On Angel Hill

If you - like me - are a big fan of the work of the actor George Clooney, you will doubtless be familiar with a pivotal scene in the Coen Brothers’ marvellous film O Brother, Where Art Thou, wherein the self-styled Soggy Bottom Boys perform the song I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow in a recording studio, set snugly around a single microphone which captures their performance in real time. “Aha” you may have thought to yourself “Those days are long gone – it’s all feeding digital files into computers and auto-tuning and cut and pasting these days – look at those hicks with their ancient depression-era ways! Those days are over, and good riddance - I, for one, welcome our new sonically curated digital overlords!” Well, quite.

So when we gathered at The Unitarian Hall in Bury St. Edmunds in order to record some demonstration tapes under the kindly aegis of folk singer and technical crackerjack Sam Inglis, we were surprised to find that the screens and baffles we were expecting to litter the place were notable by their absence and the technical arena seemed to consist of a pair of microphones on a stand, a shovel, a pair of angel’s wings, a goblet, a dagger and four candles. Most of this equipment, we quickly surmised, wasn’t really anything to do with the session we were involved in, but was more probably connected with the play that a local theatre group was putting on in the evenings while we were - if you will - sunlighting on the opposite shift during the day.

Tape Op Steve put the kettle on. This would be a feature of the course of the rest of the day – whenever there were a lull in proceedings he would appear almost magically bearing tea, coffee, Lemsip and/or biscuits. For all my analogue inferences up there ^ we were actually recording onto a shiny laptop, however the vagaries of the room’s sound, the acoustic properties of our instruments and whether Helen had had a hot lemon drink and a vocalzone recently meant that Steve’s honorary title actually translated into a practical series of tasks, as he delineated the optimum position for chairs and feet with masking tape in order that the best balance be effected for each track depending on instrumentation, who was singing, and whether there was a banjo involved or not. Mr. Wendell spent the day facing slightly away from the group, playing his Gibson acoustic into the well of the hall. Helen was instructed to rotate through 360 degrees in order to ascertain the optimum angle for her flute to cut through tonally and then had to take a step forward to sing. Each take literally began with the entreaty “On your marks…”.

Having six people performing live in a room brings its own complications. “We seem to have a tuning issue in the last chorus there” remarked our de facto producer at one point. “No – it’s just that the closer to the end we get, the tighter I’m gripping the guitar” replied Mr. Wendell affably. It was fairly obvious when someone had got an intro wrong, but if somebody happened to stumble over a vocal well into the trunk of a take we stopped and went back to begin again. Turny forgot the order of a couple of his characteristically momentous lyrics; for some reason I purported that the protagonists in one song would be entranced by each other’s 'furniture' rather than their 'flirting'; I sang ‘totches’ rather than ‘notches’ right in the last verse of ‘Harrogate’. “It’s okay – I can drop that in later” said Sam guilelessly. We all looked around within our circle of concern, processing this new information. Significantly, we stopped looking at each other at the conclusion of a take and started deferring to him*.

We relaxed between takes with small talk and noodling. The theme from Crossroads became a recurrent…theme. Fiddly’s theorising about the placement of the microphones** and other such technical concerns gave way to a philosophical “Well, you know what they say – it’s not so much about the quality of the recording as whether you’ll be whistling it on your way home that counts”. Mr. Wendell reminisced fondly about the days of four track recording. We waited for passing cars to plough their torpid furrow through the drizzled streets outside before we recorded a particularly quiet intro to our token cover version. Steve shielded my amplifier with a cushion so that the sensitive recording equipment wouldn’t pick up its ambient hum during the same. We ran through the outro of one song half a dozen more times*** for posterity’s sake. We checked the clock. It was half an hour before we had to be out of the hall. Packing instruments back into cases, gathering cables and leads, unscrewing stands, disassembling improvised risers, replacing the chairs and finishing off the chocolate brownies, I motioned Fiddly to pause and listen, as from the other side of the room came the unmistakable melody of Love Minus Zero/ No Limit.

“There’s your old grey whistle test, right there”.    

 

*This was obviously a lot easier for Wendell, as he was partially turned in that direction anyway.
 
**”No – I’m just using that one. The other one’s just there in case the first one breaks”.

***”You’re all slowing down at the same time, just at different speeds”.