Yes, yes.

So my story, um, yeah.

So I guess I would probably start at around 2013 when-- I'm in my 40s now, so I was in my early 30s then.

And I think, uh, at that point I was moving abroad for my work, and I was conscious that my dad was getting a bit older.

He was 11 years older than my mum, and he ha- he lived this very interesting life and I just, you know, just like you guys have said, things I-- Like Alexander, like the tombstone.

I, I knew snippets.

I, I'd heard anecdotes.

So talk about what that is and then just talk about the high-level steps once someone decides to avail themselves of your services.

When did you recognize that not only did you not have your dad's voice, you did not have recordings of him, but you also had this call in your life to grab the recordings of other people's parents? Talk about that crossover to recognize what you did not have, you wanted to make sure others might.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was, I mean, it wasn't in that week per se, but as grief works slowly, just over that time, it was only in 2024 when I had a break in my work, that the idea had been growing, which was just that, what a shame, like what a waste with all the technology we have.

I did try actually, I'll be honest with you.

What I tried was writing.

So I tried to get him to write down his biography and we had email at the time, so I was actually living abroad and we would email back and forth.

He would write down the passage and I might say, oh, can you explain this a bit more? But it was a very long, arduous and difficult process because he would just suddenly say something like, oh, and then I heard Gandhi speak.

And so I translated to mum and dad what he was saying.

So one of the idea, the notion that this actually could become a business, I could really make a difference in the community through this work.

Brilliant.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I, I had a long chat with Josh and it was very nice.

Um, and then I put the phone down and I went downstairs and my wife said, "So how'd it go?" And I said, "Yeah, it went really well." I said, "But I n- I ain't gonna do it." She said, "Why not?" I said, "Oh, I, I don't know, I just, I'm, I'm just enjoying what I'm doing at the moment." And, uh, my wife, I, I won't use any expletives, but, um, she, she's American and she basically said, "Get up your ass, Taylor, and do it."

No. Yeah, just tradition, yeah.

Yeah.

I, I, I'd, I'd like, like to add the, um, it's, it's great, again, being in a band.

Uh, because the last time I was in my own band was, like, in Bristol when I was, like, 17, 18 years old.

I'm curious of how you got involved and why this came up for you particularly.

Yeah, I mean, I think the story really starts, well, it starts with the passing of my dad, which was March 2021, towards the end of COVID in the UK.

And, well, I mean, actually, it starts a bit before that.

It starts about 10 years earlier.

When I tried to start a biography with my dad, I was going to move abroad for a period.

So this is like 2013, you know, I'm about 30 years of age.

And I just always felt that he had lots, he had a really interesting story and we were close and we did talk about stuff and there was no real off boundary topics, but it just didn't come up.

Can you tell a little bit about your project and how you go about that you do give people these, it's like a three-month process, is it? Or something like that? Yeah, so maybe you could talk about that a little bit in depth.

It's 100%

pass.

I've been sitting and listening to the conversation and kind of think I need to say something because I've been, well, On the bot thing, that's quite interesting because my manager has actually created a support bot and he gave it the source code and said to people, you can go off that and ask it things about the product.

And I said to him, well, that's very interesting and everything, but he's only asking the code and someone tried to use it and come back with all this stuff and they went, I don't understand what half of this means.

I then said to him, well, why don't you put the documentation in.

So we've been working on the last month, getting all our documentation into Markdown to convert it across to PDF.

So I did that.

Please do jam on it and see what you think.

Yeah.

Um, which I still have here, actually.

Um, and, and then I went to guitar lessons with my best friend from school, and we ended up, uh, just playing, like, for a few months together, like, doing, doing these guitar lessons.

Um, and then eventually my dad, um, used to go to a pub in Bristol called The Pied Horse with my mum on, on a Saturday evening.

He came back one evening, he said, "I've got you an audition." And I was 16 at the time.

Yeah.

Um, and I remember we played Moles Club in Bath, um, and Roland came along, and he was stood right in front of me.

Always remember it, and he was watching me play.

And I guess Geoff and the shop, and the beginnings of, um, punk did sort of freak out the Grateful Dead fans, and the sort of people who wanted to, you know, like doodling music, didn't they? And sort of, you know, sensitive singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell or Carole King.

Yeah.

I mean, I agree to a degree.

Uh, I mean, uh, you know, you could almost say the same when I joined the NME in the early '80s, the, the, those kind of people, there was [laughs] still, that would've been the biggest thing to have happened if the Beatles had reformed.

I mean, obviously John Lennon was murdered in '79, but so that carried on for a long time.

Um, but, uh, if you're looking for something f- new, um, it always helps if other people are also looking for it.

Um, and that's what happened round about mid-1976 when all of these records, '76 leading into '77, started to come out.

And then when they got the success of, like, Sweet as Girl, there seemed to be another sort of little, I don't know, problem with that, some- having a band on your label that is obviously going for a commercial sound.

Yeah

... come like, come like buses.

And whilst I was conscious that, you know, had they shared a room, it might not have been-- You know, my dad wouldn't have been really there in the room, but physically it would've been nice just to see them hug or, or hold, you know, hold each other.

And, uh, [lips smack] there was this other re-revela- you know, revelation or realization in those w- strange weeks and months afterwards that they would never share a room, but also everything about my dad would have to be communicated by me to my son, and also my daughter.

And that felt like a really big pressure and a burden, and I felt like I really messed up by not making the time to capture his voice and his, his stories.

And so that sort of sat with me in sort of the way that grief does and kind of comes and goes.

And in 2024, just was like, "I have to do something about this." And I didn't know what that was.

No.

What is it about music and singing that is so powerful and inspirational about Estonian culture?

Well, that brought the Estonian ethnic community together from the end of the 19th century because the festival's songs were all in Estonian, so that was a way of sort of reminding people of the language of the country, even though it wasn't a country at that time.

Um, continued when it became independent after the First World War, logically because they'd been successful in the 19th century, so no reason why they shouldn't be more successful in the independent country.

And in the communist era, they were a way ofbattling surreptitiously the Soviet authorities, so smuggling in nationalistic songs.

They were so fortunate, of course, Estonians, that the Soviets couldn't understand the language.

Very, very few native Russian speakers can understand Estonian fluently.

So by speaking it fast, by using dialects, um, old-fashioned words-

Where are we at now, and what is your, um, your hope and your concerns about the future?