Take a deep breath...

This is the story of my second album, told backwards. This is how it goes. Last summer, I got together in a West London rehearsal room with two of Britain's tallest men, Anglo-Irish bass ninja Mark Ferguson and his Manc drummer-brother-lover associate Sam Stopford. I played piano and sang. I told them I wanted to record a 70s rock album. Big hair. Spandex trousers. Star shaped glasses. It didn't turn out exactly like that.

We got together roughly once a week for the following year to play, breaking only to visit The Coffee Cup on North Pole Road for vegetarian lasagne, chips and salad. I brought a lot of unfinished numbers. We worked up them up together as a three-piece. We recorded everything, listening week by week to what we were coming up with and working out ways to make it better.

As well as getting better, we got louder. And louder. Sometimes we were so loud the plaster would shake from the ceiling. I started to experience a strange rushing in my ears in the middle of the night. We played each song over and over again, wigging out more and more and generally whipping ourselves into a frenzy. Then we got ruthless. We changed keys, tempos, swapped verses and choruses, spliced whole songs together, chucking away unwanted lines, verses, intros, outros and trying to make it better and better. Other times we just we cracked it first time - the very first recording of Diamond Tears sounds uncannily like the finished track, even down to some identical drum fills.

West Country hedonist and fashion icon Leila Macfie joined us on keyboards for a few months at the back of the year. We got really good all of a sudden. We demoed the three best songs - Hurricane Jane, Masquerade and The One That Stayed Behind. They are tracks 4, 3 and 2 on the finished album. We did drums in the same West London studio, then relocated to a rather splendid flat in Camden to do the rest. I discovered that I like recording in bedrooms, bathrooms and front rooms more than live rooms and vocal booths. We took rather more care with it than we planned to. I think we know no other way.

Christmas came. We went to a Christmas party at the West London rehearsal studio. It was done up like a night club with a marquee outside. It was weird seeing the rehearsal studio all tarted up. I was like when it snows in your street - the mundane rendered magical. Anyhow, we got very drunk. I invented a new dance and had to be helped into a cab.

After Christmas, we were back down to three again. I went into songwriting overdrive. I came to one rehearsal with six new songs, five of which made the record. We went through the same process with those until they were better than the first lot. And then we went back to the first lot to bring them up to scratch.

The breakthrough rehearsal was in April. Good Friday. The Premises on Hackney Road. A change is as good as a rest. We suddenly sounded like the real thing. 24 days later, the album was game on. I pressed the big red button after a bottle of wine in a tapas bar in Kings Cross. I'll tell the story of how I got the money together another time. All you need to know is: there was never any doubt in my head that I would make this record. None at all.

Thomas Johansen was earmarked as producer. I never actually marked his ear. He is a Danish dude who plays vicious Hammond organ, fights bears and rides topless on horses. He came on board early June for pre-production. Read all about it at the bottom of this blog. We spent the first two weeks of June recording bass and drums in London, then decamped to America for the first two weeks of July recording piano, organ and vocals. There's more about all of this further down. Then it was back to London to finish vocals, do the guitars and finally the overdubs.

In the last two weeks, we did two vocals (The One That Stayed Behind and Homes For Heroes), a load of acoustics, some extra keyboards (I was very taken with the Mellotron samples we used on Red, Homes For Heroes and particularly The Tame Lions), an insane day in which we very nearly fell out over the recording of some very loud electric guitars (which we mostly decided not to use), pedal steel from BJ Cole on Diamond Tears and The One That Stayed Behind (the man is a bona fide genius), harmonica from Tim Haigh on Homes For Heroes, a delicious string quartet on Hurricane Jane and Cressida Road and about 78 tracks of backing vocals, mainly from the outrageously talented Sian Cross. The whole thing was rounded off nicely by me playing the glockenspiel on Red.

Phew. There's not much more to say than that, other than I've never worked so hard in my entire life. We started recording at 10am every day and rarely stopped before 1am. It was INTENSE. High point number one was the contribution of BJ Cole - a true legend who played on Tiny Dancer by Elton John. And the Crooked Mile album by Microdisney! (OK, not as famous as Elton John, but a fantastic cult band fronted by my hero, Cathal Coughlan). He's played for REM, Bjork, the Verve plus a squillion others. His work on my tracks was amazing. He spent forever setting up amps, tweaking pedals and getting the right headphone mix. Then he unleashed about three or four takes, any of which we could have joyfully used, before meticulously dropping in for bits he wasn't happy with. He ended with a trippy one-minute solo for the fadeout of Diamond Tears. I looked through the glass and he was going mental in the live room. We asked him if he had one more take in him. He said no. He was right. We had it.

