Making an album part 4: I’m not with the band

Although I’m working with several different people on my album, I’ve chosen not to go down the route of forming a band to record it. Instead, I’m bringing in musicians as and when required. I’ve been in plenty of bands over the years and I’ve always been the main songwriter, but being a ‘one-person-does-most-of-the-writing’ kind of band is not necessarily the greatest formula for longevity. When the songwriting is a truly collaborative process, with everyone having a more or less equal say in the composition, you’ve probably got a better chance of keeping everyone in the band happy. But that’s not usually how I prefer to work, for reasons I’ve been exploring with a psychotherapist for the past decade or so (another three or four years, she says, and I should be almost out of the woods).    

Assuming that talent and hard work are already in place, one of the things that can keep a band going is momentum; you not only have to recognise when you have it, you need to be able to capitalise on it. From a songwriter’s point of view, momentum –or even the illusion of momentum- can only be maintained as long as the musicians believe that the songs might be able to take them places. With the benefit of hindsight, I can recognise the point at which various bands I’ve been in have lost momentum and belief, but failed to notice it. When that happens, it’s possible to trundle along for months and months, a bit like that Bruce Willis character in The Sixth Sense, not knowing that he’s actually dead. 

Up until sometime around your mid-to-late twenties, it’s relatively easy to maintain the enthusiasm, energy and belief required to maintain a band. At that stage, you are pretty resilient because, essentially, you believe that a big break might be just around the corner; but keeping a band together gets harder as you get older, particularly if the gigs you are playing aren’t bringing in much money. As the years pass and you start to realise that you are still quite some distance from earning a crust from music, you’ll sometimes wonder why the hell you are still doing it. And, as band members start to accumulate significant life baggage, the option of suffering for their art seems somehow less attractive. 

If you’re lucky, the business side of your operation will be looked after by a manager, leaving the sensitive artists to concentrate on playing music, drinking and showing off. I’ve had several managers over the years; most of them were nice enough people, but were often largely ineffective when it came to the main item on their job description: helping the band become much more successful. The management continuum has ‘autocrat’ at one end and ‘best friend’ at the other, with lots of variations in between; each style has its advantages and disadvantages. I once had a particularly autocratic manager who terminated our contract over an argument about the clothes that were to be worn in a promotional shoot. The manager wanted me, as the vocalist, to dress in a certain way. What he called -with a straight face- ‘his people’ had carried out some research into ‘winning’ colours and styles and had come up with what they believed was the perfect formula. This appeared to involve me dressing as what a Victorian novelist would have described as a popinjay.  I thought that what I was being asked to wear would make me feel even more stupid than usual, so I politely demurred. We couldn’t find a sartorial middle ground, so the manager, rather less politely, ripped up our contract. Sometimes it isn’t just about the music.           

Autocrats can be tricky to work with, but having a friend as your manager is also not without its pitfalls. Someone who is very close to the musicians might be unable to bring the necessary hard-headed objectivity to what should be a business relationship.   

I was once in a band that was booked to play a big student rally in a park on the south side of Glasgow. The placard-wielding students were marching from the centre of town to the event, which was to include a number of guest speakers and some live entertainment (namely us). As the park started to fill up, we sat backstage slugging warm beer and nibbling at the corporate hospitality crisps. Our manager (bless him) said: “This is it, lads!  This is going to be the turning point.” Having slogged for some time around various pubs and clubs in the West of Scotland, slowly but surely building a reputation as we clawed our way from the depths of nonentity to the giddy heights of relative obscurity, we felt that yes, indeed, we might well have been on the cusp of a breakthrough to a bigger audience. The organisers had very kindly given us the choice of either playing our set as the students were arriving at the park (i.e. warming the audience up for the speakers) or going on after the various student leaders and politicians had worked the crowd up into an indignant frenzy.   

