This album has had a rather odd process. Initially, the ten tracks were recorded over the space of a week in my basement studio in East Ham, back in 1995. It came about because a student of mine wanted to do the work-shadowing his school insisted on with me, and I thought it would be fun if he could hold up an album when asked ‘what did you do in your week?’ His job was to hit record and stop, and keep an eye out for things I missed on account of being rather busy with notes. The drums were all produced via an Atari, Cubase and a Roland D-something or other.
The tunes themselves were largely half-written and half-arranged, and so the week was quite intense. There were a lot of first and second takes.
Gear-wise, I used my Chandler custom, my JV-Series Squier, an Ovation electro-acoustic and possibly a Yamaha hybrid. Amp-wise either my Marshall JMP-1 through a Marshall power amp and two 2x12’s with Celestion and EV speakers or a Marshall anniversary combo. Mic’d with a combination of mics I forget. Everything was recorded on a big Akai MG1214, a sort of grown up twelve track portastudio that recorded on analogue cassettes a little like the old Betamax varietal.
The second set of sessions involved finding the master tapes (in the shed), sending them to the USA where they were digitised. Working out all sort of clock speed and sound issues before hitting on the right formula. Stripping the various channels into their appropriate places (on less track-hungry pieces, I had recorded two things simultaneously), organising and re-arranging the tunes, then sending the stems to various people to have drums recorded, then bass, then guest guitar, then sending everything to Keith More to be mixed.
