16th May 2007

A one off gig to announce. We’ll be taking part in the Ipswich Pulse festival ‘Folk to Bluegrass’ event at the Steamboat on June 14th, with Stowfolk, Street Legal, and Capstan Full Strength. We are playing first and things kick off at 7.45 .. so don’t be late.


16th January 2007

After a brief pause, we are preparing for a new round of recording, and even spent a couple of hours at a photo-shoot last Saturday.

7th October 2006

Thanks to Mike and co. for the support at Bramford. We will hopefully have some news to announce soon.


23rd September 2006

I apologise for the lack of new of late .. I’ve been dealing with the arrival of my daughter :-)

Things are now gearing up again. Next up is a return to Bramford for another big music night. Details here.
 

3rd July 2006

Some thanks to everyone who waited out the technical problems to watch us play at Ipswich music day yesterday. It was a great event.

15th June 2006

Some photos from last summer have come to light. Some are here.
 

25th May 2006

We are happy to be able to report that we’ll soon be starting work on an album for release on Backwater records later this year.

15th May 2006

After a few months when Dave and Ivan have been predominantly in the wrong hemisphere, we are now all safely back in Suffolk and have regrouped to get some new things happening.

We have a new batch of songs mostly arranged, and hope to start some new recording soon.

We have also been confirmed as being on the bill at the 2006 ‘Ipswich Music Day‘ in Christchurch park, which we have enjoyed playing a number of times in the park .. although we seem to attract technical or weather problems !

We’ll confirm a stage and time when we know.

19th February 2006

Thanks to everyone for making last night in Playford fun. ‘Blue memories’ was especially surreal for us with the glockenspiel impersonations from the audience. Thanks to CPC for the glowsticks.


18th February

.. again not directly Doons related, but the entire band were down at the Peppery productions Los Pistoleros gig last night, and had a great old time - although i was personally dissapointed that Martin Belmonts’ Fender bass (not a bass guitar at all) was not in evidence.

17th February

We have just completed work on a new E.P. which we’ll have available in special ‘limited edition’ format at the Playford gig tomorrow night. Full details of the lineup are here.

The EP tracks are :-

House on the Hill
Nothing heppends in this Town
Plastic Roses
Ghost Of A Chance
Open Roads (Live)
Lonely Midnight Sound (live)

9th December.

Many thanks to ‘the Floozies’ for playing marvellously at the Gatsby gig last night. It all sounded mighty fine.

 21st November 2005

We’ve added a couple more gigs for next year to the calendar. We are gearing up for the gig with the Floozies next month .. and really looking forward to the chance to play a longer set than we have of late.

18th November 2005

Ivan has been globe trotting with Catherine Feeny again. He’s been off in Belgium supporting ‘John Prine’. Details here.

31st October 2005

Fridays gig at at High Barn was great to do, and it was nice to be able to play an extended set there. The other artists on the bill were impeccable as always. Thanks go to Simon and Chris.

27th October 2005

We are all ready to perform a set of all ‘new’ songs to the good people of Essex tomorrow night. We can also announce (at long last) a gig with Bury St Edmunds Jazz-Folkies ‘the floozies’ in the Corn-Exchange building, Ipswich on December 8th. Hooray :-) More details to follow.

24th September 2005

For those of you with a 2006 diary, we can now confirm a gig with street legal back at Playford on Feb 18th.

19th August 2005

We had a fun time at the Playford gig last night .. and gave a couple of new songs a first outing. Thanks to all involved. A photo taken from the stage may or may not be here.

9th August 2005

We have booked up a return to the 'Unplugged' Music Club High Barn, Essex on October 28th.
 

5th August 2005

We are now reasonably ready to take part in the acoustic gig at Playford next week. This will be another ‘everyone stand around a single microphone’ job which fulfils Mikes latent ambition to play the Grand Ole Opry. We should be debuting a couple of new songs for the night.
 

28th July 2005

Our ‘Backwater’ records ‘King Of tomorrow’ EP is now available to purchase by download here.
 

4th July 2005

Yesterday saw us playing the every marvellous ‘Ipswich music day’ .. and unlike last year, the rain held off. Things kind of went to plan until 1/2 way through the second song, when the stages generator ran out of diesel. Playing to an outdoor audience without any PA turned out to be rather tricky, but once power was back things were happy again

Apologies to those people who couldn’t get CDs on the day .. we ran out after demand exceeded our hopeless incorrect guess.

1st July 2005

Thanks (again!) to Stephen Foster for giving ‘lonely midnight sound’ a spin on his drive-time show yesterday on BBC Radio Suffolk.

