"Let's make some quiet..."

A missive pings into the Neighbourhood inbox informing us that Sam-out-of-Cambridgeshire has some shiny new interfaces he wants to play with and, although still awaiting confirmation of a delivery of the world’s most expensive microphone, has a window of opportunity in which we are invited to showcase our wares. Regular subscribers will be know that we have form with Sam and his trusted accomplice Fenton Steve, and we have been mulling over the initial (‘rough’ seems too recherché a term to employ in this respect) mixes from last year’s session with a view to thinking about how to move onward and upwards.I’ve played the demos to a couple of people and had some not-so surprising feedback. That vocal could have been better, the tuning’s a bit out, a specific performance stiffens up towards the end – that sort of thing. I have found - maybe surprisingly - that I’m genuinely not bothered by either the criticisms (in their purest sense) or the revelation of the supposed shortcomings they confirm.

Because here’s a thing – we do speed up noticeably toward the end of one song; we had to choose between a bum note and a misplaced consonant on another; and everyone’s performance gets a wee bit tenuous towards the end of Love Minus Zero/No Limit because we’re all painfully aware that La Mulley pulled off a great acapella first verse about four minutes ago* and no-one wants to be the one to fuck up and make her have to do it again. And here’s another thing. That’s absolutely fine. Because that’s what we sound like. If we were maybe in a position to be able to charge money for people to keep these recordings  - and there aren’t that many groups around these days who are – perhaps we’d insist on being able to go back and, ahem, ‘fix’ a few things.

One correspondent suggested that we wouldn’t be able to send these songs out anywhere as we wouldn’t be able to explain the inherent technical issues away merely by explaining that they consisted of six people gathered around one microphone** and that’s not what they would be expecting. But, oh man - you can hear the room, I say. I know exactly what he means though. Then again, I also know of a promoter who would instantly bin any demo which came in with a picture of any band member holding a Cajon. One used to divide every jiffy bag he received into two piles and immediately dispose of one of them without opening a single envelope on the basis that he only wanted to book ‘lucky’ bands. It’s not exactly payola, but you had no chance of appearing at one particular festival unless you’d paid your subs to a certain focus interest group and another wouldn’t give you house space until you’d reciprocally booked their house band back. Given of all this, the phrase (and I quote) “…we do not normally pay a fee to musicians etc as we do get along of offers to play at our shows, as depending on the show, they use our shows as a platform to promote themselves due to the expected footfall our shows attract”*** (sic) comes as almost laughable relief.

I’m not saying it’s not a game worth playing, I’m just saying that I was never very good at it in the first place, and so given the opportunity to make a recording that transports me back into the room where I made it, rain on the windows and dogs in the street and all, I’ll take it. I mean, people should be envying us, you know. I envy us. Yeah. I do.

*There’s a great section in Bill Bruford’s autobiography about recording with his big jazz band Earthworks and wondering whether the slight fret slur made by the bass player early on is worth calling a halt to the whole take for.

**We are going to also close-mic everything on the next session just to make it a bit more flexible in terms of the tweakability, as it happens.

***We took that one.