Raising Money For Children’s Liver Disease – London Marathon 2012

This year, amidst injury and illness I have been training to run the London Marathon for Children’s Liver Disease. As part of my fundraising efforts I have created what could be the most annoying children’s song ever, The Baby Boogie Dance. Please buy it on iTunes and support this wonderful cause. My sister was born with Biliary Atresia, a rare childhood liver disorder. She had a transplant when she was ten and I spent a lot of my childhood in King’s College hospital as a visitor!

Buy The Baby Boogie Dance Now!

Acoustic Set

Promotional Clip of Sarah’s acoustic covers: Feeling Good, Someone Like You and I Don’t Wanna Talk About It.
Sarah has a huge repertoire of some of the greatest songs ever made to play for you in her own, beautiful acoustic way.
Soulful, folky, bluesy all mixed up with a touch of rock ‘n’ roll in places.

It’s a ‘No No’ to the London Marathon

I’ve been struggling with a lingering peroneal tendon injury for the past 8 weeks and even after a few miles it is as puffy as a magic dragon and I feel like someone has tightened a pulley across the side of my foot up to the achilles tendon.

I have buried my head in the sand over it but finally had a sharp nudge in the ribs to get it looked at! Expert doc did a scan and suggested there could be a deep injury to the peroneal tendons, that may have occurred when I broke the 5th metatarsal back in May 2011. He wants me to have an MRI and then ‘take it from there’. The problem isn’t affecting my day to day activities but one thumb in the injured area and I’m flinching like a prizewinning fish out of water, this is not good.

3 weeks ago when I was advised to cross-train hard and not run at all until the marathon, I was also advised that doing the marathon may cause considerably more damage to the injury and possibly put me out for months afterwards. For someone who is quite taken by running, this prognosis was not well-received! My plan is to push really hard for faster and faster 10km and half-marathon times until the winter. 

Enough of the ramble now, I won’t be running the London Marathon this year, I’ve put off pulling out, in the hope that rest and cross-training will ‘do the trick’ but it appears something deeper and more serious is at play here with these damned peroneal tendons. 

Thanks to everyone who has donated to Children’s LIver disease. I can of course, arrange for your funds to be returned but if you wish for your donations to stand, I will be running 10kms and half-marathons throughout the year and continuously raising money for Children’s Liver Disease as and when I can!

 

The Flotels on Reverb Nation

Under The Influence Of….

Music has to have a certain emotional or sonic quality for my ears to tingle and maintain an interest. Rhythm and blues are the anchors of my musical tastes, artists like Betty LaVette, Ann Peebles, Irma Thomas and Betty Davis are important to me. Eva Cassidy is another beauty of the airwaves, her ability to sing with such purity, control and soul was immense, probably one of the finest cover artists ever to have lived.

When I’m playing in a band I like to get the fuzz pedal out and play rocking blues, as a bass player I’m hugely into The Who, The Stones, The Small Faces and Led Zeppelin, I crank the vocals up too and love playing in a heavier 3-piece setup.

I’m a massive fan of the Arctic Monkeys/Last Shadow Puppets, the lyrical content is quite superb; some might say I’m brave to say this but I’ll put Alex Turner up there with Ray Davies when it comes to originality in the rock-pop genius world. The Kinks are one of my favourite bands of all time, Village Green Preservation society is a musical and cultural wonder.

Allen Toussaint is another individual who has my undivided musical attentions, there is an immeasurable warmth about everything he creates, I met him once at The Barbican and when I told him how much I loved Betty Davis’ ‘Mean Man’ he said: ‘lord, you just Sesame Street’.

Reggae music as a whole genre is something that rocks me to the core, the hypnotic qualities are so enticing; its history is so important in popular musical culture and is scattered far and wide across the top 40 today.

My goal is to make music that sounds so beautiful and clear but has a wonderful groove and feeling of soul.

Sarah Flotel: Songwriter

I’ve been writing songs for years and had a good go at getting a band off the ground (The Flotels) but that project is on hold while I search for a new guitarist to make up a 3 piece with me on bass. Keeping a band of exceptional musicians together isn’t easy without a budget so I’m going it solo for the forseeable future.

My natural writing style absorbs my influences of old school soul, rhythm and blues and the classic melodies of pop songs from yester-year. I had to sell off most of my studio equipment a while back to pay the bills but now I’m re-building it and creating a warm, crisp and valvey sound to produce my first solo EP. I have about 50 songs ready to record but life won’t allow me to commit to an album full-time at the moment so I’m going to group them into EP and single releases; acoustic to begin with then I’ll be looking to team up with a hipster DJ-beatmaster type to get some full scale production going on certain tracks. When I’m happy with the first few tracks, I’ll pick one out for a video and if I can rack up the time, I’ll do a video diary of the recording.

There are some very old demos (Jan 2009) up on The Flotels site, by all means have a listen at my very first attempts at home recording, these demos were mixed by Doug Fayers in Logic 8 and 9.

All of my photography is done exclusively by Luke Weall.