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. 

Day 3

Much, much better today. We got three lots of drums done, on 'Downhill', 'The Top' and 'The Tame Lions'. 

'Downhill' is another possible album opener. It's probably the tune that best represents the new direction we've taken the songs in. It features what I thought was a subtle yet daring key change into the middle 8 but Thomas referred to it as the 'Devil's Chord Change' (Moving from C to F sharp apparently makes me one of the Horned One's sweaty minions). It's very big sounding and it tears along at a fair old lick, with some tough and, dare I say it, flamboyant playing. Flamboyant in this sense means self-indulgent, I expect.  Any road, we nailed it in two takes and felt extremely pleased with ourselves. 

Harder to get right was 'The Top'. This is quite an old one that I wrote on the piano in a rehearsal room upstairs in a theatre in Blackheath about ten years ago. We've reinvented it as a Supertramp number played by the Who. It's very fast. It rocks. It's also five minutes long at the moment. I envisage some kind of much, much shorter 'radio edit' making the album. Thomas thinks the two minute wig out at the end is ripe for cutting. I don't see it myself. We attempted takes either side of lunch and had to take regular breaks so we didn't break Sam on the drums. Later we learned that Thomas had marked the second take as the best one. Oh dear.  We're going to have another go on Monday morning to see if we can better it when we're a bit fresher. Incidentally, Sam had a titanic day behind the kit. He seems to get better and better the longer the session lasts. I'm a lucky fella. 

Finally, after destroying ourselves comprehensively with a rocker, we moved on to one of the album's slower tunes, 'The Tame Lions'. It's a song about childhood and how simple objects around you can fire the imagination when you're a kid. Musically, it's a bit quirky and reflective, opening and closing with soft Rhodes chords and jazzy brushwork. Again, Sam did some great work. He's a closet (well, not so closet) jazzer with a few big band tours of Europe under his belt. We did it in two goes, one on brushes and one on sticks. A nice soft way to bring proceedings to a halt before our day off. 

On the subject of the day off, it's very welcome. I knew we'd had too much music when we had to turn one of the speakers off in the pub afterwards because the beat was upsetting us. 

On the subject

Second Season Syndrome

Much harder day today. I had to get up at 6am to look after my son and I was underpowered all day. Concentration was wavering and we were all a bit distracted. But we still got some good work done. 

First up was 'Diamond Tears' which is pencilled in to close the album at the moment. It was the first song I wrote on the upright piano in my front room. We got it on Freecycle from a Frenchman in Wanstead. As you do. The title and idea came from a picture of me and aforementioned early-rising son. I don't know if he was crying or if his eyes were watering (these toddlers get all manner of crap off the floor in their little eyes) but the tears caught the light on the picture and honestly looked for all the world like a couple of tiny jewels. I thought it was a beautiful image. So I thought I'd try and do justice to the insane totality of people's love for their kids. The song's protagonist is an absentee dad who's away working in another country (I was thinking Polish plasterer, as this is a pretty handy reference point for someone who lives in Walthamstow). His day to day life is miserable, he's constantly drunk and getting into fights, his heart is in bits because he's away from his family (from whom he may or may not be emotionally estranged as well as physically distant) but it's worth it all for him to know that he can send money back to his kids. I like to think of him as a bit of a philosopher poet. And pisshead. 

Next up was 'Hurricane Jane', the album's fastest, bounciest and therefore hardest-to-nail-whilst-knackered track. Although it's rather jaunty and rockets along at 168bpm, the words are rather bleak, comparing the eternity of nature with the brevity of man and so on. That sounds rather more existential in print than it does in the song itself. Although I may wear a beret when I do the vocal. I wrote it on a £12 ukelele, also in my front room (where all the good stuff appears to go on seemingly). 

We finished the day having another go at 'Red', which we're still not sure we've nailed. Confusingly that means it's labelled in orange on the computer, due to Thomas' idiosyncratic but nevertheless failsafe colour scheme. 

I bought a digital camera on the way in the morning. Photos will therefore follow before the weekend is out. Rx

Day 1

Quality first day. Back in the same studio where I recorded 'The Fire Stairs'. It's the crypt of a church, complete with stained glass windows and faintly ecclesiastical aura. It was originally one room, plus a vocal booth. Then Thomas put a partition in to create a control room. There's now another partition at the back of that room and the window's have been blocked off for complicated acoustic reasons. The lack of natural light is offset by the addition of some plush looking crimson drapes (photos to follow). 

Sam in at 11am setting up the drums, which sound great from the off. Enjoyable use of crappy old speaker as an extra microphone on the kick drum. Had actually read about that very trick the night before in Mark Lewisohn's seminal book about Abbey Road, 'The Beatles Recording Sessions', which I first read in 1987 as a Fab Four-obsessed schoolboy. I get in at 1pm, which means an epic lie-in, followed by a high-speed rush around the house to get myself ready in time. Finally get going around 3.30 ish. Mark and I in the control room. Mark has his own special monitor supplying deafening bass frequencies which make the floor shake. After twenty minutes, he wants some kick drum in there; after forty, the snare's in too. I can feel it through my coccyx. (Am now having a crisis of confidence about how to spell coccyx. Cock-sicks? Cocque6?) What with the volume, the temperature and the aformentioned drapes, it's like playing a gig to one person in the VIP room of a club. 

We kick off with 'Red'. This is fitting. It's the oldest song on the record, predating the last album, the band I was in before it and the band I was in before that band. It's a pretty meaningless throwaway pop song which others have compared to Elvis Costello. I fancy doing a Difford/Tilbrook octave thing on the chorus vocal. That tune has been knocking around since the last century and the writing of verse 1, verse 2 and the middle 8 lyrics has been spread out over more than a decade. Never worked with previous personnel but it sounds ripping now. We do about four or five takes, preferring number 3 for now. 

Then, after several hits of Thomas' lunatic strong coffee, we move on to 'Masquerade'. This song's about a year old and features this album's signature groove: the shuffle. It sits somewhere between Fleetwood Mac's 'Don't Stop' and Steely Dan's 'Reeling In The Years'. It begins at the moment with a harpsichord intro inspired by (i.e. ripped off from) Now She Knows She's Wrong by ace 90s popsters Jellyfish. The song tells the story of ladies who take their clothes off for money in what the Local Government Association wants to re-classify as 'sex encounter establishments'. But its central theme is really the connection between sex and death as debated by everyone from Freud to Foucault to Paglia. It seems death by natural aging didn't catch on for millions of years after life developed and it's only when we started experimenting with sexual reproduction that we started popping off before our time. So forget the school of thought that says we want to reproduce so much because our lifespans are finite. It seems instead that death is our punishment for over-reaching ourselves in the pursuit of pleasure. That'll learn us. My favourite line is 'Now I know why it's called the dying art of romance'. Ho ho. Don't worry if it sounds miserable. It won't be. The sleigh-bells and incessant la la la's will see to that. 

The end of the beginning

A very good two days in pre-production with Thomas, Mark and Sam. Yesterday was a bit flat after two weeks off from playing but today we got right back up to racing speed. Can't wait to get started. It's been great to get Thomas' fresh perspective on things. He's made some really good suggestions - mostly tightening up arrangements and getting rid of unnecessary instrumental cul-de-sacs. He also pressed a button which made our voices sound really high. That was cool. I think he was a bit alarmed at the level of banter in the room.  I don't have to be in till lunchtime tomorrow. Result.