Last night I made icons - mostly at the request of aditu_az and crazydutchgirl although I was intending to do them anyway. They are icons of Jeff Fiorello, who I first encountered as one of the support acts at the Half Moon (Putney) gig last Monday. Jeff did three tracks at that gig (they were pushed for time) and blew me away to the extent that acrazywench and I got the CDs off the back of those three tracks. After the gig I stopped to talk to him and he is one of the nicest, most approachable people I've met in a long time.

He told us he was going to be doing two more gigs in London that week, then head up to Scotland for a gig in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh. Unfortunately with my madness-induced bus runs all over the country I wasn't going to be able to make it to any of the gigs. I'm gutted about that really. aditu_az and hopeless_cynic went to the Wednesday night gig in London, however, and spent a good deal of time chatting to Jeff (and his dad!) and completely agreed with my impressions of how *nice* he is. He signed CDs for them at the time (and one for me telling me I should have been there - would that I could have!) and gave them extra CDs to give to friends to spread his music around.

He deserves as much recognition as he can get.

Musically he's a guitar-based singer/songwriter (yeah, it's me saying this, you're surprised?) with a touch of indie, a little folksy, a little bluesy but mostly just damn good. He actually puts me in mind a little of David Sneddon (first winner of Fame Academy here - the only reality TV show I ever followed), but please don't let the memory of DS's singles put you off (in fact if you've never heard his album you should give it a chance)) but also has a unique touch to his lyrics and style.

I don't normally share smaller artists' music outwith a very small circle of friends (because I'll just relentlessly tell people they need to go buy the album!), but Jeff explicitly said to us that he would love as many people to hear his songs as possible so as soon as I get home I will be uploading some of his songs for you.

In the meantime, please check out his MySpace page and his site

Trust me on this, you will not regret it.

(and you could always add his name to your interests on your profile page...)