Click here for a FREE Download of us playing at Ryans Bar on the last date of the Volume 4 tours. Please feel free and thanks for listening

Mick Eyeden

We finished our Volume 4 tours with an amazing jaunt around France and Spain in February, travelling in the point-and-squirt tradition of ignoring all weather warnings in France and bathing in the Spanish sun like reptiles.

We didn't have the rear row of seats in the van this winter so it was the 3 of us crammed in our vivarium up front, neck and neck and neck for something like ten thousand miles all told. Dan's information pod got as fried as us and still kept coming up with the goods, charming us with new discoveries into the final week, like Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart. We played a lot of totally amazing gigs and on the whole we thought we played to a good standard, particularly on the last tour in France and Spain, and we introduced quite a few new numbers on the way. Somewhere in Spain we broke even on the costs of making Volume 4, which being within a year of recording the album, and before the tours were over, we were delighted. I still like the album a lot and am still really pleased with how it sounds and the songs we wrote and how we caught them in the sessions.

After the tours were over we did a one-off gig with Nitkowski at Ryans Bar in London, with the intention of recording the set for a live release. We hired some microphones and Dan brought some of his recording gear over from Jersey, but unfortunately the recording computer crashed during out set so it was lost. The Nitkowski set was recorded intact, and sounds amazing, Dan says. As soon as he's mixed it, we shall release it on our Gnats Clit Recordings page as a free download, thanks Nitkowski. Our friends Pedro and Marie-Ann filmed our Eyes set that night, and married the visual up with a single-mic recording they made as a backup, and edited it into a nice youtube playlist of all the songs here:

Shield Your Eyes at Ryan's Bar, 15th March 2012

Thanks Pedro and Marie-Ann. We're not going to play that many gigs this summer but will get stuck back into it in the autumn and winter, so until then our plan is to put together a lot of free live releases from all the recordings which were made at the gigs. Some were done with single mics by audience members and then given to us, and there's the whole UK part of the tour from January which we 8-track recorded. So we'll let you know as those things get released, again on our Gnat's Clit Recordings page, again for free. Take care and if you bought a copy of Volume 4 then thanks loads, I hope you like it, and I hope this blog was in some way insightful for all the parts involved in making the album happen. Thanks again
Stef

Thanks for a good year

The main thing this year was the writing (half of)/recording/preparing/releasing and touring Volume 4, our favourite album so far. The touring we did was totally cool, with great audiences and a lot of laughs.
We have been mostly playing Volume 4 material this year which I've enjoyed a lot, in particular numbers like Tryna Lean A Ladder Up Against The Wind and more recently Glad. We went round England with Slovenia's Nikki Louder in April, and Frenchsters Pneu in September. We played with some really great bands for the first time - Cotton Ponies (Germany), Pilotz (Germany), Deceased Squirrel on the Phone (Czech Rep), Model Boat and Kidnapped Kids, as well as some old faves like Depakine Chrono, The Jellas, That Fucking Tank, Illness, Falenizza Horsepower, Don Vito, Hired Muscle, Nope, and of course Nitkowski and Silent Front. Aside from Shield Your Eyes stuff, I did a lot more Guns Or Knives solo stuff, with quite a few single dates and a couple of tours too, and a few songs wrote themselves in the meantime. My Guns Or Knives album also finally came out, now on Function Records. I also started a new band with some friends called Brass, and played our first couple of gigs with that. Henri and Nick have also been gigging more as the Bottlenose Dolphins, and they have written quite a lot of new material with plans to record an album.

As well as the week we spent recording Volume 4 in February, the Shield Your Eyes European tour in November was my highlight of the year. We visited Germany, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Austria, France and Luxembourg, all countries we have played in the past and we noticed in most towns our audiences getting bigger, which is really nice to see. Bands like us only really operate through word of mouth and it means the world to us to see our audiences grow, especially out on the Continent. The German and Czech gigs were particularily cool, and I'm hoping it's not too long before we find time to go out there again.
We have quite a lot of plans over the next couple of months. We are touring the UK between 12th-21st January, and will be taking equipment with us to record the gigs for a planned live album. Our current set involves a lot of improvisation and interpretation which is what we hope to capture. It will be a truthful recording with no post-production beyond mixing. The nature of recording these gigs to as high a standard as is practical will require a fair bit of understanding on the promoters/venues/sound engineers part, in that we will actually require soundchecks, and will need early load-ins, more set-up time and cannot lend any gear at all. We are also hoping a find someone who can engineer the recordings. If you can do it, and would like to, and are free on any of those dates (it doesn't have to be the whole tour) please get in touch. If you live in England and like coming to gigs, please come and see us play.

Then we will be off to tour in France and Spain for most of February. We still have quite a few gigs still to arrange for that so please get in touch if you can help.

After that, our plans are to get Cotton Ponies and Depakine Chrono over to tour the UK with us, both bands being totally great. We haven't arranged when those tours will be, but I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks loads again for paying our music attention and to anybody that has done anything to help us or similarly-minded bands this last year. Take care and have a nice January.
Stef

Volume 4 Pre-Orders now available

To pre-order the album go to http://www.shieldyoureyes.com/

The Vinyl comes with the CD copy and a 12" square 8-page insert book of photos taken during the recording sessions. If for some reason you really only want to buy the CD then it's available like that too for not much less money. Pre-order copies will be sent out mid-October. To listen to two of the numbers, see our soundcloud thing below. Thanks!

livin' ain't easy, down on my daddy's failin' farm

a few new developments with getting the album out:

the release date has been set by shane as monday 17th october.

the release night will be at ryans bar, london on tuesday 18th october. ive got a lineup in mind for it and will announce it when the bands have confirmed.

two of the songs - larkspur and drill your heavy heart are uploaded in listenable form on the soundcloud thing on www.shieldyoureyes.com.

dan has been working on the multi-page photo insert, and sent me a version of it last night, it looks totally good.

test pressings of the vinyl should be ready in the next couple of days.

pre-orders should be available in the coming days.

more soon
stef

vinyl cutting

this afternoon shane and i went down to curved pressings in hackney to watch the vinyl master cutting process. which is to say, we watched the process by which the master copy is made, from which the 300 copies will be pressed from. the engineer played us bits of it back and it sounded rad through two 15 inch speakers. he praised the mastering job james plotkin did and said it made his job much easier, so we could just cut it flat, with no eq adjustments or anything like that. its a shame dan couldnt be present as he'd have loved seeing it and i felt he deserved to be there after all his hard work so far taking care of all the production related stuff. its mostly over to shane now, he's sorting the cd pressing out very soon, and sounds like the pr chap is starting to get going. we have a 5-day english tour next week with pneu, and hopefully the test pressings will be ready soon after that.

its basically totally cost-ineffective to reject a test pressing when you are manufacturing anything less than several thousand copies, as you lose about £500 worth of tool costs to cut a new master copy, as we found out when pressing shield em. it turned out the wrong files had been submitted, and we couldnt justify the cash to start the process again. that's what all the uncut starts and endings were about on the shield em vinyl if youre wondering. a bit of negligence when submitting the master. it probably sounded deliberate to most people who bought the record, mind. anyway the engineer at curved packaged the master up and sent it to their plant in france. im in the process of sorting out a release gig, though henri and i have different ideas about which venue to use. i want to use somewhere we havent released stuff at before, and somewhere totally cheap and easy to hire. im sure itll be sorted soon.
stef

mastered

the mastered album arrived in the post today, and steve and dan sorted the sleeve design at the weekend. so very soon we shall submit the album for manufacture. andy abbott, our sometime bassist and that fucking tank/nope full-timer wrote the press release. one of andy's other tasks this week is recording that fucking tank's 3rd album.

so as soon as we have the finished sleeve and label artwork ready to submit, shane and i shall hand deliver it to curved pressing in hackney for the vinyl manufacturing. curved are my favourite place to have vinyl pressed, it's the same plant where we pressed shield em, i think their records are much better quality than most other places. shane will use his usual presser for the cd, i dont know who that is, i dont care about cds.

the format will be 12" vinyl with a cd inside, and a multi-page insert of some of the black and white photos matt took during the recording. we are reluctant to sell cd's separately from the vinyl now as it's so expensive to press on 2 formats, making most releases pretty much impossible to recoup, even when you tour a lot. so doing it this way we can press the cd version on those spineless card envelope things, youve seen them and make the record have a chance of recouping. so if you want the cd you'll have to buy the vinyl to get it. im keen for there to be no download version at all, but i think the label will probably insist.  

volume 4 photos

Matt Williams has given us the photos he took of the Volume 4 recording sessions. there is something like 600 photos, and from that we will choose the sleeve artwork and a multi-page photo insert for the vinyl. here is a few to give you an eyedea, with some more on our photos page





as ever, oceanic thanks to Matt, he has taken the photos for all our albums and a few gigs along the way as well. I don't know anything about cameras but he wasn't using a digital one. The album is in the final stages of being mastered and will be submitted with cover shot to Function Records very soon
stef

mastering

dan sent the mixes to james plotkin at the weekend for him to master us again. he has mastered all our albums except the first one, which could have done with it i think. i tried writing some rough guidelines/mastering notes but actually all i wrote down was to keep the noises in at the start of larkspur.

