Been feeling a little down today so I thought I’d put up a couple of pix of the next generation because they cheer me up no end.
Category: Diary
Had a meeting with the men from the bank today. New contracts have been inked and our final obligation is going to be met. We reset the clock back to zero. It is three years ago. Nothing has happened. We start again…
It has been a harrowing week, dear reader. I’ve spent every available spare moment working through my collection of 4-track master tapes. I have now finished this gargantuan task and have collated 9 hours of music, totalling 118 tracks. Some of these are complete songs, some of these are unfinished pieces, some are just fragments.
It was hard work. Various versions of the same song, badly recorded bits, awful playing, improvisations that were borderline attacks in noise terror – I had to sit through it all in order to transfer this archive.
Again, it made me realise how I’d documented my musical development. So it was a useful exercise in that way, but it was quite depressing. I don’t like looking back too often, I’m one of those folks who finds it hard looking through old photographs because I find it painful.
However, it wasn’t all bad because I found a couple of tracks that were good and I’d completely forgotten about. The thing about music (if you are prolific) is that sometimes you completely forget you’ve recorded a track and so it is a genuine pleasant surprise to find something in the audio rubble. It is almost like someone else has recorded the song, but you hear flashes of yourself, your style, etc. So that makes it familiar, but it is still a stranger.
I’ve made a long podcast detailing some of the more acceptable tracks – it is 1’30” in length so it is a long one but you get to hear me talking about stuff like mandolins, being hit by a car and other tales that inspired the songs, etc. Hey, it might even make you laugh (probably for all the wrong reasons).
09/08/10 Podcast
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Of course, you can also get this directly off my podcast feed.
Now this is a test post. The idea is that I make this post on my central website and this message update should appear on my Facebook and Twitter accounts, as if by magic.
Abracadabra – I wanna reach out and grab ya!
And so the thought of mortality presses heavy on my brow.
How can I make myself useful after my mortal remains have ceased to be? Why, you could have your ashes pressed into a vinyl record of your own making!
Huzzah! I can still bring music to the masses and my fibre will be contained therein within the grooves.
About this time last year, I bought a Yamaha MT4X four-track tape recorder secondhand from eBay with the intention of transferring all my old recordings to the digital domain. Of course, other things distracted me from actually getting around to doing this, but the other night I thought I’d better get my house in order.
It was the early hours and I honestly thought I was having a heart attack and passing on. It was as if an invisible elephant was sitting on my chest and no matter what I did, I could not get relief. Thankfully, I worked through this strange incident and I am still here. It was probably just indigestion or trapped wind, but the cold sweats and the urge to defecate on the spot made my mortality even more tangible than usual – so I have set to work transferring all these old tapes onto my PC. The logic is that if I did suddenly die, the Missus wouldn’t have the first fucking clue on how to do any of this, so I’d better tidy up before I go.
So the last few evenings, after tales of Milly-Molly-Mandy and kisses goodnight to Verity, I have retreated to the mixing desk and having to relive every awful thing I’ve ever recorded. My goodness, I have recorded an awful lot of crap in my time. Unfortunately, washing out your ears doesn’t take away the pain of listening to my first early fumblings into recording.
Whereas other musicians have paid their dues by playing with other people and actually played gigs and practised, all my musical development has been committed to tape and hard disc. This is how I’ve paid my virtual dues – so I have to live with every shit idea, whereas proper musicians forget bad gigs and duff performances in a fug of booze and dubious white powder.
One of the first proper “songs” I ever recorded was something called “Electric God”. In those days, I was using four-track tape and bouncing down tracks, so it was really hard to edit stuff. Whereas now, editing music is a bit like blowing your nose. So my ideas in those days were usually presented “as is” with no way of editing out the bad bits (or maybe I just didn’t know how to) and then mixing down a stereo master to tape, rendering the dynamics to a pool of audio mush.
I’ve tinkered with this track and tarted up the audio somewhat. This isn’t very good – I’d only been messing around with guitar for a year or so, but my bass playing is solid. Always a better bass player. I’ll post both versions – the old 1992 master and the new tinkered version. The latter just sounds a bit fizzier.
Electric God – 1992 Mix
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Electric God – 2010 Mix
Direct download: CLICK HERE
I mean who wouldn’t want to dress up like Freddie Mercury for an entire day???
