Songs of Prey
album by The Scaramanga Six
Songs of Prey is the fifth album by English rock group the Scaramanga Six and the first to feature the band’s long-term drummer Gareth Champion.
Background
Having enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with Tim Smith (who’d produced their third and fourth albums), the Scaramanga Six planned to record their projected fifth album A Pound of Flesh with him. Songs were written and initial sessions recorded before the process was cut short by Smith’s crippling heart attack and stroke in 2006. Out of loyalty to Smith, and hoping to complete the work with him once he’d recovered, the band shelved the sessions and wrote a new set of songs for a replacement sixth album.
In an e-mail newsletter to the band's mailing list on 17 October 2008, band spokesman Steven Morricone explained "The news was a dreadful shock to people, especially to his many close friends. Tim is now starting out on a long road to recovery and we can only wish him and everyone close to him the greatest of strength and resolve in this very difficult time. If love alone is all that is needed for recovery there is certainly no shortage for Tim. With this in mind, we decided to postpone work on A Pound of Flesh for the near future. We will return to it one day when Tim is better." (The songs for A Pound of Flesh were eventually revisited, reworked and re-recorded as the band’s sixth album Cursed.)
The replacement songs were recorded in sessions with James Kenosha (a producer and multi-instrumentalist who’d briefly also served as the band’s drummer in 2006) by a quartet of the Morricone brothers, Julia Arnez and Gareth Champion (following the autumn 2008 departure of multi-instrumentalist Chris Catalyst). Songs of Prey was released on 20 April 2009, with the band playing a short British tour (plus an appearance in Denmark) to promote it.
“Songs of Prey” enters the record as album by The Scaramanga Six. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Songs, Prey and album can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Songs of Prey” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Songs, Prey and album provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18795450. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2008 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Songs of Prey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.