I found out off shane that we are now really up against being able to release the album on time, he needs artwork and songs within a week to be able to stick to our october release. he says theres no point releasing between nov-feb and like fuck are we waiting till march next year to get this off our backs, so we've got to get everything sorted very quickly. still no sign of the photos from matt unfortunately, he has started a new job which is taking up most of his time and he said he'll have them to us in a week's time, we really need that to happen now. funny how these projects always end up running really up against deadlines. anyway im sure itll work out
stef

i was back in jersey last weekend to visit dan, and he played his mixes of volume 4. we put some of the vocals a bit higher, and some of the vocals a bit lower, and that was it. it sounds totally nice and dan's done a blinding job throughout. he's gonna get it so bav and henri can listen to it too, and then we'll send it for mastering. i imagine the release date is about october or november
stef

a message about the mixing from dan

How are you? How are you doing? That’s good because so am I

I’m mixing Volume 4 by Shield Your Eyes at the moment. As you probably know, we recorded it at the end of February over here in Jersey. I gave myself a fairly long cooling off period after we packed all the gear away and I said goodbye to the lads. It was an intensely excellent week so I wanted to forget just how good what we recorded was, how good the songs and how good the performances were. This was clearly never going to happen but a month or two of not hearing the numbers has brought an excitement  to proceedings. Stef and I set out with a pretty good idea of what we wanted back in Feb. I’ll speak for my own preconceptions though: a non mannered natural sounding recording of my favourite band. (perhaps just put Shield Your Eyes). I say non mannered because I didn’t want a contrived ‘natural’ sound, rather something approaching the area of, say, Deuce.  

 I started with Until I Find a Natural Way about a week ago because I was listening to a fair bit of Vol 4, panned the kit and got some good levels. The kick was still sounding as lovely as February. I put Nick over on the left, perhaps penance for his performance during the session making something like 4 minor slips in 7 full days of recording. The youth of today. I have a particular fondness for the condenser which we put on Stef’s cab, which seemed to relish getting absolutely hammered by a flat out orange head for a week. Drill Your Heavy Heart fell in to place nicely with, to quote lars, the bit that really gets my dick hard, being when the band enter from a month shooting bears in Russia to a shout from Stef. I wanted the details of the instruments to be quite present whilst keeping the lovely room sound we got.  I ‘had a go’ at Trying To Lean a Ladder, a number which is still astounding and, at the risk of editorialising, in my eyes, sits like a ’71 forlorn masterpiece which found its way onto Inner Mounting Flame. Anyway, it’s all sounding very good so far and not like a fucking car wreck that no one told me about.

Dan

dan sent through an instrumental mix of two numbers, i liked how it sounded. he reckons its best to do mixing in 1-hour stabs so youre ears dont get bored, which makes sense to me. ive asked him to blog here his thoughts of the process, hes a busy chap but maybe he'll find a bit of time to write down the details. more soon then. "i wish you would see fit to cease the practice of these religious ceremonies" johnson.
stef

volume 4 recorded. it took a week, here is my account, WHICH I HAVE FINISHED WREYETIN' NOW

i suppose it may belp to give a cast of characters so as to not confuse, in order of appearance:

myself - guitarist/singer in sye. if someone else was writing this would be referred to as being a mug
matt williams - friend and photographer, snapping the sessions. maybe referred to as mug/swills
henri grimes - drummer in sye. all round muggy cunt. may be referred to as mug/chops/muggy chops/muggy b/mugabe/mush
nick bavin - bassist in sye. may be referred to as mug/bav/bavo/mush
dan pedersen - producer for sessions, and sometimes bassist for sye. jersey resident. arranged everything
neil dautun - friend and label eyes, jersey resident, will always be referred to as nez
tina - dans sister, cooked fantastic meals for us all week
dave spars - interested friend and lender of microphone & stands. jersey resident. more than one half of falenizza horsepower
steve hutchens - interested friend, lender of nothing. jersey resident. more than one half of falenizza horsepower



THURSDAY 24th FEBRUARY

i couldnt find my passport, but thats ok cos you dont need it to get to jersey. in the evening i went round matts house in alton, i hadnt seen him since september. he showed me how much film he was bringing, i was astonished. we got a fairly early night cos of 5am start.


FRIDAY 25th FEBRUARY

we got up, loaded matts cameras and lights into the van, and drove to pick henri up in farnham. he'd seen venetian snares play in brighton the night before and had stayed up rather than get 2 hours sleep. then we went round bavs and picked him up. he'd said he would be shit with an early start but as it was our drive to weymouth was spent with bav and i listening to metallicas black album from start to finish whilst the other lads slept. i dont want to state the obvious but what a shit album. we got to the boat in time, and did the usual driving on it like you do, and went to the bit where you sit. we started playing cards next to a family who i think were pretending to be asleep so as to not have to react to some of the juvenile shit coming out of our excited mouths, but the joke was on us cos as soon as the boat hit open water me and bav started feeling all ropey. i took to the deck for the rest of the journey, and kind of crouched down for most of it, holding on to a tap in a kind of foetal state. i was sick a few times and spent a long time thinking how amazing the sick bags they give you can hold puke in without seeping or going soggy, but they just feel like paper. anyway i felt rough as shit for the whole crossing, or at least until the guernsey stop off. bav had been sick in the toilets and then joined me on the deck, and i think was feeling worse than me. he was sick a bunch of times whilst i was crouching down and it sounded like he was being stabbed. there was a bit where we were being sick at the same time i remember, and bav said afterwards that he had really thought about jumping off the boat and drowning himself but then resolved not to cos he's a "better man than that". matt is a sturdy lad with a fondness for special forces, and had no trouble with the crossing, of course, and also of course, henri came out a couple of times to mug bav and i off by eating a hotdog and a burger at us, and drinking a pint. anyway after the guernsey stop off the boat goes a lot slower on its way to jersey and we felt a lot better, and vomits llewelyn-bowen was over.

when we got to jersey we drove to the hotel, i was pleased to find i can drive round jersey and find things fairly easily now after a couple of visits to dan last summer. we parked the van at the hotel and there it stayed for the week. dan was there to meet us and it was good to see him. after a bit of catching up we unloaded the van and in a roundabout way started setting up. we also went down to lisboa for one each of their famous steak and egg sandwiches.

the hotel dining room has been used for recording quite a few times in the past for various bands of dans over the years, including a for trucks recording session i was part of back in 2005. its a really big room, the hotel has a hundred rooms and of course the dining room being so big and has most of the audio properties that many studios would spend their time trying to imitate, with such a big room you have that sound straight away. plenty of natural reverb so you can afford to close mic most stuff and with just a couple of room mics you get loads of really nice natural reverb sound come through. nez arrived, and it was great to see him too. his presence in london is very much missed, though since he moved away i go round his old house a lot more than i used to. anyway around this time dan showed us which rooms we were sleeping in, henri and bav were rooming together, dan and nez together, and matt and i together. other than us, aside for some people decorating, the hotel was of course completely empty, waiting for the holiday season.

at first the idea was to set up in the corner where all the previous sessions had taken place, we found something was still wrong with the dan kowser's amp head i planned on recording with, we got the desk in place and then left it at that for the night. i cant remember which dinners tina made for us on which days, but they were all blinding. that perhaps is not the best way to describe food but i mean to say every meal tina made us was amazing and also beyond appreciated. in fact we didnt really know how to show our gratitude and felt our mumbled thanks was not enough.

anyway that night we got right shitted and played a lot of pool. matt also did a quick photo shoot with us under a chandelier in the dining room.


SATURDAY 26th FEBRUARY

at 9am we had breakfast at the isis down the road, and showers too, with the hot water at the main hotel being switched off. amazingly dan had arranged that this could happen every morning we were there. i remember that morning i had scrambled eggs on toast whilst everybody else had the full english. i like to have my eggs scrambled every now and then, purely for the motocross reference.

after that we worked out how many leads we had and how many we needed to buy, and dan arranged to borrow some stands from dave. so after breakfast dan drove matt and i over to the other side of the island to where falenizza horsepower practice, which is inside a chapel in a graveyard, perfect for riffs of their kind. we were all very excited knowing that we would get to hang out with dave and steve a bit throughout the week and also that we would play a gig with them on the last night. so dave lent us the stands we needed, and we also stopped at a german bunker by st ouens beach during the trip.

when we got back it was decided that setting up in the middle of the room was a better idea than the corner, it certainly seemed like a better idea to me and seemed better to use the full size of the room. also it gave us a lot more room to move about and that made a nice difference during the week, to have plenty of room and not feel at all cramped in the area you record in. whilst everything was being re-set up in the middle of the room dan, henri and i went into town to drop dan kowsers amp head in to a music shop to be looked at, and we bought the few extra leads we needed. we then went to a different music shop and henri bought a front skin for his kick drum, and i withdrew most of what we owed dan for booking the ferry. the rest of the day was spent soundchecking, as much of that process as i remember i will relay now.

henri set up right in the middle of the room and dan got to work setting up the mics. it seemed to me like they came to a drum sound they were happy with very quickly, and one of the things they did was hang a rug over the kickdrum mic to get as much isolation as possible. i think my trusty d112 was used to mic the kick. the drums sounded good to me when they recorded it and played it back, henri told me it was quite an old-style sound. bav set up about 7 foot away from henri, slightly to his left, the same as when playing live, using the head and cab he uses for gigs, facing away from the circle, using dans orange 4x10 and zilla 1x15 bass cabs as baffling for further isolation from the drums. daves bass microphone and an sm57 were used as close mics. i dont remember bass soundchecks taking very long, it seemed like bav and dan had it pretty much in control. they did spend some time talking about frequencies and dan persuaded bav away from his love of mids. the plan was to throw previous ideas of amp settings away and only pay attention to what the playback sounded like, ie. what the mics were hearing. this meant bav and i using eq's which were very different from our live settings. this was easy for me as i was using borrowed amps, so i was starting afresh anyway.

