A few years ago, at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown, I met a fascinating young French guy called Jean-Charles Capelli. He has a great combination of “on-the-surface emotions” as a singer-songwriter and  business/web/metaverse savvy and a zest for new life-experiences that matches my own. We formed a new company to handle our various joint enterprises. Our partnership works despite, or maybe because he’s half my age.  I advised him that, given my appraisal of the current techological environment, merely making and marketing a record from scratch is even greater risk than ever. So we have created a three-pronged project around our album, involving a video game, a novel and a comic/graphic novel. It’s called “Ace Hansel Jr and the Legend Of Croix-Noire”. The idea is that each of the several manifestations of the concept will act as a buttress for the others in this fractious commercial and artistic world.  For added fun , we created secret identities for ourselves that aren’t actually secret at all, otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you.  He’s Ace Hansel Jr (an anagram of Jean-Charles),- superhero guardian of the fictitious French red light district of Croix-Noire,  and I’m his sidekick, Lieutenant Colonel John Talbot, an old army officer friend of his late father.  I was anxious that the project should have a solid literary base, and so having commissioned a 50,000 word novella by my friend, writer David Quantick, we moved on to commission an elaborate Roblox video game and a comic series of seven issues, all drawn by legendary Marvel/DC artist Mike Collins and his team. The album,  “Songs from Croix-Noire” spans psychedelia, rock, ballads and all stations in between. We’re immensely proud of this multi-faceted creation, but we don’t see it as a vertical take-off shot at the charts, - more the establishment of an Intellectual Property that will last for years and grow slowly but surely.