The other high point was on the very last day. We worked with genius string arranger Paul Frith, who's done strings for Radiohead recently, on arrangements for Cressida Road and Hurricane Jane. He did an amazing job. Totally different to what I would have come up with (which was the idea) and in some places, really quite adventurous, but really, really right for the tracks. He came in to MD the session. I just made myself some toast and sat in the control room crying like a girl. A really really special day.

The US and A

So, it's Sunday 12th July and I'm at Dulles International Airport. Can't help but think there's a missing t there. Today's my eleventh day in America and the last time I had a shave was in June. I look like Robinson Crusoe.

Enough of this small talk. Music. It's been a brilliant intense week or so. I came expecting to focus on piano and acoustic guitar and maybe get a few lead vocals done if we were lucky. But we've done 8 out of 10 lead vocals, all the pianos, most of the Hammonds and one acoustic guitar part. As the week's progressed, we've got faster and faster and more productive.

After the first day's sausage-fingered crisis of confidence, the pianos by and large went down like a dream. All that rehearsal really told. No major reinvention of the parts I'd written at Grove with Sam and Mark, just fine tuning.

Some brief technical talk. We're recording with ProTools HD and we're using piano samples rather than the big wooden live mothers themselves. What you lose in sound (very little), you gain in flexibility. We don't have to bed anything down right up until it's mixed. However, this does make all kinds of nefarious digital trickery possible – which is not necessarily a good thing. The temptation everyone faces with working with MIDI (the brilliant 1908s invention that enables computers to boss keyboards and software instruments) is to make everything perfect. The magic button is the one marked 'Quantize'. This generally takes a dim view of what you've played, assumes you didn't mean any of it and squeezes what you’ve done remorselessly into a ‘grid. The result is a kind of characterless, mathematical take on the original. But in music as in life, character comes from flaws not perfection. So on most of the tracks, we've kept whole straight takes and only tinkered by hand when we thought it was absolutely necessary. The result is something much more groovy and happening (I'm aware of how old this kind of lingo is making me sound).

The vocals, contrary to my fears, were also a bit of a breeze. Last time, Thomas made me a) do hundreds of takes – sometimes spending whole days on one vocal b) carry heavy items whilst singing to engage the right muscles in my stomach c) sing like a small child d) open my mouth like a letterbox, even if that meant changing the syllable in a word and e) sing in front of a candle so I directed the air in the right way. This time, again it’s felt lots more easy and natural. I think being out of a vocal booth helped too. We made a makeshift little shack out of screens but I was still out in the open with access to fresh air and daylight. The vocal booth is great for concentration and getting in the zone but it can also be a Cave Of Uncertainty for those people vulnerable to assault from their inner critic. All in all, I sang (in this order) Red, Diamond Tears, Downhill, Hurricane Jane, Masquerade, The Top, Cressida Road and Tame Lions. That leaves Homes For Heroes and The One That Stayed Behind to do in London.

I think my favourite vocal is Cressida Road. We did whole takes, rather than going section by section, and they seemed to get better and better as we went. Most of what ends up on the record will come from the very last take.

The only other thing we did (in a fearful rush before going out for dinner in Old Town Alexandria) was the acoustic guitar on The One That Stayed Behind. I insisted on doing at least one acoustic guitar part to justify all the grief I’d gone through insuring it for the flight and making sure I could take it on board the plane rather than checking it in and spending the whole flight worrying if I’d get a box full of firewood back at the other side.

So that’s it for now. Back to see my family who I’ve missed terribly, but feeling great that we’ve done some really good work.

Happy snapping

From top to bottom: 

1. The view from the studio 

2. An MCI JH636 Console that doesn't work but looks very nice 

3. An A100 Hammond Organ - rich, thick and gritty 

4. Me in front of some waterfalls 

5. The White House, home of badass flyswatting ninja President 

6. I've read this several times and I have no idea what this man can possibly mean by his 'protest' even though I agree with the overall gist 

7. A waste of gunpowder and sky 

8. The nice man who added absinthe to champagne to make DEATH 

9. Thomas, in a miner's helmet, with his hand up Leslie. 

Piano is an anagram of 'O Pain'

Three days down on the US leg of the recording sessions for my second album. Four piano parts and three lots of Hammond organ are done. Everything sounds great so far. 

