A communal kitchen that smells
of cigarettes and piss
At some point in the tour, after the all the to-ing and fro-ing toing and froing, Matt announced that he'd gone off Plan A, and he'd come up with another plan altogether. Perhaps it had been a mistake to treat the demos as demos, perhaps the band sound was too restrictive. After all, the spirit of the first records was much more individual. Why didn't we rent some studio space and use the demos as the basis for the final versions? Without huge studio costs we could have a lot more time to experiment with sounds and ideas, we could redo things as often as we wanted, and we weren't ditching the important aspects of what already existed. It made a lot of sense to me - in fact it was weird that no one had thought of it up till now. We'd always been very self-sufficient, and in fact still owned all the useful bits of the equipment we'd got years before when we were making the RUTH/45s album. Dan, whose recording rig was what we'd actually use, was also looking for a space to work in for other projects. We had happy visions of a collective-style creative haven where all manner of crazy shit could happen, and we could record it. And the World Cup would be on! We could get a rug, and maybe some nice lamps and beanbags, yeah! beanbags...
The other advantage of Plan B was that it would impose some sorely-needed parameters for what everything sounded like since we would, within reason, record everything there. Never mind all our talk, if the drums sounded like a chimp banging pots and pansWe assumed they wouldn't sound that much like a chimp banging pots and pansDan: "Well, of course, if you want the classic chimp-banging-pots-and-pans sound you have to use a Rwandan Nymph and a set of La Creuset shellfish pans, 10" and 13", preferably from before they switched production to Riems, because they used more resonant handles.., then we'd work with that.
Initial concepts for the location of the studio included various stately homes (Stargroves!), water towers and abandoned shops, along with a self-sufficient smallholding complete with dairy herd close to the beach in Cornwall Jim's idea, for the surfing. and a lighthouse. Then once we'd found out how much that kind of thing cost we scaled it back to suburban semis, industrial space and eventually 'purpose-built studio units'.
I'm not saying this to make a point, or get credit, or to show How Brilliant I Am, or anything like that. No. I wouldn't do that. But about six months previously I had noticed a sign up at the rehearsal studio we use advertising a 'Self-contained Project Studio, control room and booth'. Matt had been talking about moving his equipment out of his house because apparently Kim was tired of seeing him hunched in an office chair wearing headphones breathing too loud, so I rang him up and told him about it, and do you know what he said? "Naaahhh, can't be arsed," he said. "Fair enough," I thought. "His decision. 'Strike while the iron's hot' I always say, but there you go. Nobody's business but his, just trying to help," I thought. "But wouldn't it be funny if at some unspecified point in the future we went all round the houses looking for somewhere to work and ended up taking this place? That would be ironic. Well, not technically ironic, but you know, 'ironic' like something at which you could chuckle dryly, so self-defeatingly simple does life turn out to be. I would laugh long and loud should this sequence of events unroll.
Long and loud.
But still alone."
Did you have a nice Easter? I did. We went to the Brecon Beacons for a few days and walked behind a waterfall.
Plans to affix Outside to the Strange & Beautiful album were abandoned because Columbia fired everyone who'd thought it was a good idea. Now we can do it again properly.
Matt also went away, so we left Dan to wander around the project studios for hire. By the time I got back from Wales he too had discovered the room at the rehearsal studio and had pronounced it ideal.