so to my soundchecking, which funnily enough i remember in pretty good detail. the original idea was to use use dan kowsers peavey valve head to achieve a good loud clean sound, and use either shane's orange 30 watt valve head or my transistor marshall head to achieve a second sound, placed further away in the room. but the peavey (for some reason it was referred to as the laney all week when we all knew it was a peavey) was the one we had put in for repair that morning. so we started soundchecking shane's orange as the main amp. at first we were trying to keep it very clean so were running it with hardly any throttle, and it sounded gash. we fucked about like that for a while until we turned the gain up to half and the volume up to full. of course now all of a sudden the amp sounded excellent, and being a decent valve amp, was totally responsive to dynamics within playing style, so its clean when you stroke it and growls like a jeremy clarkson simile when you twat it. we compared what it sounded like going into an dans orange 4x12 guitar cab to my 2x12 zilla cab, and much preferred the zilla's sound, so the orange spent the rest of the week acting purely as baffling. that meant the three most valuable cabs in the room were used as baffles for the sessions. we then started soundchecking my marshall transistor into its usual 2x12 marshall cab, and after mucking about with the eq, generally reducing mids and gain, we found a sound which at full volume sat well as a second guitar sound with the main orange sound. all of this had taken most of the afternoon, though i felt all of us were more than happy to take our time soundchecking cos if you start recording takes with a half-sorted sound you'll never really be able to fix it, the best idea is to get everything sounding as right as possible into the mics in the first place, then start recording.

its probably also worth mentioning that during the guitar soundchecks, when recording to listen to the playback, we were careful to often have all three of us playing when only soundchecking the guitar. this is to allow for a bit of bleed (though actually there was very little bleed in the end), and also to make sure of the compatability of instrument sounds. of course, getting a good instrument sound is as much about making sure they sound good together, not just in isolation. it was with this in mind that dan paid very close attention to frequencies, and once we had found the right overall direction to go in it became really noticeable how the instrument sounds allowed plenty of room for eachothers frequencies, generally staying away from eachothers eq's. dan was very wary of everything being too middy, particularily the bass. bavs love of mids largely stems from wanting to cut through live with extra perceived volume, which becomes irrelevant in a recording session and can lead to problems with the bass operating too much in the guitar's natural frequency territory, so to speak. im writing this as if i know all about it but i wouldnt come anywhere near knowing where to start conducting a whole band's frequency patterns on my own, it was dan's baby.

during dinner we received a slightly strangely worded text from the guy at the music shop that the peavey/laney amp head was fixed and that we had been sticking the wrong fuses in it. this was great news and opened up further soundchecking possibilities worth exploring the next morning. so dan drove matt and i up to the other side of the island again and we picked up the head. we mucked about a bit in the evening and watched the tour video dan had edited from the nitkowski/eyes guns ya down uk/ireland tour footage from nov/dec' 09. i dont remember what we did for the rest of that night but i know i woke up in my sleep and vomited.


SUNDAY 27th FEBRUARY

after breakfast we got stuck back into soundchecking, which took the rest of the morning. now that we had the peavey head repaired, we imagined it would go back to being the main amp. we messed around with the eq, listening back each time, only making decisions based on what it sounded like through the playback. we got a down to a pretty good sound but then compared it to the best sound we had got out of the orange head the previous day, and decided to go back to the orange head into the zilla 2x12 cab as the main head.

this is where i should explain we had decided to use two guitar amps, one to be used as a main sound, a kind of priority sound i suppose, and the other to be placed further away in the room, firing in a completely different direction to band setup. both amps would be mic’d with a condenser and an sm57 on them. this was all so we had an extra sound making for a perhaps fuller sound, and also to give us a bit of room to move in mixing. the other benefit was our main ambient room mic ended up with a good amount of guitar in it, in fact two signals coming from different directions, whereas it would have had too little if we only used the one amp.

rather than use the master/slave approach to having multiple amps, (taking the signal from one straight into the other, i suppose daisy-chaining), we split the signal at my tuner pedal, with a lead going from there straight into each amp. in this way the amps can operate completely independently from eachother, which helps when adjusting the eq on the main amp, in that it wont affect the other’s sound. we assumed the peavey would at least make for a much better 2nd amp than my marshall, but for some reason when the peavey and orange were used at the same time it generated a lot of hum. we didnt get to the bottom of the reason why, and tried a bunch of things to isolate the cause of the hum, but in the end we decided to sack off the peavey and go back to the orange being the main amp.

which meant we went back to the previous day’s amp set-up, but none of us considered it a waste of time because now we could get stuck into recording knowing we had tried every possible combination of equipment we had and were achieving the best possible sound we knew how to get. we told ourselves we would use the peavey for any overdubs later in the week, but actually when it came to it we didnt end up doing any overdubs at all.

so this brought us to the point where we were ready to start recording numbers. i had written a rough order i thought we should record the numbers, but we straight away deviated from it and got stuck into “drill your heavy heart” as we had been knocking bits of it around whilst soundchecking guitar sounds. steve had popped by to see how we were going and it was nice to have him about.

number number 1 – drill your heavy heart
this has been one of our favourites to play live since we wrote it last september, and i think we have played it in every gig since then, including right across europe. i use 4 strings for this one. it sounded really great in the room, and bav and i had plenty of room to move about, which helps. i was pleased to find i was really enjoying playing, and wasnt feeling pressured or intimidated, and we straight away got all the right kind of feel. starting with this number was a nice idea. we knocked out 5 takes, all of which felt pretty much ok, and decided one of them would surely do. without listening back we moved on. later on when we came to listen back, we found take 5 was the only one without tuning problems, and thats the one we’ll use.

number number 2 – the motownish one
which is of course a working title. this is one where we were pretty much sure it wouldnt go on the album, especially as i still hadnt written much of the vocals for it. its an ok song mind, though we seemed to experience some red-light fever and it took several takes before we got all the way to the end. then we recorded one more take and moved on. we had got a bit annoyed during this, and its the closest we came to a chimp out. briefly a foul black mood threatened to descend upon the sessions for the one and only time. there would only be one other case of red-light fever, much later in the sessions. lovely stuff. drum fans: this number contains henri’s first use of a rack tom in shield your eyes. turns out he likes twatting those just as hard as every other drum.

number number 3 – larkspur
i put an extra string on for this and spent a few minutes bedding it in. then we knocked out three takes. dan straight away declared this the best song he had ever heard, i think to see off the last bit of strange feeling left in the air from the previous number. when we listened back later on, i found all the little things i had considered imperfections when recording to be imaginary, and we all agreed it was sounding really rad. we chose take 2. drum fans: this number contains henri’s second use of a rack tom in shield your eyes.

number number 4 – laid down under my jacket
this was the first of 3 numbers for which i use a right handed electric played upside down. not owning such a guitar myself, dan had brought his ones along. i tried his danelectro but didnt like the feel or sound of it, and used his epiphone hollow-body motor. its got tons of gain on the bridge pickup so i left it at less than half-throttle and it gave a nice sound. this was another number we were almost certain would not go on the album, and again the lyrics were unfinished. henri was playing a slightly different beat to when we wrote it i noticed, he had given an extra sort of jump to it i quite liked. henri said he didnt realise he had done that. this was the first time we had played it since we tried recording it during the abortive sessions at bavs house in october. we recorded 4 takes and decided afterwards the last of those was the one to use.

number number 5 – good for nothing
another number we knew wouldnt go on the album. it was really good fun recording this one, having firmly got into the swing of things. with it now being later afternoon we knew it would be the last one of the day and felt 5 numbers in the fist afternoon of recording is good going. we did four takes and chose the last one.

after another fine dinner thanks to tina, we did all the listening back i described. then matt had us do a colour shoot on a sofa he had found near reception. matt had been taking loads of black and white photos of us recording in the afternoon too, as per our plan of having the whole process photographed. after that henri nick and i quietly ran through the new structure for you merit high hopes i had come up with, the plan being to record that first thing in the morning. for the first time since thursday i had got through a day without vomiting.


