When it comes to a measure of success in music does anyone know just what "success" means?

"Three Men in a Boat" was a British blues, folk, rock, heavy metal, original / cover band that left the rush hour roads three hundred years behind them and dropped into the mid eighteenth century of the British canal system where they lived 6 months of the year on a canal barge and plied the hidden 300 year old pubs - like Tom's Midnight Garden, like a Harry Potter book, like discovering Avalon - yet those pubs were packed every night and abided by no British licensing law to cut short the revelry.

They could spend a day at 5mph reaching the next gig, they recorded all three of their albums on their barge at night - no vibrations except from chuckling gallinules or the occassional insomnolent mallard (usually kept on the record).

We here at CMEAS will not promise you major label record deals, international grandstanding, and LA la la la schmooze mountain climbing distortion of dreams, we don't promise that our tours will change some sadness in the world into light (though that would be wonderful and the wish is always there). We don't promise anything other than musical travel adventure and that we will strive to expand our adventurous sphere as long as we find folks who want to partner in the enterprise.

Seeing a wonderful singer from Texas break into tears when she saw Lancaster Castle ("There's nothing older than 50 years in Dallas!"), strapping a microphone to a potted palm in a late Sunday night Italian restaurant in Twickenham and 12 American musicians seranade the owner and wait staff (and walking out with two bottles of house champagne), spending several nights in a sixteenth Century weaver's house between gigs in Roman Bath and Bristol, washing down slow cooked lamb Henry with flagons of Copper Dragon ale from Skipton at the Aspinall Arms (and playing 'til the pogo hopping punters, some with monacles, leap no more and the rock and roll shirts lie on the fleur de lys floor).

Or camping out at a hippy families' hill top farm outside of Colchester after playing to a field full of people surrounded by Constable countryside, feeling the chills walking into Britains' most haunted pub (and playing a gig there), staying in a 600 years old hostel overlooked by a 1000 year old Norman castle and eating in a 500 year old pub for lunch (East Anglia Tour 2006).

There's no rush to a faceless hotel and a barn of a sound check and back to the faceless hotel. If we pass by Glastonbury Tor, we're hiking up the bloody thing and looking across the Somerset Mendip hills and north to the Welsh penninsula across the Avon and 8000 years of history followed by dinner in another 500 year old pub built when folks were shorter so you have to stoop under the beams to get to your table. Heck, if we stop for lunch on the M4 between Swindon and London it's not bloody Burger King but an Inn with home cooking as we sit and watch wild ducks muddy bill through tresses of chalk stream watercress while unconcerned trout chomp on fragments of our Ploughman's lunch.

Another day heading back north we stop for a couple of pints of Marston's Pedigree Ale in a canal town only 4 miles off the M6 motorway and almost expect to see Three Men in a Boat but entetain ourselves instead by watching the saxophone and harmonica player jump across the canel running through the beer garden at the Crown Inn somewhere near Burton on Trent (pity they didn't fall in).

What we will promise you is to find adventure for you in as many wonderful places as we can. And for the musicians in those wonderful places we ask you to give a thought on how exotic your home is to them. If you've read this soppy malarky up to this point, then, you've reached the sweet spot of the whole CMEAS deal here. The dream is simply this: play music around the world and meet other musicians around the world and invite them to play their music on your turf. Wherever you come from.

When this was written we had only booked the UK and some parts of the US, but now we're booking Holland and Costa Rica and looking at Rio, Australia, Romania, France, Czech Republic, Russia and, most recently, Montenegro. We're musicians, and if we play for the world maybe the world will start to play itself. Gad, that's some soppy bollocks, anyway, above are some of the ventures we have planned ahead. Like the Merchant of Venice, not all the ships may come in, but if just one does more will surely follow.