26th June 2005

Last nights gig at Blaxhall was a truly strange night .. The pancakes had kitted Blaxhall village hall (an impressively ‘old school’ structure) with papier mache owls, Heron, and other assorted wildlife. half the audience came dressed as animals (we are still not sure why !)

The 7 year old prawn was especially impressive.

Thanks to Jamie for putting it all together

25th June 2005

Last nights gig at Baddingham followed the now familiar pattern of rain setting in the moment we try to play an outdoor gig. We had a fine old time once we moved into the back-up indoor venue. Thanks to all involved.

Tonights gig at Blaxhall (village hall 7.30) will doubtless see great weather as its inside.

6th June 2005

A few more gigs are in the pipe line. We’ll be playing a gig in Framlingham on Friday 24th June, and Blaxhall on the 25th June, and possibly Playford on the 13th of August. More details to follow

20th May 2005

Thanks to the new Wolsey people, and everyone who turned out for the pulse gig last night. We had a good old night.

7th May 2005

Once again we had a good night at the wonderful Wensum lodge music club last night. Many thanks to Simon Black for putting on a good show as always.

4th May 2005

We have just been confirmed as being on the bill for the ‘music in the park’ extravaganza at Christchurch park Ipswich on 3/7/2005. More details to follow.

7th April 2005

There are some new tracks to download on the ‘sounds’ page. Enjoy !

4th April 2005

Dave and Ivan are back from playing a gig in Belgium with Catherine Feeny . Apparently they ‘played like pros’ .. which presumably means they drank too much, then demanded lots of money.

12th March 2005

We had a good time at the big acoustic night at Bramford. It was pretty interesting to try out our ‘oh brother where art thou’ moves around the single microphone. We were even able to take some copies of the acoustic EP.

March 8th 2005

The rather wonderful Catherine Feeny was kind enough to pop down from Sunny Norwich to do add some vocals to some recordings we are working on. It all went rather well, and we hope to have an EP of the recordings available at gigs from the end of the week.

February 16th 2005

We have just been added to the bill for a gig as part of the Ipswich Pulse festival organized by the nice people at the New Wolsey Theatre. The gig will be on Thursday May 19th. More details to follow.

January 30th 2005

.. nothing exactly to do with the band, But Mike and Chris greatly enjoyed Hank Wangford last night. Martin Belmont is a guitar God.

January 28th 2005

We now have some finalized dates for some appearances in Norwich .. see the Calendar pages for details. We are doing a few numbers at the rather wonderful Wensum lodge music night in a couple of weeks .. but we are pretty much going there to support our friend Emma who is debuting there that night.

We have (perhaps) just started recording some songs ourselves with a view to making them available somehow if they are any good. The emphasis for these ‘DIY’ attempts is to get a nice loose natural feel which is a tricky thing to get in a full studio situation. We’ll see what happens.

A recent look at some recent advertising material shows that more in more than 50% of cases we are advertised as ‘Mike Summers and the Dunes’ rather then ‘Mike Summers and the Doons’. Perhaps a change of name is needed .. along with a shift into Surf guitar.

January 21st 2005

We are busy booking up a load of appearance in Norwich. We’ll update the gig list as soon as they are confirmed.

Here are assorted random links to recent media mentions.

Here, here,

and MJ says a few nice things about us (bless him) here

17th January 2005

We all had a good time at the steamboat with MJ over the weekend. It was also good to break-in Mikes new guitar (some people get all the best Christmas presents)

Now if we can just get it to stay in tune ...

22nd December 2004
The line-up for a gig at the Steamboat Tavern Ipswich on Jan 15th has just been sorted. We are playing with M.J.Hibbett and the validator. Check out there stuff at http://www.mjhibbett.com/
This gig is organized by those nice people at vc25.co.uk

December 15th 2004

We have just been confirmed as playing the “Big Music Night” organized by the people at street legal music on Friday March 11th 2005. This looks to be a excellent night.

December 12th 2004

Our trip up to Norwich art centre for the blackcat music showcase was the expected good day out. Although severely tempted, Mike even managed to avoid buying any weird and wonderful stringed instruments from the cash-converters music shop around the corner.

November 26th 2004

We had a great time in darkest Essex at the High barn gig. We hope to be back there next year. This was the first live outing for a very long time for a purely acoustic line up .. featuring acoustic bass, and everything sounded fine.

Summer 2004

Mike and the Doons have an EP released on backwater records.
The ‘King of Tomorrow’ EP contains tracks
‘King of Tomorrow’
‘Blue Memories’
‘Open Roads’
‘Long black Train’

See the backwater web site for details.
The track ‘King of tomorrow’ has been picking up a lot of radio air play in Chile
.. we don’t know why !

See the events calendar for upcoming gigs.f