“Well I don’t like that tie, for a start…”

We have enjoyed another enormously productive weekend at Pig Pen Recording Studio, and the skeletons of the songs are starting to flesh out, put on muscle and wearing their jeans in an inappropriate fashion likely to upset their parents. Our Glorious Leader, resplendent in sandals and socks for reasons of comfort, has entered very much into active service after being an interested bystander for much of the time up until now while husbanding the work of Gibbon and me and generally overseeing the process with a benign but schoolmasterly air.

Now, brought to the fore of the fray, he chooses a guitar like a batsman selecting his willow, and discards plectrums much as a disgruntled golfer would despatch a club shortly before cuffing his caddy for providing him with the wrong iron. As is de rigueur in these situations, the introductions for many of the songs have long since outgrown their initial humorous intent, and have largely been replaced with anonymous click tracks and bip-bip-bip sounding electronic on-your-marks count ins, with the exception of one particularly notable introduction wherein Our Glorious Leader seems to have channeled the very essence of 1970’s Bruce Forsyth and counted off “one, two, three, fower”, which necessarily had to be temporarily excised before I could continue fluffing up the guitar part on ‘Rolling and Tumbling’ in my own good time.

There is a spectacularly good-sounding mystery cover version (to be revealed at a later date) in the works for which OGL decided to redo the guide vocal as he had initially extended the extemporisory theme of the count-ins to the point where the second verse consisted of a series of squawks and exclamations which wouldn’t necessarily have been out of place in the hubbub of Billingsgate in its prime. 

That Nice David Booth and I were in the studio Control Room – me trying to angle my reflection in the glass so that it looked as if OGL’s body had my head on it and TNDB lining up the monitor mix to be fed through into the headphones in the vocal booth. “Are you alright in there?” enquired TNDB solicitously. “I’m really not getting enough bottom” replied Our Glorious Leader. 

We turned to each other in the control room, nodded an unspoken acknowledgement, and moved on.