I write from the basement of a house in Reston, Virginia - about 30 minutes or so out of Washington DC. The very next room to mine is a recording studio, meaning I could stumble straight out of bed to hit the piano if I wanted. I don't. 

Travelled out Thursday night (July 2nd). Hideous delays on the runway at Heathrow. They were missing a piece of rubber apparently. Waited for plane to disintegrate on take-off but thankfully it held together OK. Highlights of the plane journey: watching In The Loop (very, very funny and definitely the most inventive swearing ever recorded) and sitting next to a Slovenian lady whose surname was 'Rollova'. Thomas met me at the airport and we went for something to eat. I had jumbo shrimp stuffed with Monterey Jack cheese and wrapped in bacon. That's good eating. See you in 2 stone. I love America. Their jumbo shrimp would have our king prawn in a fight any day. 

Started slow on Friday. Got a nature fix with a quick walk at Great Falls. Then did a tour of local supermarkets buying in provisions for the session. Thomas' wife Jane is away covering Michael Jackson's funeral in LA so we're aware there's a risk we could go feral and start foraging in dustbins for food. Started making music around 4ish. Did piano on Red. I thought it would be a leisurely start but in fact it was like being plunged into the deep end. Of the ocean. We focused in straightaway on the middle 8. Thomas wanted me to double up the rhythm in both hands but accenting the notes I would have played. This is much, much harder than it sounds. I couldn't get it. Maybe I was struggling because it was first up and I was a bit short of match fitness. Or maybe I'm just shit on the piano. Either way, we settled on a compromise, doubling up the bass and playing half time in the right hand. It sounds great. If a bit like Keane. 

A word here about the art of rhythm playing. Whether it's piano or guitar, the idea is to play something so well that no one ever notices it.  The secret of invisible playing is timing. I've got a lot better at it over the years, but it's still something I struggle to get spot on. I think of it as hiding behind the drums. Or sitting in the cracks between kick, snare and bass note so that you only poke out when no one else is playing. Getting it right (at least for someone with my limited ability) requires self-flagellating attention to detail. The funny thing is that if you do get it right, people never hear the results. They'll just hear one noise and not be able to pick out any individual elements. I love it. There's just something perversely satisfying about the reward for labour being nothingness. 

For jetlag reasons, that's all we get done on day 1. Day 2 is the 4th of July. We're heading into DC for Independence Day fun and games so we crack straight on. We do pianos on Diamond Tears and Downhill. Both go down much faster than Red. Again Thomas' contribution is pivotal. He knows when to leave things alone, but if something's not working he can generally help me find the answer. Diamond Tears' problem section is the outro. The feel of the drums changes from straight to swinging. I end up playing something quite groovy (I mean that in the literal sense, not in the Neil-out-of-The-Young-Ones sense). It sounds a bit like Soul 2 Soul, in a good way. Next up: Downhill. We nailed the bass and drums in 4 takes back in London and the piano goes down equally smoothly. We keep a whole take which I'm really pleased with. 

Then we hit the Hammond. Hammond organ, like Rhodes, tends to tie a track together really nicely, making sparse instrumentation sound really full. On the last album, we used a digital Korg organ which sounded great but we're using the real deal this time. I'll get back with technical specs another time but it's a big dusty old beast. It sounds rich, thick and gritty. There's an expression pedal which you use to kick out more volume. The more you press it down, the more you rev up the distortion. Then it hits the Leslie speaker, a massive wooden box of swirling goodness. A minor technical hitch: it keeps squeaking. It sounds like a mouse being revolved to death. Thomas has to take it to pieces. To do this, he straps something that resembles a minor's helmet on. The fact that he even knows how to do all this reaffirms one of the key reasons I like working with him. I just wish he'd wear a white coat like the boffins from Abbey Road used to. 

As well as being King Geek, he is a fearsome Hammond player. His work livens up Downhill no end. It's great on the chorus. After leaving chords hanging in the intro and verses, he goes all rhythmic and propulsive, almost playing what you'd expect the electric guitar to cover. It's very exciting. 

We knock off early and head into DC. I get obligatory snaps of the White House and the monument. The fireworks are mind-blowingly massive in scale and seem to go on for hours. However, the highlight of the night is seeing Natasha Bedingfield sing I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy with Big Bird off of Sesame Street. Introduced, via VT, by Barack Obama, President of the United States and badass ninja fly swatter extraordinaire. After the fireworks, we retire to a nearby bar and drink a cocktail called Death Afternoon which contains absinthe and champagne. It just seems right. 

