Blog: Sessions COMMENCE

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I got up LUDICROUSLY EARLY on Saturday morning (6.30! AM!) in order to get the train up to Derby, arriving at 10am to be met by Mr Francis A Machine. We nipped over to Snug where we found Mr T Pattison and Mr R Newman setting up the drums, for LO! it was the first day recording the NEXT ALBUM. Rock Historians, TAKE NOTE!

It took a couple of hours to get everything set up properly, but by noon we were ready to begin. In order to get SEPERATION we had the drums all miked up in the live room and the BASS amp on a floor of its own, downstairs in the practice room. Tim and Frankie were both in the live room together (for maximum RYTHMN SECTION BONDING) and I was stood looking throught the window in the control room, doing GUIDE vocals and guitar. For this first session PRIORITE UN was to get bass and drums down, which made life easy for me as i could BELLOW and play as hamfistedly as i liked without fear of repercussions, although i DID spend much of the day worrying that I was going to smack Robbie round the head with my AXE, as he was sat just next to me at the controls.

Anyway, we got going and took a few takes to sort out Do The Indie Kid to everybody's satisfaction. This was a GOOD song to start with as it's the one we, theoretically, know THE BEST, and it came out sounding PRETTY FUNKY. ALL the songs sounded that way, to me at least, probably because everything had so much bass & drums on it, it was a NICE sound.

Next up was My Boss Was In An Indie Band Once and Best Behaviour (featuring Proper Professional Ending AND drum overdub), both of which took a few takes, and both of which SHAPED UP NICELY as we went through them. One of the (MANY) DELIGHTS of Validators Sessions is that we have done this QUITE A LOT now, so there is not much MESSING AROUND. Well, OK, there's a bit of messing around and LARKISH name-calling, but we are an EFFICIENT ROCKING UNIT, if someone says "AGAIN!" then by golly we knuckle down and do the song AGAIN until everyone's happy - this usually being signified by Tim throwing his sticks to the ground and marching back into the control room.

Satisfied with progress we made our way over the road to the PUB, there to watch the last five minutes of Derby playing Southampton in the first leg of the Qualifiers Semi-Final - all morning Frankie had been slightly DISTRACTED, with a look of FEAR in his eyes, and it was a joy to behold his little face LIGHT UP when he noticed that the SCORE was 2-1 to Derby. LONG MINUTES of SHEER TERROR passed until a look of RELIEF and PLEASURE spread across his MUG - you could FEEL the anxiety flow out of him and, INDEED, most of the people in the pub.

We strolled down the road to another pub to get some GRUB, and passed a very jolly hour or so eating and LARFING. I'm not entirely sure WHAT we were larfing about, but it all seemed very humorous at the time, and we got back to the studio in HIGH SPIRITS, ready to ROCK again.

Over the next hour or so we LAID DOWN Do More Eat Less (JAZZ!) and We Can Start Having Fun (EPIC!), the latter rocking so HARD that i broke a string, and got to get out my Guitar Repair Kit, which i was rather proud of. We sat and listened to our WORK, saw that is was GOOD, and then moved back into position to PUSH FORWARD THE BOUNDARIES OF SOUND.

To some people it might have sounded like we were just pissing around for the next half hour, but what we were actually doing was recording The Music Of The Future. Do The Indie Kid features a BREAK with aforesaid sounds, so the idea was to record different VISIONS of this Music, possibly to overdub onto the original, possibly to use for different versions of the song, possibly to listen to once and say "Ah". We had a LOT of fun doing fast, slow, jerky, sparse, and VERY sparse versions, then swapped instruments to see how THAT sounded. Some of it sounded like NONSENSE, but by heck some of it sounded quite convincing. As Mr Machine pointed out, over the years we've ALL been to see bands whose entire SCHTICK was performing "pieces" that sounded EERILY similar to what we'd just done, especially when the DELAY PEDAL had been bought to the party.

The final hour of the SESSION was spent with Mr Newman mixing down two versions of each track - one a rough mix of everything we'd done, for Mrs Pattison and Mr McClure to use to work out their parts with, and one JUST of Drums and Bass for me to use to overdub my singing and guitaring in another studio, should I choose to go that way. That done we said our goodbyes to Mr Newman and, with Mrs Machine joining us, headed off for a CURRY.

Curry CONSUMED we dropped in to LONDIS for BOOZE before heading over to Steve From Johnny Domino's APARTMENT for a Eurovision Party. I'd had my doubts about this, but it turned out to be GRATE - we had SCORE CARDS to give our OWN marks for the songs, and spent an extremely happy few hours arguing about THAT, heckling the telly, shouting our DIGUST that countries were so obviously voting for their neighbours and historical colonies/colonists and APPLAUDING Brave Ireland and Plucky Little Malta who would NEVER EVER DREAM of doing such a thing.

It was a GRATE night, although I was surpised by how HORRIFIED people were, on telly, in the room, and in the papers next day, at the fate of SCOOCH. It is true that aforesaid nationalism means they never had a chance, but even if that WASN'T the case, surely it didn't help that the song itself was such an appalling pile of crap? It sounded like something KNOCKED UP in someone's bedroom about 10 years ago when irredemably awful HANDBAG stuff like that was SO BRIEFLY considered A Good Thing. I've never gone along with things being So Bad They're Good - why waste time on pretending to enjoy things that are RUBBISH when there's so many things that are ACTUALLY good? ALSO, there's a fine line between CAMP and APPALLINGLY SHITE, and the Creepy Sex Goblin guy making "Outrageous" "Remarks" such as "Would you like some salty nuts?" or "Would you like something to suck on?" at the end of the verse crossed that line at high speed.

Still, it could have been worse: JORDAN!

Anyway, it was a BRILLIANT evening, and it was a very happy TEAM VALIDATOR who wandered back to Chez Machine. It was a LESS Happy Hibbett who woke, yet again, FAR TOO EARLY, but I got home to find The Voting Section In My Televised Eurovision HOME at last from her holidays, and joy and happiness spread around. It was a GOOD weekend!

posted 14/5/2007 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

glad you had fun and it was good to see you and tim after what seems like yonks!
posted 14/5/2007 by stevedomino

The "Qualifiers"????

It's the Play-offs Mark..

But then you did think we were playing Gloucestershire United didn't you?
posted 15/5/2007 by Francis

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