You are allowed to enjoy this…

In early December a job opportunity came my way to work on a music technology magazine that I had a mild interest in. There were points against the job: its location, the smallness of the company involved and how to extricate myself from my current situation. But I applied because I’ve been telling myself that I should take more chances and was surprised when I made it to the final four to be interviewed.
However, the interviews weren’t going to be held until late January and I had over a month to stew and think and stew and get worked up about the possibilities and opportunities that might be thrown up by this job if I were lucky enough to land it. The snow delayed the interview by another week and over this period of about five weeks, I’d pretty much convinced myself that I’d got the job without even taking the interview.
I think it was the sheer amount of time between getting the nod and actually attending the interview that sent me a little ga-ga, but for a while I was completely deluded. I was the man for this position. This was the job for me. I actually thought myself into the company. What kind of dumb-fuck was I?
But I kept remembering my experience of recording music using the same technologies that were lauded in this magazine, my electronic talents to fit pickups to guitars and my body of recorded work that I would present to them in a handy little 4-CD sampler (with USB data stick containing PDFs of my written work, videos and more music). I was bugnuts, completely loopy-loo-la-la. I was going to get this job. This job was mine. The years of writing experience I’d amassed in my fifteen years working in the media would hold me in good stead. I was going to nail it.
The Missus offered to drive me the 200 miles to the interview and we stayed overnight at a local hotel. It was a nice opportunity for us to get a way from the kids for a nght, I guess, but I was dogged by a stinking cold and did my best to hold it all in.
I felt confident. There were no pre-interview nerves. The Missus was amazed by my confidence – she’d never seen me like this before. So I went into the meeting, did my little performance and left. I thought I did a great job. To me I nailed it. Everything I said, I wanted to say. I was my usual frank, honest self. Not too frank. I don’t think I said anything to blow it. The interview lasted an hour and I was very pleased.
Had I got the job? With that kind of performance, I thought I’d make it to the second interview that they mentioned during the meeting. However, the following day I received email confirmation that I had failed. There was to be no second interview (obviously I was that crap) and the person they offered the job to had accepted.
This was the brush off:
“Believe me, getting through to interview stage was a feat unto itself. I don’t doubt that you could turn in excellent copy, but the candidate we decided on had a broader range of experience with the music creation side of things and a background that combined journalistic and educationalist experience.”
I wasn’t upset that I didn’t get the job. It was probably unfair of me to drag the family 200 miles across the country if I had to relocate and to be honest, I didn’t want to live in that area anyway. Visiting the place was sobering and didn’t feel a good fit for me. Or maybe I am just kidding myself? I don’t know what to believe anymore.
But what I did feel was complete embarrassment that I’d managed to lie to myself and convince myself that I was good enough to get the job. I must remember my place. I am the also-ran, and there’s always going to be the better man out there, the one with more experience, more to offer than me.
I do try, I really do, but sometimes I think I’ve wasted my life on the media. Without feeling too maudling for myself, I always feel I never get the breaks. Just one break every so often would be nice. Please.
I can’t even bear to look at my music gear at the moment. I feel dirty…

It is hard to believe that this video is eleven years old, and the song itself still sounds quite fresh with its future-retro chops. I love the visual imagination on show here, the referencing of the Midwych Cookoos, the unsettling imagery at the end (the children riding the parents and the little girl surrounded by a SWAT team). I think this was before all the Marilyn Manson nonsense and is one of the few unsettling pop videos out there. It’s part Lynch, part Da-Da, part nightmare. I like it a lot and Shirley Manson makes me feel all funny in my private places.

Click the album cover to preview the album on iTunes. Buy it if you like what you hear!

I absolutely love the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and admire their late leader, Simon Jeffes, greatly. He’s a musical hero. He was the person who said: “It doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to go anywhere, it just has to have emotion”. Of course, I paraphrase that last bit for clarity. It’s all about the tune. It’s all about finding a modern British folk music. It’s African, South American, ragtime, folky, jokey, but never hokey. My only regret was never getting to see them play live and I cried when I found out that Simon Jeffes had passed away prematurely over a decade ago. Whenever I am down or need a little pep, some musical sunshine, something that can put a spring back in my step, I turn to the Penguins. Some might laugh, some might think that it is nothing more than middle-class chamber music, but it has soul. And it appeals and nourishes this soul…

The debut performance of Verity’s rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” – the feedback is her channelling the rock ‘n’ roll spirit of Jimi Hendrix into her performance.