A late start the next day. Back to Hammonds. Thomas plays an unobtrusive textural part on Red then I play on Diamond Tears. My work includes the album's first solo. I used to love guitar and keyboard solos as a kid but I got conditioned as I got older to think they were the Devil's Work. I'm trying to get a bit of that innocent, joyful, for-the-love-of-it feel onto this record so I'm setting crappy adult prejudices aside and just going with it.

We close the day putting sparse piano down on Homes For Heroes. Thomas goes out leaving me to finish some lyrics up. I'm determined there won't be a single line that I'm not totally happy with. There are four up for grabs at the moment and I'm perpetually rewriting them in my head the whole time. 

Three tracks, maybe four, are ready to sing on now so today (July 6th) I'm doing some vocals. This is the most nervewracking part of the process for me. It's the most important thing on any record - a great performance is what draws the listener in. It's very personal. And it's very physical. It's ultimately just controlled breathing in and out. Directing the air to the right bit of the roof of your mouth. Opening it in the right shape. You're also a slave to factors almost beyond your control. Atmospheric conditions. Energy levels. Diet. Health. Hourly inspection of the contents of the tissue after blowing your nose is not unusual. 

I'll report back later, along with some photos of the trip so far. Have fun. R x

Introducing the bland

As promised some gruesome pictures from the studio. You see before you:

1. Bass player Mark Ferguson doing his 'bass face'

2. Drummer Sam Stopford lining his sticks up, no doubt to the sound of internal squeaking

3. Sam and Mark, living proof of the old adage that the rhythm section that plays together stays together

4. Sam, Mark and producer Thomas Johansen crossing the Broadway. Only Mark sees fit to cheese at the camera. Thomas looks underwhelmed, thinking that this photo can't possibly match the one of him topless on a horse, that can still be found on the internet if you have a mind to search. 

5, 6, 7...8

We've had a busy last few days. On Tuesday, Sam was unwell. Perhaps seven days solid playing the drums from dawn till dusk took their toll. What a loser. We took the opportunity to get ahead of ourselves on the bass. Setting ourselves the target of getting three tracks done each day, we kicked off with Diamond Tears. It's a groovy little thing which means simple, sparse playing and loads of gaps. There's a great Motown-y break in the middle, where we put foam under the strings to get that old-school muted percussive feel. The song ends with a quasi-military drum off and a punchy bass mantra inspired by A Forest by The Cure (a teenage favourite of mine). We worked through section by section to get all the detail right. This way of working threw up an unexpected problem: what to call each part of the song. I couldn't decide which bit was the chorus. I suggested in a way that all the sections were choruses in their own way. People pointed and laughed. More fool them, I say. When I get a moment, I will craft a songwriting masterclass for them that illustrates how this approach is the key to guaranteed chart success. Using only the Bee Gees back catalogue. 

After Diamond Tears, we did Masquerade. This was the first track we worked up with this line up almost a year ago now. The bass is a key feature that really drives the song along. The drums really evolved in the playing last week (can't believe they went down on day 1 - they'll be the first thing on the finished album to be recorded) so we had to work section by section again, tweaking the bass part to fit with what's down there. No one listening to this record will ever really be able to hear this kind of detail - locking the bass in with every kick drum and every fill - but it's honestly the difference between a decent record and a really good one. 

Last up was Hurricane Jane. I realised listening to this that we'd strayed quite a long way away from something that had really worked a few months back, so we listened to the demo. We recorded this just before Christmas last year, doing the bass and drums at Grove Studios where we rehearse, then doing guitars, keyboards and vocals in Mark's mate's flat in Camden. I remember Mark's mate Neil saying it sounded like Take That. I took it as a compliment. We spent a lot of time on those demos last year. It was a lot of work and I questioned at the time why we were taking such care with something that only we'd ever hear. But it's all payed off. We put it on again and immediately we were able to get in touch with the simplicity and freshness of the way we played it before we started thinking too much about it.  Once we'd done that, it went down in no time at all. 

We started late on Wednesday, the first day of the 48-hour tube strike. Sam had made a Lazarus-style comeback so we looked again at The One That Stayed Behind. This is the countriest (easy now) track on the record and a bit of a nod back to The Fire Stairs. It'll have lots of strumming, pedal steel and big, big harmonies on it. The beat works because it's unbelievably straight and simple. It has to be totally in with the click and of course that makes it very hard to get right. This is one of those incontrovertible music facts. But I still can't help but wonder: shouldn't hard stuff be the hardest, not easy stuff? Do you think they got the words mixed up when they were writing the dictionaries?

