G'day Don,

The bellows of European concertinas and accordions are basically glued together with paper (and, we hope, some fabric) over a basic carcass of creased and folded cardboard and pneumatic leather gaskets. The best repairs would use traditional bookbinding/repair materials ... if you could find a surviving traditional bookbinder! The next best bet would be the sort of academic library that still values books ... and keeps them in good repair.

I've bought repair and maintenance materials directly from library suppliers, since the better English-made instruments are also made in the traditions of bookbinding ... indeed, Wheatstone had his first experimental concertinas fitted with bellows made up, to spec., by London bookbinders). A useful repair is to glue a patch of fine linen (or cotton) on the inside of the bellows, if it is a matter of firming up and sealing the folds, The corners may need a fine soft leather patch ... I can't offer you the small remainder of the 0.14 mm (!) superfine skive of kangaroo skin I got from a friend who is a scientist with our Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial research Organisation (CSIRO) since he has now been promoted past getting his hands on real leather. This was uniquely wonderful repair material ... Sigh!

I do have the Pithead in the Fern CD ... I think it actually has a minor item of my graphic work, in the form of a reworked "Feather & Wedge" logo I did for John. I did the cover photograph and some layout for their next one Who Was Here?.

My "transcriptions" are not tablature ... I work mainly from standard musical notation of melody line and chords. I just looked back in my files - and I can't find Anderson's Coast. I had a disastrous hard disk failure ... of a new disk I had bought and to which I had just managed to transfer the files from a disk with an incipient head crash failure ... then the brand new disk failed (faulty controller) and my IT shop, having failed to retrieve my data - "returned the disk to the supplier ... for their refund ...!). I lost some 8 GB of photographic and music files.

I may find a printout, if I haven't given them all away ... and then music OCR it into Finale ... but I can't spot one right now - and it may not be what you need. Anyway, I'm a great believer in picking things up by ear (I have to do that to transcribe a melody ... I'm not one of these musicologists that can dash music script off like shorthand stenographers!)

Regards,

Bob