The Horseshoe Inn, also know locally as The Bridges, is situated at the base of the South Shropshire hill range known as The Long Mynd. Since 2004 the pub has held it’s doors wide open and welcomed countless musicians and music fans to share in each others appreciation for every variety of music imaginable. With it’s regular Monday evening Open Mic’ Session, plus a further three nights a week of live music, it has provided the area with a much needed, and dearly loved, opportunity for the local community to enjoy live music in deliciously welcoming surroundings.

It's the local pub for Erica Nockalls and myself and it was there that we met some great singers and players and I was amazed – they were quite young, singing and playing their own stuff to a gathering of 30 or 40 people a night in the pub. They were called open mic nights, people would do three or four songs and pass it on to the next person, we met some really talented people, and I thought “Let’s see if these guys want to be recorded.”

So I just started out with the recording idea and then I thought “Actually, a lot of this is sounding great, let’s try and find a platform to release it.” So we put the first Shared album together - there was some of mine and Erica’s stuff on there, Wayne Hussey from The Mission was also on there - we knew that a certain amount of sales would come from just our names being on there - and then four other unknown, or as of now relatively unknown, undiscovered artists.

We’ve sold a few thousand of them now, and it’s been a nice platform for the new artists. It’s been also a nice thing for us to be able to do - we’re not working on a new album, just coming up with two or three tracks for no other reason than it’s a bit of fun. There’s no parameters set around the tracks for Shared.

We're two albums in and we’ve started to also do gigs where the bill isn’t like somebody opens, there’s someone in the middle, then a headliner.  Me and Erica are first on stage, then we have one of the other artists join us, and we three or four sing sections for about an hour and fifteen minutes then have a half hour break.  There'll also be a period for everyone from the night – we’ve had Jim Bob from The Unstoppable Sex Machine and Dirty Ray who used to be with Immaculate Fools and a bunch of other friends. So you’re seeing eight or nine people play, and play with each other in an hour and fifteen minutes, a nice break, then you do it all again. It works out great, and we’re planning more gigs like it in due course.

The roots of Shared lie firmly at the feet of Mo and Bob Macauley who ran The Horseshoe Inn and sadly the pub is no longer in their hands but it remains the spiritual home of Shared and the whole philosophy that got me and Erica into it in the first place.  We've done album launch parties for both of the albums thus far, along with a mini-festival styled gig shortly before The Horseshoe Inn shut its doors back in September 2010.

What's great about Shared is that I get to work with artists who I've followed and admired over the years.  There are old friends on there who I've known, met or worked with a long time ago and there are also new friends I've made who hopefully will stay around for years to come.

It’s all in a very acoustic environment, it’s really good.  It would be great to make it a mainstay at one of the side stages of one of the smaller British festivals. So yes, it’s still early days for it, but we enjoy it, and it’s another thing that we feel blessed to be able to do.

Miles Hunt, August 2011