studio LPs, the most recent of which was the excellent Pocket Melodies back in 2020.

And now Crofts is keen to return to studio to get cracking again, although where and when has yet to be confirmed.

"I’m not quite sure where I will be recording my album yet," he said. "I will probably be doing most of it myself as I feel it will be more personal this way.

"Once I have chosen a studio I plan to get in and start tracking. I have so many demos, I just need to pick the track list."

And he added: "A lot of the demos are down, I just need to finish them.

"Sometimes when I come up with song ideas, I come up with a verse, pre-chorus, and then maybe get stuck, and then I will move on to another song.

"So it is a case of me going back, dipping into all the songs, bit by bit and try and repair them and put them back together like jigsaw pieces.

"They are all original pieces, nobody has heard any of them, unless I put the song Westway on the album, which I might do.

"I am excited about it because it sort of officially puts me out there on my own.

"So it is exciting, and I am just looking forward to having something out again.

"Every time you leave it too long you feel like you have gone stale, or the iron gets cold very quickly, and you want to be relevant.

"I am never going to have a huge following, and I will always have that sort of underground following, which is cool, because I am too old to be hip and signed to a major label.

"But it's exciting to do it all DIY really."

So what of The Moons?

"The Moons is still going, but it's just a case of things having slowed down a bit," said Crofts, who now lives in Worthing in west Sussex.

"Everyone's up and down the country now, everyone's got kids, and it is quite hard to orchestrate it all together.

"We haven't split up or anything, but I think the time now is for me to do my own thing, and come up with something interesting like the solo album."

It has been a couple of years of change for Crofts, who has also had to step back from his role as the bass player with Paul Weller's band.

Crofts had been a Weller band regular in the studio, working on a string of hit albums including Wake Up The Nation, Sonik Kicks, Saturns Pattern, A Kind Revolution and On Sunset.

He also travelled the world as part of the Modfather's live band for 10 years, but personal situations meant he was unable to commit himself fully, and that led to his departure from the Weller camp.

"It was a huge disappointment for me, because it was out of my hands," admits Crofts.

"But at the end of the day, I was being unreliable because I had to stay at home, and being unreliable and not being able to turn up for gigs or rehearsals, or whatever, that is something I don't do.

"It started to take its toll, so in the end I just took the horrible decision of stepping back.

"I am still close friends with everyone, exactly the same as I was, it's just musically I had to step back."