To a band accustomed to performing in grotty, sparsely-populated bars, the crowd that day looked to be of Woodstockian proportions and we were buzzing at the possibility of performing for them. As bodies continued to flood into the park, the manager announced that we would go on after the speeches; this, he suggested, would give us ‘maximum impact’. We all agreed. Why –so our thinking went- should our unique brand of rock and roll play second fiddle to a bunch of boring old speakers? No way, man! Let the politicians do their bit and then we’ll rock this place! Hell, yeah! This is the turning point! With the benefit of hindsight, our manager’s statement was probably correct, but only if by ‘turning point’ he meant ‘career-defining clusterfuck’. It was certainly the point at which I realised that our plans for world domination were sadly unsupported by anything approaching a coherent strategy. 

Not knowing our collective arse from a hole in the ground, we had chosen to ‘top’ the bill, having given no thought as to why hundreds of students had bothered to walk all the way from the city centre to the south side. They were there to protest, to listen to speeches, to vent some spleen, to stamp their feet and shout ‘Tories Out!’ (although it was such a cold afternoon that I’m pretty sure that some of them must have felt like shouting ‘What do we want? Some hot chocolate, please!’)  

By the time those speeches had ended (and there were more than one or two), that Woodstockian throng had already started to dwindle; by halfway through our opening number, the crowd had shrunk in size by about 50%. Once we were three or four songs into our blistering set, the remaining punters could comfortably have been accommodated behind the goal at a Ramsden’s Cup preliminary round tie between East Stirling and Stenhousemuir. During our last number, what was left of what I’m now embarrassed to call the ‘crowd’ could have gathered in the average student bedsit and each of them would have had more than enough room to swing a cat. It’s not that we were that bad a band (honest), but we were certainly stupid enough to deserve everything we got that day. Had our manager been more than just a supportive buddy, had he been capable of strategic thought, he would surely have advised us, in the strongest possible terms, to go on before the speakers. So if you ever get invited to play at a political rally, kids … just remember exactly where you are in the food chain.                                 

But I digress; back to the album. I’m playing bass on a couple of the tracks, but the majority of the songs require something a bit more sophisticated than the root note simplicity I can just about get way with. I had a great session a couple of weeks ago with the very talented Fraser Sneddon (pictured above). I’ve played with Fraser before and know that he can be relied upon to nail some really wonderful bass lines. Hearing the bottom end of my tracks start to take on a bit of heft and groove was a joyful experience. I enjoy the experience of sitting face-to-face with musicians and talking about what you want to achieve with an individual piece of music. A good player will usually give you options when it comes to specific parts. I like to give talented people their head and let them interpret the part as they will. I will then make one or two suggestions, with perhaps a point or two about emphasis or rhythm here or there. I might suggest that the part needs to be more or less aggressive, or perhaps requires more or fewer passing notes. Little alterations can sometimes really alter the feel of a piece. 

The best recording sessions occur when folk are relaxed and feel confident enough to experiment a little. My co-producer on the album, Eddie McArthur at Stealth, has a much better ear than me for spotting little tuning fluctuations or deviations in timing. Our preferred method is to get the player to run through the parts a couple of times to loosen up and then get a version which is more or less the part we imagined. Then we’ll pursue the ‘what if?’ strategy, which involves letting the player wander off-piste to see what kind of unusual or interesting stuff gets thrown up. The wonders of digital editing will often allow us to construct a part which might be a mixture of the basic idea, the loose ‘off-piste’ take and maybe a dollop of additional studio surgery.        

Another way of collaborating on recording projects is to have musician friends send you stuff through the miracle of electronic mail. For this album, Alan Robertson –a former colleague in the band ‘Gum’- has been recording material at home and firing it off into the ether; somehow, it ends up on my laptop. Alan’s one of those chaps who can knock out a tune on a variety of instruments, a great ideas man with a good ear for hooks and textures which can help add flavour to a piece. Fraser and Alan both make excellent contributions to the song I've linked to here.  Since I posted the original demo (featuring just a vocal, an acoustic guitar and some rudimentary piano), they have helped me flesh it out a bit.

