Wow, we were excited about this one. For our first ever non-UK act, we managed to somehow persuade none less than The Thermals, Portland OR’s finest, to join us for some evening sunshine, some fairly daft banter and three cracking acoustic tracks.

The band had been delayed at sound check, so we’d ended up waiting around for a lot longer than we’d planned. Our new friends from the My Old Kentucky blog were also over from the US to watch us record the Thermals and in between drinking and telling tall tales about Edinburgh, it occurred to us that we could carry this theme of hanging around for stuff we like on into the session. So, naturally, we snuck into the graveyard of Greyfriars Kirk to find our spot for the evening.

The story goes that this very churchyard is where one daft little dog guarded over its dead owners grave for fourteen years, in an actual parable of loyalty beyond death. It’s pretty popular with tourists, as you’d imagine. The churchyard itself though is actually chock full of notables other than just the dog guy, though, with the architects who built the city and the politicians who ran it all interred in sometimes astonishing tombs, all covered in skulls and bones and other weird-looking sculpture.

With the evening sun nice and low – and having roped our new friends in to do the glamorous job of keeping the branches out of the bands faces (thanks Wendles) – we got three acoustic corkers from the new album.

Final track of the evening was I Let It Go – all rumbunctious and pogo-ing when plugged in, here it’s stripped back and gets taken from the garage to the grassland. It’s still got the energy of the record, and Hutch’s voice cuts through like a foghorn, but with the flavour of a Sunday morning, rather than a Saturday night – cracking stuff.

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Find out more about The Thermals at thethermals.com