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.
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