Tonight I started recording demos for my forthcoming album. Two versions of a song called Shade. I often use drum machines for demos, as the regular beat makes everything clearer when deciding on song structure and things like, how long should any solos be. It also makes the bass stand out more, and everything being perfectly in time makes any duff notes in guitar solos obvious. When it comes to recording studio albums though, we’ve never used a drum machine or click track. I tried a click track once at Ranscombe Studios on the first day I recorded there. It was a song called “It’s Evening Now”. It’s a slow song with long gaps between the notes, so I thought I’d need the click when putting on the bass and drums later. We recorded two versions, one with a click and one without. We used the one without.
One version of Shade is 120 bpm, the other is 110 bpm. I use a drop pedal for bass, which brings my guitar down an octave, instead of using a real bass. The guitar is a Fender Stratocaster going through a distortion pedal, but I set it to bypass any distortion. The pedal is only used for looping during band practice and gigs, tuning and for the drum machine when practicing or recording demos. The only other pedal I use is a volume boost for solos. The mic is an SM-57 with a sponge. The recorder is a Fostex four track cassette tape recorder. I can’t remember what the mixer is, but it’s a pretty good one. All the mixing is done in the four track, sent through the distortion pedal, bypassing any distortion, then into Audacity. Audacity is free software.
“When they paint together, is Johnstone like the rhythm section and Childish the frontman?”:
Billy: “No, I’m the guitarist, the singer, the drummer – rhythm is very important in painting. Edgeworth might play a bit of bass on it.”
I strongly suspect Billy was either misquoted or taken wildly out of context, because what he’s quoted to have said isn’t true. It’s not even nearly true, it’s completely false. Heckel’s Horse is a collaboration between the two of us. Saying I “might play a bit of bass on it” is complete crap, an insult and dismisses thirteen years of my work collaborating with Billy on these paintings. Heckel’s Horse is a perfect synergy of our painting in which both artists make essential and substantial artistic contributions throughout. I’ll write more about this in a future post, as it parallels a lot with what’s going on with Piers Morgan and Earl Spencer's book. I should post it now, while it’s still topical and relevant to the current news, but I’m too busy doing this album for the foreseeable future, and am waiting to see if the publishers of the book in question “To Ease My Troubled Mind The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish” by Ted Kessler, at least make a requested change to the paperback edition. If they don’t, I might take a leaf out of Piers’s book and ask that the Billy Childish book be pulped.
FARANGERS are one of my jazz improvisation bands. The demos I’m recording now are all pre-written songs, like the ones on the CLASS album. Tomorrow I’ll start on the second song for the new album, and hopefully have it done in a couple of weeks. The final version won’t be published online. It’ll be in my online shops though on CD.