ENGLAND IS A GARDEN AMPLE PLAY 6 MARCH
Our new album is… sealed, gatefold with liner notes, poster insert, double vinyl, double colour, and copper bottomed.
The sessions were… sporadic. There were quite a few layers of recording, maybe a few days recording strings, or wind instruments. Then months off until the next session, with lots of editing at home, too. I’m used to writing lyrics then building up the parts to a song. However, as my head was in repair, I had to just continue recording musical ideas as they came, which started songs off. Thus after a few years when an engineer had welded my head back together, I then had to add the lyrics. This difference meant everything was protracted. Weeks became years.
We worked with… no well known musicians deliberately. In the past, we have worked with Dan The Automator, Noel Gallagher, Otis Clay… so for a concerted effort to do things differently, this was a simple blanket statement of intent. For a choir, we used a school parents’ choral; for backing vocals, we asked Valerie Etienne, a mother from my son’s local school, to sing for us. It turned out she was more professional than a parents’ evening would suggest.
We used… either my studio in London or West Orange Studios, Preston. The engineer at the latter is Alan Gregson. We have worked with him since we were studying at Preston Polytechnic, and over time he has become a band member. By the time the songs were edited, West Orange Studios had moved from Preston to Poitiers, so we mixed the tracks in France.
We were inspired… by nothing but the idea of taking each song through to a satisfying finish. We hardly listened to much other music, did not allow anyone to hear work in progress. We just chipped ahead at seemingly no pace.
We learnt… that even while being intent on finishing an album that was slowly killing us, being anti-Brexit was still more uppermost on our mind. What a honeycomb England is breaking, and I do mean England.
Playing these songs live… we have stopped playing live, keep our carbon footprint as small as a bird, and are happy to leave it like that.
You’d be surprised to know that…
despite the unmitigating upbeat nature of the album, there was a lot going on behind the scenes. Marie Remy, our label manager, thought it would never get finished, but also pushed us to just book the next studio and move