I’ve been recording music since the early 1990s, starting off with analogue four-track cassette recorders, which frankly left me a little dissatisfied with the process. Despite holding the knowledge that the Beatles recorded Sgt Peppers on four tracks as my template, I’d forgotten the fact that they also had George Martin and Abbey Road studios at their disposal, so my feeble attempts were always going to come up a little short.
Those early recordings lacked width and clarity, and the bounce-down process (where you bounced an edit onto a free track, whilst overdubbing another instrument on top of the original track), left mixes muddy and little scope for revision. But saying that, the whole four-track era (I recorded about four or five hours of music this way), gave me the discipline to be able to nail a performance in one shot – or at least be comfortable to leave my mistakes on record. In those days, you had to get it right because once you’d bounced down the performance to another track, that was it. You were stuck with it!
I’d practically given up recording between 1994-97 – dabbling occasionally with my four-track, but just feeling restricted by the technology – but then everything changed. Home computers suddenly had the processing power to deal with multitrack audio and soundcards were almost becoming pro-spec. I remember seeing an advert for a Guillemot (now they are called Hercules, I think) soundcard that boasted multitrack capability and featured its own recording software. I paid my £200 and waited. Four-tracks were expensive, eight-tracks nearly a grand – digital recording was the realm of the pro-studio, so I felt like I was on the cutting edge.
The first software I used to record was called “Quartz AudioMaster” and despite its age, it is still a fairly solid application. It allowed me the recording power of a digital sixteen track and soon I was revitalised, energised and able to get the recording results I wanted. For me it was all about getting the ideas down and in a way that could be accessible to the listener.
At the same time, the Internet grew in popularity, modem speeds increased and by the late 1990s both the advent of the MP3 music compression algorithm and the introduction of broadband internet connections, meant that you could, for the first time, share your music easily. And so my passion for recording fell in step with the technology around me.
I’m currently reading the autobiography of legendary drummer Bill Bruford (hi Sid!), a musician I hold in high regard. The book is informative and is more about music and his relationship to music than a biography per se. There’s a lot to think about and Bill, being a proper musician, seems to have an issue with us home recorders. He thinks that we are clogging up the system with unlistenable, unwanted music. That we are stifling his profession and that vanity publishing is ruining the music industry.
This gave me a lot to think about? Why do I do this? Well I record music because it is my hobby, it constantly challenges me as a person, I get a lot from it and I hope that my music finds its appropriate audience. I’m not a musician in the same way Bruford makes his sole living from playing the drums. I am the hobbyist musician – a new breed who doesn’t actually NEED to make money from music. I am also of the belief that all art should be free and when you mix money with the creative process you are no longer creating art, but product. Of course, there are flaws in my thought process but this is not the place to debate them. That is for another time.
Anyway, I record music because there appears to be no better way of passing my spare time. There’s something at the end of it and I can share this with the population, whether they like it or not. Yes, I would love to be a proper musician, but I was born out of time. I don’t think anyone out there would pay to listen to me or even book me to appear, so I’ll stay here thank you very much.

The album “Fade In/Fade Out” back in 1998 was my first “digital” recording in so much as it was recording and assembled on a home computer. It was just me, my guitar and bass and FX unit, fed straight into the sound card. Yes, there’s some MIDI synth stuff going on too, but it is minimal. The actual concept was to record a record where there was NO DRUMS, NO RHYTHM TRACK at all. The guitar would provide the rhythm, and so I believe that this is one of my purest recordings. It’s just me.
The idea of the Legacy releases was that I was heading towards a digital future where I could no longer access my old recording masters unless I kept a dusty old Pentium computer in the corner running Windows 98. So the plan was to go back, get a netbook that could run WinXP and Quart AudioMaster and extract the raw digital audio tracks and MIDI data files. These tracks would then be loaded into Sonar (my latest recording software DAW) and given some 21st century spit and polish. Remixing has been cut to a minimum other than getting rid of some of the extraneous noises/clicks/pops and altering some of the synth stuff. Of course, I don’t have access to the Yamaha MU50 tone generator I used the first time around to create the synth sounds, so I have used rough approximations.
The overall mix is clearer, and you can hear my development as the album progresses. Halfway through, (with the track “The Return of Carter”) you can almost see the lightbulb going off above my head as the synapses fire up and I start to stretch myself.
This presentation is brought to you in FLAC lossless audio format so you can burn your own audio CD and print up sleeves – or you can create high-quality MP3 files from the tracks. There’s full details in the accompanying ZIP file. You’ll need a BitTorrent client to download this file and I recommend uTorrent.
Fade In/Fade Out Torrent