Dead Like Harry's Studio Diary

We’re half-way through the first week of recording for our new album. It was a pretty heavy day yesterday – 12 hours – in which we recorded almost continuously. Adam, our drummer, has blistered hands and I’ve no idea how Alice managed to keep her singing voice for that long. Still, although it was a tough day for everyone we made a great start and the atmosphere seemed a lot more relaxed this morning, knowing that we’d got a lot of drum, bass and piano parts down on tape.

Towards the end of last year, after getting over 50 gigs done between April and October, we’d saved up a bit of a slush fund that hadn’t been spent on accommodation, food, petrol and van hire. It was obvious that we needed to get back into the studio and try and capture the songs we had been writing and performing over that period. When me and Sam, my brother and co-writer of ten years, sat down to have a look through the material we had performed at the 2008 gigs, we noticed that, unintentionally, though probably subconsciously, we had written a narrative of the band’s recent experiences, which reached a low point at the start of the year after a particular project and collaboration we had spent 9 months working at had failed to work out.

I think we tried to take a positive slant on the whole experience and decided to spend the whole year taking our songs and our live show to as many people as possible. We managed to bag several big festivals as well as travelling to all corners of the country. We played in sunny fields, under wet marquees, on stormy beaches, in large night clubs, sharing stages with bands as varied as Scouting for Girls and Show of Hands, as well as in numerous darkened city-centre live music venues. On our travels we started to put our experiences down into some sort of musical diary.

50 gigs and nearly 10,000 miles for an unsigned band is a lot of work for one year, especially when trying to contend with: parking in central London; 2 band members crashing their cars into the bass player’s Skoda at the same gig; our equipment being submerged in a muddy field at Glastonbury; a spring-tide stranding our gear on the beach at Scarborough’s ‘Beached’ festival; drunken drummers and grumpy keyboard players; as well as the ever-present loading / unloading hazard of the “bag of death”. After several close shaves with this strangely shaped and extremely heavy container we decided to swap the “bag of death” for two “boxes of mild discomfort”. As recently as last month and at Alice ’s request, these boxes were dissolved into four “briefcases of almost mild pleasure”. However, I have digressed and this is a story for another article.

The money we saved was not enough for a full album studio session, but we managed to strike a very interesting and exciting deal with producer Alan Smyth, whom we had worked with before, and who has recorded bands such as Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, Richard Hawley and Reverend and the Makers.

When you’re recording at his Sheffield – based 2-Fly Studios, hardly a day goes by before some local pop legend pokes their head in the door: “Know where I can borrow a banjo from?” asks Jarvis Cocker.

Well, it turns out our old collaborator Alan and his co-producer Dave Sanderson had found an old factory space they wanted to renovate and make into a new studio. It’s what is happening behind the old red-brick walls in Sheffield ’s old industrial centres. When I was a kid in the late 1980s, Sheffield wasn’t the prettiest place. With a lot of its industry dead there were many empty shells of buildings with dark interiors and broken windows. Things have changed and are continuing to change with often surprising speed. The arts sector has become a large employer in Sheffield and one of the most exciting things about this is the amount of music now pouring out of this city. In 2009, if you walk through these areas of disappeared-industry you are likely to hear the sounds of bands all day as the old factory spaces start production once more – this time producing music.

We made a deal with Alan that we would renovate and build the studio over autumn 2008 in return for enough studio time at the start of 2009 to get our album recorded. And here we are…

We spent Christmas rehearsing and preparing every part of the album. We wanted it to be the real deal – the best possible album we could make. We wanted a thematic feel to both the lyric and the music. It had to tell our story in both of these mediums without compromise. The next few weeks will tell if we have got it right. After 10 years of practicing for this we are sure we will get it right though none of us doubt the immensity of the challenge ahead.

I think the events of the last year and a half have brought the six of us together. We have had highs and unfortunately we’ve seen some real lows.. We know we’re still on that journey together and that we have a lot to offer. The six of us have become very close friends and with Alan Smyth and Dave Sanderson on board for the project we feel sure that we are going to get back on the road in the summer to promote a special album and tell our own story on our own terms.

We are aware that in the current climate many bands are recording albums that are almost just a collection of singles that, when put together, make a disjointed muddle of songs. Perhaps these are the albums reflective of an I-tunes generation of songwriters? We came into the studio wanting the songs on the album to work as singles – after all, this is a business and we need to make money to survive and progress. The album has to be attractive to record companies. They have to be able to market the album through radio. But at the same time we didn’t want it to be a collection of unconnected short stories. A good album has to be a book, where each song is a chapter, that can stand alone – and be a potential single – while still being part of the whole story.

We are sure of one thing – the album ends with a song called Cherry Street, in which the girl voice and the boy voice that went off on their journey at the beginning of the album return home. Cherry Street is the name of a road near to the studio I’m sitting in now. We wanted to name-check a few places we grew up playing gigs in – “At The Boardwalk, down in the city…” The song reaches a false climax in the middle section before dropping away and becoming reflective. For a while we feared we were coming to the end of something. It soon became apparent that by returning to Sheffield and by returning to Cherry Street we had begun a new journey. We wrote the closing lines of the song knowing they would also be the closing lines of the album:

“Down on Cherry Street the lights are shining. The world is waiting there.”

Matt Taylor
DLH
www.deadlikeharry.com