MONDAY 28th FEBRUARY

number number 6 – you merit high hopes
as far as i can remember, we started recording as soon as we got back from breakfast. this is a relatively easy number for all three of us, and i really enjoyed it. we didnt think there was anything wrong with the first take but did two more anyway. we all felt the new structure had massively improved the number, the previous arrangement having been a bit clumsy and not flowing very well. when we listened back later, we chose the 3rd take but we could have probably used any of them really.

number number 7 - fleeting
before tackling this one, the kick drum mic got knocked over, and a long soundcheck ensued. mics have been knocked or slightly moved in every long recording session i have ever been involved in, its just something that happens. but dan and henri were also totally right to spending the rest of the morning trying to get it back to sounding as good. it wasnt just the mic has moved, the front skin had only been on the bass drum for a couple of days and it was still stretching like they do. anyway the lads finally got back to a kick drum sound they liked. in the meantime bav and i left them to it, i wrote a few lyrics i needed to finish, and then bav and i practiced fleeting round a few times in mine and matts room. when dan and henri were ready, we  knocked out 2 takes of fleeting, feeling they were both pretty cool. it was fun to play, though later we noticed a few mistakes on both takes, most of them being pretty small though. i think we chose the 1st take, though i was starting to feel this number wouldnt be album-bound, i spose i was going off it a bit. drum fans: this number contains henri’s third use of a rack tom in shield your eyes.

number number 8 – tryna lean a ladder up against the wind
this turned out to be the biggest production piece of the whole session. we had decided different parts of the song needed slightly different eq’s on the guitar amp, so it was dan’s job to flick those about when i gave him the nod. on the orange amp it was just a case of switching to channel 2, but on the marshall dan needed to roll all 4 settings after the intro. also in different places of the song it suited me being away from the amps and some places right in near them. in the outro i was using a lot of feedback and playing around it, so we spent a while me walking around the amp playing at full volume on my own, looking for the best spot for good feedback. once we found it, we gaffa taped the carpet. we started doing takes, and i think we probably did about 8 or 9. the whole number is more about feel than anything else, and it was one of the numbers i had the highest hopes for. the outro section only had a very loose structure, and was communicated by a lot of eye contact, moving about, shouting and tongue gestures. most of the time it was going on a bit too long, due to vinyl limitations we know it had to come in around 6 and a half minutes and most of the early takes were about 9 minutes. after doing so many takes it was time to leave it at that. when we listened back the consensus was that there one we could use, but i felt sure we should try again in the morning, i was sure we’d get better takes that way.

dave had been around for a bit in the afternoon which was nice, and we played him a lot of the numbers we had recorded so far. we had dinner, did the listening back and played some pool. matt did another photo shoot with us in the corridor, and at some point in the last couple of days had done another one with us in a room in the kitchen where all the pots and pans are kept, but i cant remember when.


TUESDAY 1st  MARCH

we skipped breakfast and in fact got up ultra early, because this was the morning where we would get all the outdoor photo shoots done. i make it sound a bit formal, actually it was the morning where dan drove us round jersey to show us loads of coastal beauty spots, and matt took a lot of photos when we were there. first stop was to a demolished hotel near nez’s house where iron maiden had written one of their albums in the early 80s. it was fucking freezing. then we went to st ouens beach, and after that to what felt the furthest tip of the island, the one looking out to the atlantic. im not sure if it was but thats how it felt, like the end of the earth. we had to park and walk for a fair while to get to that one, freezing mush. matt went through fuck knows how many rolls of film in this time. when we got back we went down to lisboa for one each of their famous steak and egg sandwiches.

also, dan picked up a microphone which he had ordered from some guy in holland a few weeks before. dan had been watching some german tv rory gallagher footage from 71/72, when gallagher was operating with by far his best material (the first two studio albums and live in europe), and by far his best lineup (wilgar campbell on drums and shagger mcavoy on bass). fuck it, heres a youtube link:

messin with the kid (great shot of al from nitkowski at 3.31)

on this footage, dan had seen a dynamic mic he liked the look of (its the white one on gallaghers amp), investigated it, and bought one. i imagine the price would not have been shy, and it had got lost by the courier company and hadnt turned up in time to record the music. dan had planned for it to be our guitar close mic. anyway, now it had arrived and was waiting to be picked up at jersey sorting office. so at least we could use it for the vocals and in the acoustic numbers. for a bit of extra reference, dans template for how he wanted to approach the production was gallaghers second album deuce. he had picked up a mint original vinyl polydor copy, and listened to it in great detail. its also one of my favourite albums. anyway after lisboa, with it now being lunchtime, it was time to go back to the hotel and get stuck back into the recording.

number number 8 – tryna lean a ladder up against the wind - continued
we rattled through two takes, the first of which felt great. dan quickly compared it to the best of the previous day and decided straight away there was something extra in the feel now, sleeping on it had helped. i was really pleased to have got that one sorted, as i said it was one of the numbers i had highest hopes for. drum fans: this number contains henri’s fourth, and so far final, use of a rack tom in shield your eyes.

number number 9 – until i find a natural way
we hadnt played this in a long time, though i dont remember if we gave it a quick run through, i think we must have done a quiet run through before dan started recording. we recorded two takes, the second of which we stopped half way through when bav made the only big error i remember him making all week, great lad, he seemed to be revelling in the sessions and im pleased he chose not to throw himself off the ferry. anyway later on we chose the first take. i was pleased how quickly we got into the feel of the song, it being quite slow and pensive. of course there is a bit near the end where we drop the clutch and take her for a flat out rattle. i have always thought there is something quite sabbathy in this number, in a snowblind way. anyway its one of my favourites and it almost felt like a shame to have nailed it so quickly as i was really enjoying playing it. so that one was done very quickly and we moved on.

number number 10 – brno
we knocked out a take pretty quickly, which we thought was ok but perhaps not totally rad. then all of a sudden the only other bit of red-light fever kicked in and like fuck could i play the intro riff anymore. we kept trying and cos its a long repetitive slide guitar riff, and the lads join in slowly, for some reason i started not being able to play the guitar part, despite having toured the shit out of it, it being our set ender for most of our gigs these last 6 months or so. anyway i think the feeling that red-light fever produces is a feeling of how pathetic it is to have your friends sit around and bear with you whilst you get your shit together. i was getting pissed off at myself so i went off to my room and practiced it on my own for a while. henri chose this time to take a power tool to one of the cracked cymbals he had brought along, something which he had been doing all weeks during breaks, and which was sometimes referred to as henri brushing his teeth. anyway i sort of got the guitar part sorted back into my head, and we went back to recording. i think we did another 3 takes, making 4 overall, and i think we chose take 3. i think the red-light fever had been brought on because i had considered this the most likely number to be the album opener, and now i started getting feeling it wouldnt be. it was now about 5pm, and we moved on.

number number 11 – taking water
this is another number where i use a right handed guitar played upside down, so i switched over to dans epiphone hollow body again, which was still perfectly in tune from recording laid down under my jacket two days previously. the number has a long rattly guitar intro and dan and i were concerned to get the guitar sound as good as possible. i suppose we were looking for that sound where it is clean but right on the verge of breaking up. i kept the guitar set to about half throttle and we soundchecked loads of different eq’s. in the end we gave the peavey its long awaited debut and found quite a nice glassy sound with that. the lads were worried about this number, but actually i think it dawned on them during the first take that althought its long with quite a few rattly sections, its actually quite easy to play. we hadnt played it since we tried recording it in october, and it was really cool that we got straight back into it. we nailed the first take, but it turned out i had left my second amp switched off. we didnt think this would necessarily matter but we were enjoying playing it so we did another couple of takes, and later chose the 2nd one of the three i think.

number number 12 – nicola
this meant we had finished all the full rock band numbers we had to record, the only songs left being acoustic numbers or similar. nick and henri had had the idea earlier in the week to re-record the first song from our first album, nicola vella burrows, which has never dropped out of our set and we have never grown tired of playing. dan, matt, nez and steve stood around the drumkit and got ready for the bit where we all shouted “give” together. of course we only did one take, and we didnt listen back to it, and thinking about it, i forgot to record the vocals. it was a nice blow out to end this part of the sessions, the full band recordings.

dinner was the final supper with matt, as he was flying out the next morning. having him around thus far in the week had been fucking brilliant, he had been shooting us throughout the recording process, getting right up into our mushes at times. he counted the rolls of film he had taken and said it was over 800 photos. our plan is to produce some kind of insert of several pages to go in with the vinyl, using these photographs.

after dinner dan and i got stuck into starting to record the vocals. i went off to write a few of the vocals down and dan made the vocal booth in the corner of the room, near the desk, behind my 2nd amp. he used my groove tube condenser and the rory mic as it was always referred to, and we kept a room mic going, moving it into closer to the middle of the room.

we started with trying to record the vocals for good for nothing, and i did my usual thing of pushing too hard and singing too loud, unnecessarily so. dan coached me through it, pun intended dan, anyway he seems to understand a lot about singing. anyway we were soon going in the right direction, and sacking off good for nothing we got the vocals for larkspur done and left it at that for the night. the lads listened to what we’d done and said they liked it, cheers lads. they had spent the whole time playing pool, with bav turning it on time and time again. henri did not do as i expected, namely fuck about for a few games and then become unbeatable, in a very muggy cuntish way. bav was totalling everyone by now and it was an honour to pot a few before he cleared up. if you take me out of shield your eyes you have the bottlenose dolphins, nick and henri’s 2-piece. matt also did a shoot for them in the corridor whilst dan and i were recording the vocals. after that matt packed up all his photographic gear in a pile near the desk, for us to take back over to england in the van at the end of the week.

anyway this had been a busy day and we went to bed. dan, matt and i stayed up for a while in mine and matts bedroom and talked about recording the acoustic numbers the next night. i played dan the songs, one of which i had played him in montpellier whilst on tour, and dan said he had some ideas how to go about it. anyway we were knackered and went to sleep mush.


