I had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch my 5.30am train and arrived at Birmingham New Street fully laden with the things I’d need - my guitar, our expensive studio microphone in it’s very obviously expensive-looking flight case, my portable hard-drive and my laptop. I was half-asleep and carrying over £2k worth of gear - an opportunist mugger’s dream ticket - but I managed to survive the journey unscathed by staying awake with strong coffee and 4 back-to-back episodes of Prison Break. I also got to see the Lake District in the very early morning, which was a treat.

Arriving in Glasgow just after 10am I made my way to Cam’s house and we began to work on songs. A little while later, and as we were setting up to record, I realised I’d left the XLR lead used by the studio microphone back in Birmingham so we made a quick trip back into Glasgow city centre to visit Sound Control and in the process found ourselves in a branch of Fopp, via a swift and unnaturally disciplined visit to a bar, before heading back to work.

As a quick aside, I’m equally sad and glad that Birmingham doesn’t have a Fopp. Sad because it’s a great record store and you can never have too many of those in your city but nevertheless Glad because I’d be considerably poorer if there was one here. Cam spent £46 in under 10 minutes, the flash get.

Some songs for the new record are fully formed and ready to be recorded but others need a little work - a middle 8 here, an intro there and so on. The idea is to arrange around 20 songs before we get down to recording the basic stuff like drums and guide tracks that will enable us to start the recording proper. I guess we’ll eventually whittle the whole lot down to 10 or 12 for the final album, but that’s a decision for later on. I came away from Glasgow with arrangements for 4 songs, taking the ‘ready’ pile to 7 in total…so far, so good.

The songs Glasgow gave us were “Stagger Home Safe“, “Railtown People“, “Bubble of Hate” and “Beneath The Tree“.

“Stagger..” is one of Cam’s and is about a homeless drunk worried about international terrorism (!) whilst “Railtown People” is a really simple song, again by Cam, that is based around a de-tuned D chord and has a sweet, repetitive refrain that we plan to build into some kind of harmony vocal round. “Bubble of Hate” and “Beneath The Tree” are songs of mine that I’ve been carrying around for a while, searching for a structure or vocal hook to hang them upon, and they came back from Glasgow in pleasingly different forms than how they arrived. Both were initially faster, poppier numbers but after some playing around we settled on a sparse and bittersweet country feel for “Bubble..” and a slower, more punchy arrangement for “Beneath The Tree“.

All-too-quickly I found myself on the train back home again, but in my mind’s eye (ear?) I can already hear the way the record is shaping up, and it’s shaping up nicely.

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