At the end of winter we drove down to London to record our John Peel session in the famous BBC Maida Vale studios. Rather than the exhilarating, creative experience we had hoped for, it turned out to be an intense, slightly stressing, workman like episode with little time for reflection. Like all bands and artists, we had a day to set up, record and mix four songs, pack up and get out.
We unloaded our equipment, most of which was still home made, into a basement in front of the bemused, slightly concerned, expressions of the waiting staff and started to assemble it. I glanced around to see if Mr Peel was there but he wasn’t.
The studio staff, who started cabling and unfolding mike stands, were joined by a woman with a clipboard making notes. She approached Justin, who for reasons of his own had recently melted a sheet of thick, black polythene around the body of his guitar, looked at him, looked at the guitar, said “interesting” in a doubtful way, and jotted something on her clipboard. She remained with us the entire time, making notes.
The producer/sound engineer who was very well known and undoubtedly excellent at his job, came across as being jaded and intolerant. He was particularly unimpressed with Nick’s old Shaftsbury drum kit and when at one point Nick dared to ask if he could make the bass drum sound a bit warmer or deeper he said, in a dull voice, “I’m not interested in looking for frequencies that don’t exist”… which had the rest of us turning away in different directions trying hard not to laugh.
HIs mood got even worse when Steven broke a bass string whilst recording ‘Impulse of man’ and had to admit to not having a spare. We thought he’d actually packed up and gone home at a certain point, but he came back when eventually someone found a replacement string from somewhere and we carried on.
Luckily we had previous experience of miserable, uninterested sound engineers so were able to continue without taking anything too personally and eventually do a pretty good job. The engineer/producer did a fine job too it must be said. Our version of ‘Wallpaper dying’ is still played from time to time on BBC ‘6 Music’, Peel was impressed with ‘Impulse of man’ and although it was perhaps naïve of us to record our new single ‘The secret sea’ and the previously unreleased ‘There was a man of double deed’, they also sounded fine.
The session was broadcast a few weeks later whilst we were on a UK tour with ‘The Cure’ for the second time. They were promoting their new album ‘The Top’ and our first album had just been released. We had a great time but much had happened in The Cure camp so it was quite different to our first, more intimate, tour together. They had just had their first top ten hit with ‘Love Cats’ and the ‘Pornography’ album had been a huge success so they were now selling out Odeon and City Hall sized venues. Everything was on a different scale and their line up had changed too; no Simon Gallup on bass and Lol wasn’t drumming but playing the keyboards.
We travelled in a separate vehicle (driven by our friend Neal Cook from our label mates ‘The Wild Flowers’) and we had a good laugh, it was an exciting time. We got on well with the new Cure members too, especially the drummer, Andy Anderson, and Robert was as supportive and friendly as ever inviting us all to ’Club Smith’, his hotel room, when we got back to the hotel at the end of the evening. But it was different. Of course it was.
Steven recently listened to some recordings from the tour taken from the desk and said we were often pretty terrible. It wasn’t easy playing to big, less than half full venues at 7:30 p.m… perhaps we were too nervous or trying too hard… we’d probably drunk too much. However, we were certainly good some nights… the tour ended with three shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in London where according to Justin we were very good the first night and got progressively worse, whereas The Cure went the opposite way ending on a high.
One might imagine that with all the activity and excitement of the first half of this year we would be feeling up beat about our future and very pleased with ourselves for making such progress. But my notebooks of the time tell a different story.
Our album sold quite well, but, in the UK at least, (and our world seemed to end at it’s shores) it was largely ignored and what little press we’d got from our live performances was not encouraging. In one magazine the journalist was once again using me as the catalyst for their derisive and somewhat inflated criticism. I found those confidence draining attacks very difficult to deal with at the time but in retrospect I can accept that not everyone was going to like how I came across on stage. I was too nervous, too intense and had a lot to learn.
But our first album is a good record. When we were preparing it for re-issue recently I listened to it from start to finish for the first time in years and was pleasantly surprised. It’s well played, the songs are generally good and it’s particularly well produced. It deserved more recognition - but things aren’t that simple.
We tried to be cool and make out we didn’t give a damn - but we did and it nearly broke us. This lack of ‘success’ or appreciation… and it must be said the absence of any money coming in, led to my volatile ego clashing with Steven’s, Nick confessing that he was very unsure if he wanted to continue dedicating so much time to the band and suggesting we should look for another drummer and, on top of it all, we were struggling to find any way forward creatively.
We went into the dairy almost every day and tried to write new songs, kicked a ball around the yard, went back and tried again but nothing sounded any good. There was something about the whole idea of ‘jamming’ that pissed us off and we never played covers of anyone else’s music so these sessions were often quite tense and we spent a lot of time holding our plugged in instruments, just looking at each other.
Then in June, as I was sitting quietly at the window of my small bedroom at the top of the house with the Worcestershire fields in front of me, writing lists of things that I should and shouldn’t do to make things better, Justin opened the door and said he was going to give the band until October 1st. This sounded reasonable to me and we talked calmly and practically for a long time about the band, about music and about our uncertain futures as the sun got lower and filled the room with its light.
SHJ