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.