Last up on Wednesday was Cressida Road, a song that came out almost perfectly formed on the piano at George and Toby's house in Holtspur, Buckinghamshire. It was written as we were mixing the last album. For a while, it was even the working title of the last album, before I decided to hang on and make a song out of it. Cressida Road is in the Archway/Highgate area. I drove past it every day on my way from Hendon, where I was working at the time, to the studio in Crouch End. The song's a sister to The Tame Lions. Both are about how you're shaped by your early experiences. But whereas The Tame Lions is about innocence and imagination, this one's about the darker side of childhood, those moments where you realise there are things in the world that can hurt you, that your parents are fallible, that people leave you and die and that nothing's yours forever. It's set during the Blitz. A bomb falls in the middle of the night. Something bad is unearthed. There are repercussions. On Cressida Road, there's a fire/that knows you and taunts you/and burns for the rest of your life./Long ribbons of gold give the lie/asking "Why do we have to die?"  Musically, it's lilting and mournful, with a soulful, jazzy 6/8 feel. I think it's the best we sound as piano, bass and drums. On the record, I expect to add some subtle Bill Withers style strings and nothing else.  There are long sections of it with just piano and voice, so we've never practiced it to the click. That means we've got used to pushing and pulling tempo wise to suit the feel of the song. After a few false attempts at imposing a more fixed tempo, we decide to record it like we've been playing it. We've kept one straight-through live take, only splicing in one small moment from another take where we really nailed the slowdown out of the middle 8 into the last chorus. We overdubbed bass straight away to keep the mood and feel absolutely the same. I will probably have to spend weeks getting the piano right but it'll be worth it. It really sounds like an old record and I think it'll be a nice change of pace and feel from the rest of the album's regimented accuracy. 

So, with the drums now done, we moved on to more bass on Thursday (yesterday, as I write). Mark unleashed the shuffle once more on Downhill, which sounds really exciting. Then he added bass to Homes For Heroes, which I'm started to view as this album's dark horse. We ended the day letting our metaphorical hair down with The Top.

Today, we're going to finish up bass on The Tame Lions and The One That Stayed Behind. Then it's onto me, finally. This stint in the studio will be over on Sunday evening, then it's three or so weeks off before I fly to Washington on July 2nd. 

So, we're seven days in. It feels like seventy. In a good way. All the drums are recorded and sounding amazing. 8 out of 10 bass tracks are done. We started out wanting to capture the spirit and energy of the way we've rehearsed over the last year and I think we've done just that. It sounds confident, energetic and ballsy. I'm very happy.

These curtains are making me angry

Short entry today because I have to go and buy a hard drive and change a camera case. The glamour never stops. Or starts. 

No Mark in the morning so Sam had another go at The Top. Got some really good fresh takes down with loads more energy. As well as sounding like Supertramp and the Who, we've decided that it's also a bit like Blinded By The Light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. I did warn you. 

Then Sam and I played through Homes For Heroes, the album's newest song - so new that I only have lyrics for two verses and no choruses. It's a song about de-institutionalisation(ism). Soldiers returning from the war. Ex-cons leaving prison. How they reject society and it rejects them. And how everyone ends up next to each other superglued to adjacent barstools. In the case of this song, barstools in the Vulcan: my favourite Cardiff pub. 

The first verse goes like this (at the moment):

There's a dog with a muzzle that can't bear to be touched

By the last door standing, on an avenue of dust 

A string of medals hanging from a rusty nail

A three-word message that yells out from the slate:

"Homes For Heroes"

I have high hopes for it. 

Then we did 'The One That Stayed Behind', a song about marital paralysis. We aborted because Sam brought the wrong shoes. Honestly. More on this tomorrow. 

While Sam disappeared off in search of more appropriate footwear, we started recording some bass. Mark has borrowed a 70s Precision which sounds great. It got its first outing on 'Red' and Mark did some top work. The part sounds mean. Really looking forward to putting my stuff down too now. 

In other news, we had lunch at the Railway Arms on Crouch End Hill. I had a steak sandwich, Sam had a burger and Thomas had the full vegetarian breakfast, which was something of a work of art. Unusual but very welcome addition of mashed potato. Touch.