Fontacular!
It was 1997. Britain was accelerating into the future… riding the crest of the youthwave unleashed by Tony Blair’s election. In shops and post offices up and down the land, people were talking about the novelty communication device that would soon change the landscape forever – the fax machine. At home, dads were puffing pipes and reading about the ‘hover-craft’ whilst mums were trading powdered banana in exchange for nylon stockings from GIs. Or something.
Anyway, it was all a long time ago and as I haven’t talked about music for a while, I thought I’d revisit what I was doing at the time for precisely no reason whatsoever. (Click here to skip ahead to the tunes and avoid my tedious reminisces)
My band – Sleepwalker – were at the peak of their success. We’d just headlined Friday night at the Duchess of York as part of Sound City. Embrace were second on the bill on the Wednesday - in your face, fat balladeers! We’d been namechecked on Steve Lamacq and our name had been printed in the NME. We were actually crazily good as a live band at this time, having been doing 10 gigs a month for probably a couple of years.
1997 saw us take a trip to Dublin to play the In The City festival – another industry shindig where a couple of dozen bands with potential had been picked to perform in front of drunken locals and A&R men from various record labels. In case you think that means jack shit, the same time we were playing, The Stereophonics were on at the other venue. But for the bitter hand of fate, eh?
I always talk us down, but I’m proud of that. We did it all off our own bat, with no promotion other than playing live week in week out, selling tapes at our gigs and sending tapes on-spec to record companies. Even then we were fucking lazy, but obviously good enough to get a big crowd of regular followers on the live circuit and interest from the record companies.
Following are some recordings that have been rescued from the last surviving CD of the band at that time. CDs were still an expensive novelty and we only made around a dozen! We were recorded in Castleford by the same guy who made all the Agadoo records. Bwahahahahahah! There – I’ve said it for you.
This tackles the blight on human society that is fashion in an excoriating 3:19 of venom, bile and searing guitars. Actually, it’s the kind of upbeat perkiness for which we were famed at the time. I’m still have a sneaky bit of pride in some of the lyrics – how often do you hear the phrase “a hundred miles in the teeth of a howling gale” in modern pop parlance – and I still love the chorus, gay as it is.
If you thought the previous record was upbeat and perky, you ain’t heard nothing yet. This 2 minute blast of pop has been known to make people shit themselves and represents the apogee of my songwriting ’gift’ for annoying catchiness. I don’t know why it always worked out that way. In my head, all I wanted to do was write dark, gritty blues epics like prime era Stones, and somehow everything sounded like the bastard lovechild of The Housemartins and the Boo Radleys (ask your mum). Please note that the fade-out is in 5/4 time. Jazz!
This was ever-present in our set for a good 6 or 7 years. It blends slightly-cringeworthy-now-I-look-back-on-it lyricism with a so-so kind of tune (although I still adore the middle 8). Originally, it was more mid-paced and set to a background of jangly guitars with a kind of Beatles-y air. Thanks to the demands of our live set, it had got a lot faster and less subtle by this point. This is a re-recording we did for Creation Records because they thought the original tape we made of it ‘had promise’. So blame Alan McGee.
This still crushes me with disappointment when I hear it. Live, this song was around 7 minutes long with big distortion everywhere and a lengthy middle section where we went wild with all the effects pedals set to stun. It was a lot of noise, good fun and had a proper bit of groove to it. The recorded version is clean, chintzy and badly played. This was the one song we really wanted the producer to just set some mics up and let us play the fucking thing. Instead, we had to record the rhythm track separately from the guitars. This meant coming up with an arrangement of how many bars we should leave free for the instrumental bits instead of just freeforming our way through it and we didn’t leave nearly enough time and ohmygodIstillhatethisrecording.
For some reason, the producer was also insistent on pushing the guitars down in the mix and using clean sounds. So instead of the sprawling distorted mess we intended, it just came out like some little ching-ching-ching piece of crap. He also fucked around with the drums a lot, hence the slightly out-of-time intro, which really sets things off on the right foot. At £250 a day though, we couldn’t afford to go back to get the result we wanted. Ah well.
Tune in next week for: Recordings What We Did On Dave’s Stereo in Flea’s Garage in 1994.
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