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Hard Road
By Craig | December 7, 2007
It’s taken us until late 2007 to finally release a proper album but since we started in 2000 we’ve written a boatload of tunes and at various stages during the intervening years have even recorded a few of them. We’re currently in the process of pulling together a compilation of these which we’ll be bunging out at some stage in 2008 as a Digitial-only release.
The collection is to be called “Community Punishment Workshop” and will cover the years 2000-2005, featuring the singles we released for Winnebago and Bearos Records, the sessions recorded during our time with Sanctuary and songs from “Gun Quarter Tapes“, the album we almost but never quite finished in late 2004.
The thinking behind all this is that releasing “Lighting and Electrical” has been something off a watershed for us, so the comp is intended to draw a line under the past, tie up all the loose ends and see us we move forward free of incumbent old songs and into 2008 clear-headed as we begin recording the second and third albums at the same time (more on that soon..)
Beth McGowan, our trusted mixer and fixer, is in the process of making the songs on “Community Punishment..” all nice and sparkly but in the meantime we’ll be leaking a few out on the site over the coming months and the first up of these is a tune called “Hard Road“
Friends of the Stars - “Hard Road” - DOWNLOAD
LISTEN
“Hard Road” comes from the “Gun Quarter Tapes“ sessions, which was our first stab at recording ourselves ‘properly’, rather than just making 4-track demos. At the time of recording this we had just parted company with Sanctuary and were once again hell-bent on going it alone, which is how we started out initially and probably should have stayed…but there you go.
The song was recorded in our Birmingham lock-up, which was a room in a damp Hockley basement where the drum kit sat in the corner on a very flimsy piece of floor above a 20 foot drop into the canal…..and Boo-hoo-hoo…we only had one pair of shoes between us….and Boo-hoo-hoo….we walked there every day in the rain….and boo-hoo-hoo… we had to eat coal to keep warm…and boo-hoo-hoo-hoo hoo.
Incidentally, the fabulous Courtesy Group lived in the room next door to us at this time and the racket they made was always an inspiration.
With “Lighting & Electrical” we used computers for the first time, but “Hard Road” was recorded on one of these..
…which at the time we purchased it was pretty cool, but ultimately revealed as limited. It only had two inputs and so most parts were recorded track-by-track and the only way to record more than 8 tracks was to take a stereo mix out into a Minidisc player and then feed it back onto two tracks before starting all over again on Track 3, and so on. Even so we were pretty chuffed with the sound we got.
More blasts from the past soon.
x
PS - It seems “Lighting and Electrical” is now also available at Napster
Topics: Collaboration |
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:35 am
[…] month’s free track from our dim and distant past is Salvation Day. As with Hard Road (given away in December) it comes from the 2004 recordings we made in Hockley, Birmingham that never quite saw the light of […]