WEDNESDAY 2nd MARCH

in the morning dan drove matt to the airport on the other side of the island, i went along for the ride. im writing this with further chronicles of tooth pain, fuck it hurts. i had a filling a few weeks ago and its that tooth which hurts, perhaps it had an infection and the dentist just filled in on top of it? there was nothing about his manner which suggested a thorough job well done. anyway, after seeing matt off at the airport dan and i went back to the hotel, and got stuck into vocal takes.

dans approach was to make me do a lot of takes and this took a lot of time. the good news was although singing all day my voice held out and i didnt go hoarse. dan payed close attention to the volume i was singing at, and altogether encouraged me through doing the numbers, for me to not sing too loud, and we mucked about a bit too. i think from a production point of view its the most tedious part of recording perhaps, but although we hadnt spoken about it beforehand it seemed we were both keen to end up with some good singing. anyway at a leisurely pace we got a few numbers done, a bit more of larkspur, then tryna lean a ladder up against the wind and until i find a natural way. the day disappeared somewhat, and there seemed little point rushing the vocals. by the time we had dinner at tina’s over the way it was quite late. we had decided to finish writing and record the acoustic numbers in the evening, so after dinner i showed the first number to the lads.

number number 13 – glad
i had shown it before at nicks house a month or so before, and we had sort of worked up a structure and bav had put a bassline to it. but now in the hotel we straight away got it sounding much better than we had managed the previous time, and we went away from having a rigid structure to all the changes being done on eye contact. henri hadnt found a beat the previous time and had decided to wait til the recording so he could leave it to feel. bav stripped down the bassline he had written and i think what both the lads ended up playing is amazing, with perfect feel. dan started setting up shop to record, and we left the drums where they were, henri detuned his floor tom i think, i sat over by where the orange amp was and bav came and sat right opposite me so we could do all the eye contact. dan had brought his acoustic guitar down so i could use that, he had said it is nice to play and he was roight. dan put a condenser and his rory mic on the guitar, which also took in most of the vocals. i think a room mic was running a bit away from us, and dan put an sm57 near my face to catch any vocals the guitar mics didnt pick up. steve had come round and gave dan some comps behind the desk. bav’s amp stayed mic’d the previous way and bav turned right down. we did a quick soundcheck and found dan had got everything sounding just about perfect, even the levels all seemed right. so we ran through 3 takes, all of which were done on feel so had different lengths of sections and stuff like that. it was really nice to play like this. i remember thinking the 3rd take was the best but dan had his eye on the 2nd one, and so we listened back straight away and he was right, so we chose the 2nd take. i was really pleased how well it had come out, with as much feel as it has. we were all feeling pleased with it i think. it was now about 11pm and we moved onto the other acoustic number, which id only played to dan before.

number number 14 – crowd
dan and henri went to play some pool whilst i showed bav the song. theres a few sections to it, bav put his parts to it pretty quick and we ran it through a few times before getting henri and dan back. it came together pretty quickly, i wrote the lyrics last year on our european tour with pneu, and put the guitar to the vocals last summer one night in manchester, so despite only showing it to the band at the last minute its quite an old number in my head, and i was really pleased to be finally working on it and hearing how it would come out. anyway we did 2 takes of it, both of which we thought were pretty good, the 2nd one being better, and by now it was 1am and we were all feeling tired. so we left it at that for the night, with the idea to record another take in the morning and then do the listening back. so we went back to bed mush.


THURSDAY 3rd MARCH

we had breakfast over at the isis, and showers i think. by now i was feeling relieved to have the majority of the recording done, but also feeling the end of the week was on its way, and was really enjoying the process, having such a great time getting stuck into it with such a good set of dudes.

number number 14 – crowd – continued
when we got back from breakfast we recorded another take which went ok, and compared it to the previous night’s takes. we preferred the feel of the night time take, and chose the 2nd one. i was really pleased to have got the acoustic numbers done and that henri and bav played so nicely on them. i was also pleased in both cases we recorded the vocals at the same time as the music.

we spent the rest of the morning and afternoon doing some more vocals for the other numbers, i think in the order of brno, drill your heavy heart, you merit high hopes, and fleeting. i really hated hearing back what id written for fleeting, and i decided it wasnt going on the album, the vocals are shit. whilst dan and i were doing this, henri and bav played endless games of pool and watched eastbound and down in their room. dave came over for a bit, watched for a bit whilst dan and i recorded you merit high hopes, and then went to hang tough with bav and h-lad. after dinner dan and i were burnt out on recording vocals so we all played a bit of pool and mucked around doing impressions of richard keys asking jamie redknapp if he smashed it, amongst other shit.


FRIDAY 4th MARCH

the idea at the start of the sessions was that we’d spend the last couple of days mixing, but as the week went on i think we let it be that dan will mix it a few weeks after the sessions so as to give him time to have fresh ears so to speak.

anway after another fine breakfast at the isis, we went back and i redid the vocals for you merit high hopes, and then did taking water. the only thing left to do was record shutze deine augen.

number number 15 – schutze deine augen
which is a solo blues number ive been playing at guns or knives gigs, but always planned it to be on volume 4 since i wrote it. its another one where i use a right handed electric, so i used dans hollow bodied epiphone again. we soundchecked the guitar sound for a bit, and i sat over by the drums so as to be able to record my vocals at the same time, singing into a wide condenser mic, which in a way also acted as a room mic for the guitar sound. anyway it sounded rad and i enjoyed playing it. i think when recording blues style solo numbers you dont deserve to do multiple takes, it takes the form too far out of context, anything more than two takes and it becomes absurd. anyway i only wanted to do one take and thats all i did, and it came out alright, with most of the right feel and i was pleased with the singing when listening back. it was another number i really enjoyed recording, along with most of the rest. jobs a good un.

i let the lads know what i thought would be the tracklisting on the album, and we listened to that in order. the tracklisting i had in mind then was:

side 1
larkspur
drill your heavy heart
glad
you merit high hopes
taking water

side 2
brno
crowd
tryna lean a ladder up against the wind
until i find a natural way
schutze deine augen

it was really nice to hear the weeks work stacked up next to itself. i timed each number to see if the tracklisting could fit onto vinyl and it was a bit too far over, one side being about 23 minutes, when you dont really want to go over 20 minutes for sound quality purposes. anyway thats how we left it at the time but i had a feeling it would change. since getting back and listening to the unmixed versions in my van we have settled on a new tracklisting, with one less number, of:

side 1
larkspur
drill your heavy heart
glad
tryna lean a ladder up against the wind

side 2
you merit high hopes
until i find a natural way
crowd
schutze deine augen
brno

i think this works really well, it comes in at about 19 and a half minutes each side, fine. i cant wait to release it. but anyway, back to listening back to the numbers next to eachother for the first time in jersey, and i think we were all feeling fairly tired. it was getting into the afternoon, and dave swung by the hotel on his way to dropping the falenizza gear off at the venue in town, for tonight was the night of the gig nez was putting on. i went over to the isis to have a shower and it felt amazing to suddenly realise all the work was done, with the plan of getting some mixing done in the morning before our boat in the afternoon. when i got back we had some tea, and packed down our gear for the gig. we loaded the van and had some tea at tina’s. we rattled on about how nice the album was sounding and how nice the week had been. i think left to our own devices we would have gone straight to bed, probably all in the same room to maximise comps and to not get lonely, but having a gig was the perfect way to rattle off the week.

after a bit we went down the venue, falenizza had soundchecked and we loaded our stuff in. this was the first time shield your eyes have played in jersey and it was nice nez was putting it on. its always good when the promoter is the most shitted person in the room, and nez arranged a really great gig. after loading in dan said he had left his earplugs back at the hotel so we drove back to pick them up cos dan wanted to keep his ears in good nick for the mixing the next day. st helier is a confooosin’ town to drive around and we talked shop on the journey, shop being volume 4. it was nice to have a burn around the two of us and we harked back to our tour last autumn when we took turns at the wheel burning up over 7 and a half thousand miles across europe, time spent mostly talking about the groundhogs. this van is a total dude, and im in the process of fettling her up a bit a the moment. anyway, we got back down to the live lounge, to find a nice amount of people in the room. brett and lynchy had come over from guernsey specially for the gig, and id say they got a right dose from both bands. i was playing a guns or knives set to open the show, and i played these numbers:

schutze deine augen
melissa
untitled boogie
natural way (lyrics of until i find a natural way banged over some country soulish guitar stuff)
and an uptempo blues number played on johnnys left handed sg in standard tuning about buying a hound and training that mutt to growl if you turn me down etc
and i left it at that.

then felanizza played and no sooner had he started digging dave stuck his spade straight into a mains cable of riffs from some previous bass-fueled civilisation. as ever they were totally idiosyncratic and totally formidable. also as ever they played pretty much a totally new set of numbers, all of which stacked like school chairs. dan recently filmed a video on falenizza horsepower, and at some point in the week we had watched it at the hotel. its got some really terrific footage of them playing some really amazing newish material next to a mini cooper, and i think will serve as a perfect introduction to the band for people yet to hear them, or a reintroduction for the people in england who havent had much opportunity to see them play recently. anyway their set was fucking amazing and yes its true i should mention that they invited me up to sing the wizard by sabbath, a dream come true; misty morning etc. when singing a 3 minute version of any sabbath number backed by the falenizza riff section in a picturesque tax haven, what on earth can you do other than pull your fucking shirt off, tell the audience to get high, flash peace signs and keep informing the audience you love them in a brummie accent.

this was of course a low point in the felanizza set, the rest of the 45 or so minutes being totally rad. by now in the night the crowd was getting stuck right into felanizza’s extended doom boogies, and id say most people were totally shitfaced, including my beloved rhythm section and producer.

after that it was time to set up shop and we played a really blues rocking set on the floor, playing mostly volume 4 material. our setlist was:

an extended version of larkspur
a fucking long version of tryna lean a ladder up against the wind
drill your heavy heart
taking water
too little has been good for the soul with a really long kraut rock jam at the end
nicola
brno with the usual extended outro

it was about 2am when we finished and i think we were all totally shagged out. we mucked about for a bit, got our stuff set down, and took to loading it back into the van. the money nez payed us was the same it had cost dan to hire the desk for the week so that covered that. afterwards we went back to the hotel all tired, played a few games of pool and went to bed. henri and i slept in dans room for the purpose of a bit more comps, seeing who could do the final impression of richard keys asking jamie redknapp if he smashed it before we were all asleep.