I said at the time that I was hoping that it would one day inhabit a lusher soundscape and, thanks to Alan’s electronic noodlings and nurdlings (and what I hope is the judicious use of some backing vocals) I think the track is now close to being complete.  Another tweak or two and it’ll almost be there.

Making an album, part 2: It’s not (quite) about the money, money, money.

I’ve had some interesting correspondence since my previous post about deciding to record an album and to write about the various issues associated with that process. Most of the comments have been supportive, with some folk saying that they are curious to see how it will all turn out. I was a little bit surprised by a couple of the more critical remarks, not because I expect everyone to think that my idea is great and that my music is wonderful, but because these comments focused on the fact that my opening spiel talked about money and, specifically, about my hope of recovering some of the costs of the venture. 

One correspondent suggested that I was approaching this from the ‘wrong direction’, because true artists shouldn’t be bothered with financial considerations; this person suggested that, if filthy lucre was at the top of my agenda, I would be better advised to stick to my day job. I’m intrigued by arguments about the purity of art.  It seems to me that, unless you have a benefactor (or can survive on just the occasional bowl of steam), money will impact on how and when you produce your work. If you can’t make a living from it -which is the case for the majority of artists- then whenever you spend time and money on your art, it is time and money you are not devoting to something else; it is time you are not giving to your loved ones and money you are not spending on essential bills or other items.  Should I spend a couple grand making an album because I feel the need to, or should I put that money towards my mum’s hip operation? Should I hire some really good session musicians to sprinkle fairy dust over my stupid little songs, or should I use that cash to give my kids a really good holiday? It’s a difficult call.  

Any musician who has their work promoted by a record company and any artist whose endeavours are supported through the public purse (for example, with a grant from Creative Scotland) is in an unusual and fortunate position. I don’t have any choice as to whether some of my hard-earned tax buck should go towards subsidising another artist’s (no doubt worthy) efforts. I do, however, have a choice in how I spend my own spare cash and -much as I’d love some additional support- I’m comfortable with the fact that I’ll have to record this album on my own dime. If wondering how I might best manage that makes me some kind of philistine breadhead, then I guess I’ll just have to live with the stigma.     

If previous experience is anything to go by, I have about as much chance of getting my money back as I have of becoming the next James Bond; in fact, I would regard it as something of a triumph to recoup even a quarter of my costs. My prospects of glory are somewhat south of remote, but that won’t stop me committing to the enterprise. It would just be nice to think that I’ll be able to bank enough positivity to encourage me to start work on another album; that ‘positivity’ might be defined in financial terms, but it is just as likely to be something as simple as getting some good reviews and good vibes from a handful of supporters. The truth is that the real reward will be the work itself and the completion of that work.     

I think that when people make art, they are probably making it first and foremost for themselves. But even if that were not the case, I’m not sure why anyone would object to an artist hoping to get paid for their work. It’s always nice to get a little approbation, but it’s probably nicer to get paid; and it’s probably even nicer to get paid a lot.  I heard the comic actor Christopher Biggins on the radio recently talking about his role in the TV comedy ‘Porridge’; he was, as I recall, a relatively minor character in the show (let’s, for the moment, leave to one side the question of whether or not Mr Biggins can legitimately be described as an artist). In a charming interview in which he came across as an amusing and essentially decent chap, Mr Biggins revealed that every time the BBC shows an old episode of ‘Porridge’ on the telly, he pockets £1,000. That, my friends, is a beautiful dollar. Just imagine how good it must feel to get work that pays you at the time that you do it and is still paying you some forty years later. No wonder Mr Biggins sounded so jolly.      

At the risk of causing offence, I’ll venture the opinion that writing a song is a purer artistic process than acting in a sitcom. I would define it as purer because there is an unbroken line between intent and execution. It is pure in the same way that writing a poem or painting a picture is pure, because the intent of the artist –at that stage- is unmediated and uncompromised. 

