Am delighted this morning to get a text from rob the bass player in the brilliant spoon telling me that they are playing on monday night. Here's hoping we have done enough by then to warrant an evening off.
Get into the studio and the morning ritual of technical problems starts. Today franny's amp has decided to explode. So while we wait for another one to arrive we decide to crack on with a tune where he plays acoustic. This breaks the tradition of recording the tunes in live running order, but means that we get to do 'get up'.
This is a big loud tune with both me and andy on bass and claes on a very dirty sounding hammond. Great fun to play but actually quite tricky to get a tight sounding take. It has to sound fat but angular if thats not too oxymoronic for you.
After quite a few takes it settles down and we manage to get a good un on tape before we all go deaf. It is brain bendingly loud in the live room for this one.
Franny's new amp arrives and we move on.We have to get "last words" done before friday as we have sally coming in with a string quartet to do a little arrangement for it. I am very excited about that as I think it'll be lovely in perhaps a lennonish way.
This is another one that's quite hard as we are all kind of playing against each other and nobody has a particularly easy ride on it. It takes quite a while to fall into place. We try different guitars, amps, sounds for everything and eventually it begins to gel.
After around about 20 takes or so we are all a bit brain numb and go in to listen. Thankfully we have the take. And for once it's the very last one!
Am beginning to get excited at the prospect of going back and listening to all the tunes. A very good sign. After a late dinner and a quick eno inspired ambient jam (we christen it "music for bus stops') we set up for an atmospheric evening doing the mean and moody "broken mirror". This tune is pretty straight forward to play but it's all about feel.
The lights are low, the wine is poured and a little cigarette smoke is provided by nick.
In fact it all feels so good that it is slightly disappointing when we get a great take pretty quickly.
We make up for this with a brief hard rock singalong incorporating thin lizzy, rainbow and van halen. It certainly breaks the broken mirror ambience. 3 days 7 tunes.
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