Blog: Pass Me My Jam Jar, Bring Me My Pumpkin Seeds

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I had the afternoon OFF yesterday, which was RATHER delightful - it was dead nice wandering off to the station NOT thinking "Yipes! Officially i am Working From Home, WATCH THE PHONE!" NOR "Yoinks! I must RUN lest I miss the last available Non-Ludicrously Priced tickets!" for LO! I was off to DERBY for a Recording Session.

I got to SNUG just after three o'clock, and was greeted by BOTH Robbie and Rich, who were huddled round the bar heater. We LEAPT into action and got my vocals done for One Of The Walls Of My House Fell In, Leicester's Trying To Tell Me Something (including PARALLEL UNIVERSE double-tracking...oooOoooOOOh!) and Being Happy Doesn't Make You Stupid. The first couple were pretty much done in one take, with some little RE-DO sections along the way, and I was Quite Pleased - earlier on in the day I'd been CONVINCED i was about to have a cold, so drank LOTS of Orange Juice and had a Lemsip which, remarkably, seemed to work!

Vocals were the MAIN thing that needed doing, so that Emma could come in and doing HER vocals, so anything else was for THE FUN. THUS I moved on to do SPANGLY GUITAR for Do The Indie Kid, with an idea I'd had a little while ago, practiced a LOT, but never actually managed to play correctly all the way through, so we ended up doing it in BITS. My SHAME was HIGH, but it did sound pretty good. With GUITAR in hand we then did REALLY A LOT of Guitars on Leicester's Trying To Tell Me Something with not one but TWO different Very Loud Guitars. It was GRATE - I can see now why some bands end up with sixty guitar overdubs on a track: because it is SO MUCH FUN.

Plans to then do some acoustical guitar were put on hold due to the lack of acoustical guitars, so we HAULED out the keyboards and had a go at some of THAT. It is always, i believe, a mark that Things Have Gone Well when you have time for KEYBOARDS, also known as The Instrument Of Messing Around. I had an IDEA for some Boogie Woogie Piano at the end of Best Behaviour which once again i was unable to play, so once again we did it in two bits. Thus Tim arrived, fresh from work, to find me MANICALLY playing the chord D then STOPPING for an equal length of time before HAMMERING AWAY at it again. It felt a bit daft, and i was once again ASHAMED for my inability to change from one extremely simple guitar chord to another, but once done it sounded ACE.

At this point Producer Pattison took over The Instrument Of Messing Around - he had THORTS for MELLOTRON on The Drummer's Lament, so DID some, and did HIS bits in one go, the clever clogs. After THAT we went back to Do The Indie Kid and SLAPPED on some ATMOS in The Music Of The Future, and also a sound called The Lonely Spaceman, which seemed appropriate, both on the Mellotron. I THINK it just made the same noise whatever you played, but Tim still WENT for it, hammering away on the keys like The Muppet Composer. I also added some VOCALS to that bit, going "NANG NANG NANG" which, once done, seemed never to have NOT been there.

STILL on that track, Tim and I popped into the live room to do some handclaps. This, i think, was my favourite bit. We stood there CLAPPING in unison, and I thought "Goodness me, this is fun" and THAT, i think, is the DEEP DARK SECRET OF ROCK: when it comes down to it, it really is just Good Clean Fun. You can dress it up in tassly hats and bullet belts, neck a bottle of heroin and inject whiskies into your eyeballs all you like, but it's all an attempt to disguise the fact that Making Music is THE SAME whether you're a raddled millionaire or a class of infant school children: FUN. I'm sure if SLASH was given scrap paper and some colouring pencils he'd make THAT an excuse to draw nudey ladies or something, but you can't hide the FACT that the Making Music is a LARK beyond compare.

BIZARRELY, halfway through, Tim said "good guitar part there, by the way", and we were both so surprised we had to stop clapping. There's no space in the GRIM AND GRITTY world of The Serious Studio for THAT kind of nonsense! He made up for it shortly afterwards when I did my LAST task of the evening, an overdub of rhythm guitar for the VERSES of Do The Indie Kid. I couldn't play the main riff specifically as Tim wanted it, so I did it in two parts: the A chord (NER! NER NER! NER NER!) and then went back and did the WHOLE song again just playing the E (NER NER!). It was EMBARRASING, and not helped when Tim asked if HE could play the E bit. "NO!" I said, "It's bad enough as it is, without you playing it for me!" ALSO it would have meant there'd be THREE of us credited with "GTR" on the SLEEVE, and that would never do!

By this point it was Train Panic Time, so we BURNT a CD of The Drummer's Lament for Tim to practice to (he's doing the vocals), said our cheerios, and DASHED for the station... where I found the train was half an hour late.

This did, however, give me time for CHIPS, so it was a well fed, FUNNED UP Hibbett who journeyed back to London, and ended up being still WIRED some four hours later about how well it'd gone. This album is going to be GRATE!

posted 17/1/2008 by MJ Hibbett

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