SATURDAY 5th MARCH

of course our plan of getting up soon in the morning and believin’ we would dust off a mix of the album went to shit when we woke up at lunchtime. i woke the lads up and they werent keen. fancying a last trip to lisboa i went off down there and picked up a steak and egg sandwich each for the boys. that woke them up and soon we were up and at them, sitting at the desk listening to a few numbers. dan decided to try a mix of fleeting first, as that is a full rock band number that isnt going on the album, so would serve well as a tester, dogshit vocals or no dogshit vocals.

in the meantime the rest of us concerned ourselves with setting down all the mics and trying to work out which leads belonged to which people. dave dropped by and helped us work it out. we ended up with a few piles of stuff, the shane pile, the dan pile, the dave pile, the bottlenose pile and my pile. all this was a total rush cos we were getting really close to our check in time for the ferry home. anyway we sort of arranged stuff though it turns out we left a few things we were supposed to take back to people in england.

dan did a rushed mix of fleeting, just as a starter. my thoughts were it reined the whole thing in too much, made it too much of a “demonstating what good source sounds we got” type mix in my opinion. fuck no thats not a dig at dan, is that a fuck you to the old man? NO IT ISNT. anyway that was about all we had time for in the end, and dan started burning off all the unmixed numbers onto a cd so we could take it back and have something to listen to. something that i dont want to lose from the unmixed version is the sort of omnipresence the guitar has across the sound, without actually being too loud for the most part. i think its in the unmixed version cos the main room mic got a good dose of guitar and it sounds great. the first thing a lot of mixing people would do is get rid of that to have better control, but its a sound i really like, and i think it definitely suits the material. i dont think it will be in context of the material to have the guitar strictly coming from its place to the left of the drums, i think the saturated but still not too loud sound really sounds straight out of 1970 or so, as do the sounds dan achieved with the drums and the bass. anyway dans judgement has been absolutely spot on so far and i dont reckon the mixing is anything different. as i say the fleeting mix was just a fired-out warmer-upper, dan also being massively hung over, and it still sounds pretty decent, despite the fucking god-dog-awful singing of shit lyrics.

anyway we finally got our van totally loaded, including all matts photographic gear he had left stacked in a pile for us to take back. we said goodbye to tina and dans mum, and drove off down to the harbour to catch our boat. dan met us there a few minutes later to give us the cd he had burned of the material, and this was our goodbye to dan after an amazing week. as we drove through to the next bit, dan gave us a big ozzy impression as a parting shot. dan did us such a massive-huge-large-big-sizeable incredible job, aside from the principle of wanting to record another album and having the material written, the rest of how it all happened was all dans idea; doing it in jersey in the hotel, making it a weeks project working day and night, staying in the hotel, hiring the desk, hiring heaters, rounding up gear borrowed from friends, getting us a cheaper ferry ticket than would normally cost, buying mics and other equipment for the sessions, loads of stuff like that, and then totally slayed at getting good sounds, fixing problems, and all the negotiation and persuasion that goes with producing. we were fucking lucky dan chose to do all this and i know the project had taken up a lot of his time before we arrived on the island, and he’s still got the mixing to do too. then hes got to fucking tour the thing with us as our bassist when he finishes work at the end of the summer holiday season. and its made a massive difference to the album, im totally delighted with how it sounds and how much feel each number has, as well as being by-and-large nailed from the technical side of playing.

henri and dan did their usual thing of playing fucking well, both in the worked-out stuff and loads of  the little imrovised sections and loads of rad interplay. a lot of that is due to us having less set-in-stone structures than most of our previous material, a huge amount of the material was communicated live during takes, like lengths and feel and endings and stuff. for my part im pleased i had so little red-light-nerves, and for most of the session i just enjoyed playing the numbers, which for some reason is not often how it is in recording. i brought over some decaf tea bags and stayed away from caffeine all week, maybe that helped keep all that shit at bay. anyway im delighted with a: how the music came out and the album numbers, and b: how much of a pleasure it all was to do, and what a great week it was. its the first album where we took in a good amount of extra material so we could afford for some numbers to not come out as well as we hoped, but as it was all my favourite numbers, the ones i had highest hopes for and which i felt represent exactly what i want the band to sound like, they all came out totally rad.

anyway we drove the van on to the ferry, and we went to the deck at the back straight away, cos its less choppy there. none of us were sick and its always nice being at sea eh. from weymouth i drove the lads back to farnham, where we unloaded their stuff, and jobs a good un. i slept most of sunday and then dropped matt’s photo stuff back at his in the evening. we had a nice old chat and he was still buzzing from the sessions, it was so good he came over and im looking forward to seeing the snaps.

a couple of days later i dropped shanes head and mics back at his and it turned out somehow his orange head had blown, perhaps got knocked in the van or something, anyway it wouldnt make any sound and its being repaired at the moment. rad that it worked perfectly all week when it needed to.

thats it! praps i should check it for spelling mistakes and that. anyway with the mixin’/masterin’/photo choosin’/designin’/pressin’/releasin’ all still to do thats a good few months of work, for its release in the autumn. i’ll keep updating this page as those things happen through the summer. cheers for reading this, i just did a word count and this bit about the recording week is  over 10,000 werds mush.

thanks again for reading it, i hope you have enjoyed this candid account of the band recording an album. at no point did henri tell me all my riffs are stock or start telling me a story about when he was out jogging and ending it by shouting the word “FAAWK!” in my face

give give give
stef

lovin’ you is easy cos youre beautiful

eve of confusion

we loaded most of our gear in the van yesterday, all the backline. the fuse housing i ordered ages ago for dan kowskis amp turned up this morning, hopefully its the right one this time. that amp has a bright clean sound which is the sound id like for these recordings. we are taking all our mics and stands, and some leads, and extension cables. the desk, monitors and most of the leads are in jersey already, plus a lot of mics of dans or ones he is borrowing from friends there. he bought a mic (he wont tell us which one) especially for the sessions too but its been lost by the courier company and doesnt seem to have made it out of holland, looks unlikely itll turn up in time for the sessions. dan has hired the desk, its 16 tracks. henri is taking 4 snares, and all his broken cymbals, as well as a few which arent broken, including a sabian ride he bought on finance the other day for the sessions. i think he is picking up the last couple of skins he needs, hes got his sticks. he and bav have bought our strings. the work i had done on my frets 6 weeks ago has already started scratching up but i think as long as we leave the slide numbers (brno mostly) to be recorded near the end it shouldnt be a problem. we are also taking dans orange bass rig back to jersey, its been in henri's shed since dans last gig with us in december. nick might use that or might stick to his normal amp, thats coming too. shanes orange head is also going to be there if i need it. the van is pretty full but i think theres room for matt's photographic gear, like the lights etc. everything always fits in the van. the other week all of palehorses gear and all of palehorse fitted in the van.

one or two of the numbers havent been given their final arrangements, and theres an acoustic number i havent shown to the lads that id like them to play on and id like it to go on the record, some of the numbers havent been practiced since our abortive recording session in september, but i think we'll be alright because we can be working on all that kind of stuff round the clock, i think if we get stuck in and get the songs in not too many takes we'll be ok for the album and some extra numbers for other releases. hopefully anyway. im going to go and buy a load of food and other supplies for the sessions now, of course that includes about a hundred miles worth of gaffa tape.

leyein snowbleyend in the sun, will my eyece age ever come?
i hope you are all well, especially as the weather is looking up today, was driving about a bit earlier, lovely stuff.
stef 

you merit heyegh hopes & fleeting

we had a practice last wednesday, we practiced thoughts on larkspur round a few times, and then we started writing another new one, called you merit hight hopes. i had the vocals all written, and the guitar chords, but not much by way of ideas of what to do with it. we rattled it round a bit and it was sounding alright. then on friday we played our first gig for a while in brighton, it was a really cool night and we played mostly new stuff. the setlist was

tryna lean a ladder up against the wind (1st time weve played it live)
thoughts on larkspur (1st time as well)
drill your heavy heart
too little has been good for the soul (with krautrock outro)
nicola (someone requested it)
brno

i did some driving jobs on saturday which went a long way towards paying for our boat over to jersey for the recordings. we had a long practice on sunday, we wrote a new number called fleeting, i have to finish the lyrics but the music came together very quickly. when i was writing the guitar parts i thought it felt like one of the r n b numbers off of axis: bold as love, and after the full band arrangement it still feels like that. nick and henri got their parts sorted so quickly which is great to not over deliberate everything, its got lots of up-tempo bitchy feel. its yet another number that we have written and made no basic recording, so the first time we will hear will be during the album sessions.