On my way to the holy grail of completing the album, there are certain things I am able to do musically and certain things in the recording sphere that I can achieve on my own. I have a basic recording set-up at home, but have neither the equipment nor the technical expertise to record to the standard I would desire. Accordingly, I have to book time in a professional recording studio to realise my goal. I must also factor in the additional cost of hiring session musicians. You might argue that I could just record these songs with vocals and acoustic guitar and do a ‘purer’ version of the album without spending a lot of money. I could do that, but it would result in a particular kind of album and not the one that I want to make right now. The album I want to make has to sound as close as possible to what I’m hearing in my head; achieving that sound will necessarily involve a significant investment of time and money. 

There is, of course, an obvious tension between ‘how much’ money I am willing to spend and ‘how good’ I want this album to be; in my experience, the less you rush things, the more you take the time to review your options, the better the end result will be. There might, however, be limits as to how much time you should take.  Many moons ago I was in a band that recorded a couple of songs at a ‘proper’ recording studio in Glasgow. We sat on the tracks for a few weeks before deciding that they could be improved with some judicious remixing. When we called the studio to book some additional time, we were told that our tracks had been erased to free up some room on the master tape. Chastened and more than a bit crestfallen, we had to make do with the unsatisfactory versions we had. Who knows, the entire course of pop music history might have been different had we only managed to remix those two tracks (although, if I was a betting man, my money would be on the remixed tracks still sounding a bit rubbish and the band still breaking up within six months). These days, with digital recording and storage, it is unlikely that anyone would have their material scrubbed just to make some space.   

There are countless examples of the excessive (and compulsive) behaviour of bands in the studio, tales of musicians who spent weeks working on a snare sound or a difficult guitar solo. Bryan Ferry -an artist I really admire- once used 30 musicians at six different recording studios over several years to make one album, the lush and lovely ‘Boys and Girls’, released in 1985. This album achieved some notoriety before it was released because Ferry had sunk so much cash into it; he is known to be something of studio obsessive, but –even by his meticulous standards- this one was a doozy. You might argue that to spend so much time and money on an album was ridiculous, decadent and indulgent, but the end justified the means if the songwriter achieved what he set out to achieve. 

‘Boys and Girls’ is bejewelled with sonic delights, but there is one achingly beautiful piece in which the purity of the songwriter’s vision is illustrated. ‘Windswept’, like much of the album, features gossamer-light melodies floating on a beautifully seductive rhythmical bed.  About two minutes into the track, a violin appears stage left for a brief cameo, the job of which is to introduce a scorching and melodic guitar solo from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour which –for 25 blissful seconds- lifts the song out of its seductive reverie, before we settle back once more into Ferry’s trademark elegant ambience. You could argue that ‘Windswept’ didn’t need that brief appearance by the violin nor, indeed, the expensive guitar solo, but here’s the thing: Bryan Ferry thought it needed it. My guess is that he wanted to create something beautiful, now matter how much time and money it was going to cost him. He pursued his vision and, for an artist, that is what counts. The bonus for Bryan was that the ‘Boys and Girls’ album gave him his only UK number 1 solo record. 

Now that I’ve fulfilled a lifetime’s dream by seeing my work mentioned in print alongside that of Bryan Ferry, there’s a link below to a one of the tracks from the album. It’s called ‘How will you know when you know?’ and the lyric is relevant to some of the topics I’ll be exploring in this blog. The song is about being in a band and about hitting the wall of realisation that you are not going to be the next U2. In the first verse, there is excitement and optimism as the band plan for a successful future, loading up their van to hit the road for a gig (in the exotic location of Aberdeen). The second verse is written from the perspective of the morning after the night before, grinding through the day job and attempting to analyse events through a fug of sleep deprivation. What was last night about?  Why did we do it? Was it really a good use of our time? The chorus illustrates that perhaps a certain realisation has occurred to the protagonist:  

“If every step we ever take leads us to where we ought to be,

shouldn’t we be smart enough to know we ought to rest there?” 

I think the track is pretty much finished, but I'd be prepared to reconsider if anyone can pass me David Gilmour’s phone number.                 

How will you know when you know?