Kick-started by our love of Tim Smith and the Cardiacs, which is where we came in initially right back in the early 90’s when we all first met and the whole thing came into being in the first place. And after years of living together and playing together, busking for coppers, splits and spats, falling in and out of love, starving on the streets of London and our eventual rise in the late 90’s, only to drift apart for years to be brought back together by the man who started it all in the first place. We always knew we had something extraordinary, and if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing again.
So there we were in a café in Stoke Newington, like nothing had changed since we first played here 15 years before. Still scrimping and starving, 5 impoverished souls with a bloody great yearning and no way of knowing just how we can all make this work. Hanging everything on a simple naïve optimism we decided to do it again. Just how do 5 people from different parts of the country, with no money and no contacts and no hope, with a reputation like ours, set about making an album? An album that they hope one day will be lauded as the greatest piece of art, the most stupendous piece of work, that will stand the test of time and be heralded the world over and bring peace to the world (or something). It’s not going to be cheap, they thought.
Don’t ask me – I guess you operate on the principle that if you want something enough it will happen. I still can’t see how that’s possible, but lo, 3 months later there we were in Snap studio in North London, with Guy Massey at the controls, embarking on our mission impossible and recording the first two songs in a 3 day session. Contacts were pulled, and deals were made. Old friends and new pulled together to make it happen. Dave Bedford and Andy Mcleod and Simon Williams – thank you.
Of course you don’t get anywhere without a bit of hard work and a lot of inspiration, and we’d put in the hours writing and rehearsing, and playing, until we had a set of fine songs that we could be proud of, and that we hoped would set the world alight. The writing of “Sovereign” alone was fraught with Dostoevsky style candlelit scribbling in the wee small hours, whilst slotting rehearsal spaces around our busy schedules, and crawling up and down the M1 sleeping on floors, hoping that one day it’d all be worth it.
Cut to the end of the strange summer of 2011 – did that actually happen? And there we were at the Bull & Gate playing two glorious sold out nights, showcasing some of the new songs that were rolling off the presses ready to be recorded for posterity. Andy Mcleod had been having secret meetings on our behalf and had come up trumps with a deal to record the rest of the album. 15 days.
15 days…15 days! That’s less than 2 days per song. How will we manage? It took Pink Floyd 8 months to record “Dark Side of the Moon”. These were our worries when we approached the recording (not bad worries to have though in the big scheme of things), and the sessions weren’t all plain sailing, but Vanessa did cook us some lovely food to keep us all going, and thanks to all the time spent rehearsing and playing, the songs were laid down fairly quickly, and despite Guy sustaining a broken rib resulting in the wonderful Marco Pasquareiello stepping in to desk duties for a while, we almost managed it. I say almost. We did have to negotiate another 3 days, but that’s certainly not bad considering what we were up against. Vanessa, in between cooking duties and of course laying down some magnificent bass lines, managed to capture some stuff on her flip cam, despite the sometime hysteria of Richard and the reluctance of some parties to be captured on film!
And so we reached the end of the year with an album in the can. Despite all the odds we had achieved what we set out to achieve. Unfortunately we couldn’t record everything we had written, and with more songs to come, I’m afraid before long we’re going to have to do it all again. After all, songs are like babies. They cry and cry and keep you awake at night, and you have to clothe and feed them and send them out into the world when they’re old enough. Will this ever end? Probably not. We are like proud parents right now watching their progeny crawl off to their first day at school, hoping they’ll do alright, and not get bullied.
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