after that we carried on writing you merit high hopes, it still proved difficult to arrange, its a strange number for us because it is without much phrasing or screeching, or riffs, its just chords with the vocals. we kind of wrote ourselves into a corner with it, though now i think i have a structure which will work well, so we'll have a go at that next practice.

the idea was we would practice tonight and wednesday, before going to jersey for the recordings on friday. henri's seeing venetian snares on thursday night, and his work are trying to make him work tonight and wednesday as well so im not sure what the plan is, we really need to have a couple of practices to run through everything and get it straight in our heads. lots of the numbers were written and havent been practiced since. in the past it hasnt suited us being unpracticed for recordings, we are supposed to be a one or two take band and that gets ruined when the numbers arent straight in our heads. still henri's trying to get out of work so hopefully we can sort it out. 

anyway the numbers to record are:

brno
until i find a natural way
drill your heavy heart
good for nothing
taking water
laid down under my jacket
tryna lean a ladder up against the wind
the motownish one
the acoustic & bass & drums quiet one
thoughts on larkspur
fleeting
you merit high hopes
crowd (an acoustic number i havent shown the lads yet but want them to play on)
schutze deine augen
comes to town (just needs drums, mandolin & vocals are already recorded)
kx250 demo (just needs vocals put on it)
blues rocker (kind of written when mucking about and setting up, might as well record it)

larkspur

we have another new number, we all thought it was great. we were going to practice on sunday but in the end nick and i were both too ill to do so, so we met up last night instead. i was still feeling a bit rough and we didnt play at full volume which helped. anyway we wrote a new number, itll be called something like larkspur or thoughts on larkspur, something like that. ive had the lyrics knocking about in unstructured form for a while but i sorted them out and finished them wheyelst driving back into london last night.

the number is a curious fellow, i suggested it reminded me of lemon of pink by the books (in a way), henri suggested it reminded him of wont get fooled again by the who, and nick just banged on about tonights spurs v ac milan game. anyway i like it and like most of our new numbers it hasnt been tape recorded, so the first time we hear what it sounds like without playing it at the same time will be during the recording proper, which for me feels like a nice way to be doing it. weve got our next practice on wednesday, i think we will try and write another new number and then practice some of them for our gig on friday.
stef

last night we ran through the three newest numbers, made a few changes, and generally improved the feel and parts. then we jammed on a bunch of blues riffs for fun, we used to do that a lot when writing theme from kindness and had fallen out of the habit since then. anyway i want to write 3 new full-band numbers, 2 of which are pretty much ready, one of which i will try some ideas for riffs tonight. we havent got long before the recording and theres still a lot of music to finish, lyrics to finish, and organisational things before we go away.

two new numbers, perhaps in need of more feel

on sunday we wrote two new numbers. one of them sounds quite motownish to me, it was sounding ok but i reckon with a few tweaks on our parts we could make it better. im not totally enthused on it really.

the other number is new ground for us as i use an acoustic guitar but with bav and henri bassing and drumming still. as it was henri decided that he'd wait until bav had his bass parts written before he'd try writing his part for that one.

i reckon both songs could be made good with the right feel in the playing, hopefully we'll sort that out ok. its really good that we sorted the structure of each song very quickly, each of them being very simple in that sense.

we have a practice tonight, i think we will run through the one we wrote last week, and make a start on another new number too. will write more tomorrow
stef

give reyese to hopes for

we finished writing the new number last night, i really like it. at the moment its untitled but i want to find something in the lyrics to name it, as with all the numbers on this album.

i think we'll open with it at our next gig, in brighton, hopefully by then we will have all the numbers for the album ready too. we might be practicing on sunday to write the next number, if not itll be next week. the plan for recording the album is nearly totally organised, once it is i will describe the idea in full.
stef

we wrote the bulk of a new number last tuesday, its kind of mid-tempo, lots of feel and not always going ten to the dozen, though there is a midsection where we drop the clutch and play solos. im using 5 strings for this one, and the lyrics are written. hopefully we will do a lot of practices soon cos we still have quite a lot of numbers left to write in time for recording. more soon
stef

dan has offered for us to record volume 4 in the dining room of his family's hotel in jersey, whilst they are still closed in spring. so i think now our plan is to write a few more numbers, fix our instruments, borrow and assemble as many good amps and mics as possible and book a ferry to take the van over sometime in march. the plan is to have about 13 numbers ready, maybe write one or two during the recording process, and make a 10 track album with a few numbers left over for other releases or suchlike. its exciting but i also think march will come very soon and so if we havent got everything ready then all of a sudden it will be a big rush to get prepared, in particular getting the cash together to have our gear in good enough condition. ive got quite a lot of ideas for some good new numbers, and a couple more ready to be shown to the lads. bav will play bass on the album and dan will in effect produce. i think the plan is to get a decent and full rock sound, i hope it sounds like early rory gallagher but thats a lot to ask for. hopefully the sound quality will not be seen as a statement in itself, eyed just like the instruments to sound good and for the songs to be well represented. in the meantime we need to write a few more numbers and then rehearse the lot. lovely stuff, hope youre all having a nice winter time, love and love
stef 

son says "mother dont you grieve and cry, you know damn well i was born to deyee"

we recently listened back to a few of the takes in the van and reckon 2 or 3 of the numbers sound good enough for release in some form. "layed down under my jacket" perhaps for the album and "until i find a natural way" would be nice for a split or something, with another version to be recorded for the album as well maybe. maybe thats the best way to go about this album, to keep trying different places to record, with different approaches, until we have good versions of each song. and then we would have quite different sounds from song to song, like a rod stewart best of or something. feels like maybe a nice way to do it.

hopefully we will write a few new numbers with bav in the winter for the album too, ballads mostly. and it feels like volume 4 will be more ballads than rockers for you.
hope youre good
stef

leyeve eyes

after one more practice getting numbers ready with dan on bass, our tour starts tomorrow. of the volume 4 numbers, we'll probably be playing "good for nothing", "brno", and "drill your heavy heart" most nights, and hopefully "until i find a natural way" after a while too. im excited to have so much new stuff ready to play.

for a look at our dates go to:
www/myspace.com/leavethetapesrunning.

to read our mostly nonsense tour diary, go here:
http://shieldyoureyesrabbeyestour.blogspot.com/

bye for now, or see you soon
stef

that chimps an idiot

i had a listen to all the recordings on sunday, and i think with a sleyeghtly different sound and perhaps a bit more familiarity with the material we'll be able to record it again and get much better takes. i played it to dan as well and he described it as being perhaps a little undercooked. as well as that i think the music needs a cleaner guitar sound than i managed to get out of my amp, and a spacier and wider sound overall i feel.

so i spoke to henri and nick about it and we decided to record it again after we're back from our tour. i really like the music and the numbers themselves, and the lads playing has really amazed me, and i feel the material is the definitely some of the best numbers weve ever written. but whereas the theme from kindness material suited begin recorded in a small room i think perhaps this new stuff might suit a bigger space, more like a traditional studio size i guess, but one where it's us mucking about with the faders, and calling the takes. and i really want it to be an album where its all first, second or third takes, with as little correcting as possible. there is also something in my mind now that somehow it is bad luck to try and record two albums in the same room. of course, thats bollocks and i wasnt thinking that whilst recording. but, either way, and with that in mind, and for the time-being, and so: in effect, i suppose whats happened is ive made you read all about us just demo-ing a bunch of new songs. sorry bout that.
hopefully see you on our tour.
stef

three numbers recorded

tonight went well, we started by recording "good for nothing" again, and the first take was great. then it turned out the lead going into our tascam room mic which gets a lot of the guitar and drum sound had fallen out. so we put that back in and did another couple of takes, which also felt good. henri absolutely drilled the rattley bits near the end and he sounded so rad i nearly mugged up playing my parts listening to him. with that finished we got stuck into "brno". after a couple of times through to remember how to play it right, we did four or five recorded takes, most of which felt really good to me.

we had recently been talking about writing a number with the eyedea of it starting with some old fashioned question and answer style playing. so tonight bav had a really nice bass riff and we started responding to that, and then we jammed a bit and threw some extra ideas in, loosely structured it, and started recording it. in the end its got pretty much fuck all question and answer left in it but i spose that just  means we can try and do that another time. i think we did about five or six takes of it, trying to make each one shorter than the last, i have no idea what it sounds like cos we didnt listen back to it but i'll be curious to hear it in a few days. it's going to go second on the album.

then we moved a couple of mics about a bit and tried another take of "escudo para tus ojos", the acoustic blues number i recorded at dan's last week. i was using bav's dad's previously-mentioned boss-as-fuck gibson acoustic, ive never played such a nice feeling and sounding motor, but for some reason we couldnt really get a good sound through the mics. also we couldnt find a way to stop my singing from being too loud and overpowering the guitar volume in the mics. we did a take anyway which was ok, i think i will give it another go recording it using that guitar and my 4-track tape machine cos thats always seems to give a nice acoustic sound, and that way i get to play that guitar again. i will perhaps try it with the capo a few frets lower to help keep my singing down a bit.

after our gig tomorrow night at the prince charles cinema, our next recording session is on monday night. i have a set of 5-string riffs that i wrote on the pneu tour earlier this year, as yet untitled though the lyrics are started. once henri and nick and i have written the song, and once it starts getting close to being finished we will roll the sadly proverbial tapes until it has been turned into the correct series of ones and zeros on henri's hard drive. in that regard, it will mean it is one of the only numbers on the album to be recorded according to the original plan, namely recording each song as soon as we have finished writing it. so hopefully on monday, except for another acoustic number entitled "schutze deine augen", which i imagine we will be able to record somewhere on tour, we will have finished all the music for the album, and we can record the vocals somewhere on tour. so i guess we're doing alright again now. i realise this blog is perhaps very dull indeed, but im not keen on ramping it up with stuff that didnt really happen or things i didnt really think. i do find recording can often be a total clitache and at times it feels like an entirely unromantic process, a necessary evil required to turn our ideas tangible, and all-too-prone to rendering far-excessive dilution of said idea somewhere in the execution. but of course sometimes it can feel really good too.

like, i have always instinctively hated how absurd and contradictory any overproduced rock and roll music always sounds, and have always loved to imagine most of my record collection as having been recorded by bands with the members all in a room together, perhaps faced-in in some kind of semi-circle, each member loud enough so as to allow something like a mutual bleed of inspiration, perhaps only in a small or unintentional way, but manifested as soulful interplay, and in all cases the ultimate aim of the recording being purely to capture the sound in the room whilst that holy and communicative process happens. and whilst listening to that kind of stuff you could find words like "how curious", "how honest", "such truth", and "rad as fuck" might start swimming around your head and hopefully you dont need sentences attached to those to know what i mean. but that's other peoples music, and having created a recording process as close to that as we can manage for ourselves, i start thinking "actually, does this sound really shit?"

feyeve numbers recorded

at great last, we recorded five numbers last night. we got set up and soundchecked pretty quick, and it helped having dan in bav's hallway pressing stop and start on the computer.

first we did a couple of takes of "taking on water" and one take of "layed down under my jacket", so now i can give shane's guitar back to him. then we did the 4-string numbers on my usual guitar starting with "good for nothing" which was tricky. several takes went past without us really getting it reyeght, so we did a couple more and it felt a bit better so we left it at that. we're recording again toneyeght so i think we might try another two or three of that one. it would be a shame to not get that number pinned especially as its going to be starting the album. theres a section at the end which is a total shitstorm of rad drumming, but i dont think henri quite played it as good as he had at recent gigs so i think its worth re-recording it for that alone.

after "good for nothing" we did a couple of takes of "drill your heavy heart" and the outros of that in particular felt really good in the room. to me that one feels like totally new territory for the eyes. after that i took a string off and we did two or three takes of "until i find a natural way" which felt feyene but when we listened to it after it was perhaps a bit sloppy in the rattlier sections.

we did very little listening back to the recordings other than to check the odd thing here and there, so i have no real idea of what it's all come out like, and can only guage our playing by how it felt in the room. i felt the songs lent themselves to the one-take approach but a few of those got wasted by mistakes, probably due to lack of practice. there was a nice feel in the room though, especially on the slower numbers. i would describe the material and the sound as being more vulnerable than our previous recordings. fuck knows, having deliberately not listened back much im not sure if its come out good or shit. we'll see. it would be a shame to not do the material justice cos i feel it is our best stuff yet by quite a bit. it felt to me like there was a better feel on the quieter parts but didnt totally rattle and nail the fidgety bits. we're going back to record more tonight so i will post more in the coming days.

first gig with dan on bass tomorrow night, and dan and henri havent even played together yet. but not to worry, dan and i have gone neck and neck on a few unplugged practices and he's got about 14 songs nailed, and still learning more. "great stuff with potential", as twats would say. see you soon
stef

dan and i went to farnham last night and met up with henri and bav. we reckon the most recent computer/soundcard problems might be solved by having spoken to a couple of people it seemed like we needed to up the buffer size. so today dan and i are driving back to bav's to set up and henri's meeting us there after his labouring. then we will hopefully record a few numbers. we havent rehearsed the material since we tried recording two weeks ago but i dont think thats a bad thing, i dont want to rehearse the life out of it.

we have our first gig with dan on friday night and its looking like we do our first loud practice with dan that afternoon. that way we can spend the next two nights trying to record with bav, with dan ladding the controls. we have so many things to get done before we go on tour next thursday, but i reckon itll be ok! will write more tomorrow.
stef

feral kid get to shit

fuckin recorded a fuckin new fuckin eyes number earlier, tonight, in fact two of the baaastards, varg. acoustic though mind, none of the stuff people actually buy albums for. meanwhile and also, inbetween takes,  readin' about norwegian black metal and may i say what a good set of lads they were, obviously some corpsepainted eyes coming soon. ive spent this week in jersey chez daneyes'atol and the new numbers mentioned are topical as one of them is going on volume 4. it is called "escudo para tus ojos" and is an acoustic blues number, with lyrics about wanting to GET A JOB. the other is called "put her the family way" but as she's for a different release then she doesnt bear description here. needles to say she about a girl you want to wish to burden forever on account of her being as fit as a butcher's dog. but enough of that, wheyelst here in jersey the van has been tuned right up, and right ripped for all its soon-to-be hard tourin' round mainland europe. we are on the ferry back to england tomorrow, with gale force 7 predicted, hopefully that'll sail alright. fuck em, we've got amps to ship and odin to honour.  we also have 90% of an album to record in the next two weeks, as well as rehearsing dan into the band by our gig in prince charles cinema next friday. but it would be a brave bastard to bet against the eyes. for futher insight to the volume 4 wreyeting process, type "troggs tapes" into youtube. lovely stuff with great potential, the lord GIVETH and the lord taketh away, driller, blessed by the name of the lord. give!
stef

chicks on tap studio machine: defects

the external cd drive turned up so i drifted the van over to henri's shed, then down to bav's to set up. the driver on the cd for the mixer ended up not working for mac after all, so we sacked off my computer again and went back to henri's to pick up the computer that came from the loft, then back to bav's. we set up all the mics and soundchecked everything, and everything was sounding good, so we started the first take (and it felt like what would have been the only take) of taking on water, but then the computer started spooning out with error messages and stopped recording. henri tried a bunch of things with the mixer and cubase to try and fix the problem, but it kept going wrong, so we didnt record anything. after an hour or so of that we tried writing instead and we got a few eyedeas sounding ok but i think we were too annoyed with not being able to record to write properly. not really sure what the next plan is other than to try and find out whats wrong with the gear and then start again. i really hope we can get this album recorded before we go on tour. splish splash i was slidin' the van
stef

i was being a bit optimistic about the cd drive turning up today, it didnt, and henri's busy tonight and tomorrow night now so we are going to try and get the lot done on thursday. hopefully that'll be ok and enough time to get the songs rattled. i restrung both motors i'll be using so thats that out of the way.

also started writing the lyrics to the untitled upside-down dadgad tune, and now its called cruisin in the eyes mobile, in reference to thin lizzy having called a song cruisin in the lizzy mobile in their awesome eric bell early days.  now i should get stuck into trying to book some more dates for our european tour thats coming up. lovely stuff.
stef

chicks on tap studio machine: zero defects?

looks like henri has managed to get the computer he got out of the loft to speak to his mixer, and in the meantime i realised i should buy an external cd drive on ebay for 30-quid so we can install the drivers for henri's mixer and cubase onto my computer. so for the moment it looks like we might have a choice of two computers to record onto, with my one looking like the better option cos apparently henri's one is making loads of noise. i figure as long as we dont actually run that noise through an amplifeyer then we should drown it out but henri knows a lot more about this than i do. im excited to soon have chicks on tap studios returned to fine operation.

we had a practice this evening and played through the songs that needed some goes round to get a bit more familiar. we dont want our best takes to be the ones we do in the last practice before recording, so we stopped playing each number as soon as it felt we were getting close, the feeling being hopefully we'll peak when the mics are listening. hopefully the cd drive will arrive tomorrow and then we'll try getting my computer ready in henri's shed. then we can go round bav's in the afternoon, set up the mics, soundcheck them, and then when we're ready, drill fuck out of it. hopefully tomorrow!
sleep tight
stef

two new numbers

weve had a few more problems getting our recording stuff to work so without being able to record today, instead we carried on wreyeting. my computer would be fine for it but the cd drive is broken so we couldnt install the drivers for the mixer, and neither henri or cargill (thanks for trying matt) could find the drivers online. our plan is now to find a computer in the coming days which we can install cubase onto and the driver for the mixer. henri got one out of his loft but it was too old and wouldnt work with the gear. so anyway, we wrote more music today instead, and got two new numbers worked up, which are:

untitled - a melodic soul ballad.
taking on water - a riff rattle.

for both songs im using a right-handed guitar tuned to dadgad, spun over and played lefthanded, similar to how i do a lot of the guns or knives stuff. i borrowed the guitar yesterday from shane who runs function and will give it back later in the week when we've recorded the songs, cheers shane.

taking on water is pretty choppy and we frazzled ourselves getting our heads round it, but it was sounding really good towards the end. we are having another practice tomorrow night to get it teyeght enough to record. we'll also run through the other songs again, and then later in the week hopefully we'll have the computer problems fixed so we can record what we have so far, which is now six band songs and an acoustic number. it's all happening quite quickly, and we need it to! i'll write more after our practice tomorrow. have a neyece monday folks
stef