Abubilla Music

First Report Back of June 24-30, 2010 Spanish Jam

Written by Jimmy

This will be the first of several blogs on the Spanish Jam – giving you a quick update on THE MUSIC and EVERYTHING ELSE. 

THE MUSIC

6 days, 5 nights in the studio.   287 diet cokes, 314 San Miguels, 816 cups of coffee.  And lots of Air Conditioning.  And smelly red shoes in the Studio.  Andy’s smelly red shoes.  More on that below.  We managed to go into the Spanish studio with no songs and emerge with 13 and a couple more fragments.  And some might even be good.  It is all a blur, but we will try our best to tell a story: 

• Day 1, Friday, June 24th:    We enter the clean studio.   No coffee cups, no lyrics sheets, no tangled cables.  And the red shoes were sort of clean.  We started with some lyrics that Jimmy had completed the day before.  The first song we went for was ‘That’s What I Really Love’, a complete nonsense song about loving cell phone snooze buttons and Sudoku.  But, we had Jimmy’s brother in town, Lew, who’s a blues guitarist so idea was to let the band go blues and country a bit to start us off.  Andy led in vocals and deserves special mention for his Elvis impersonation – sort of like this:

We then shift gears in to 500 Letters from New York, with lead vocals by Lou.   A song set in the thirties about a woman abandoned by her husband during the depression – he goes to NYC to make his fortune and send for her.  All he does send is letters and telegrams with lots of promises of deals just around the corner … a true story about Jimmy’s grandmother and 1 million others we imagine.   Nice little country rocker again, with Lou in full Michele Shocked mode, sort of like this:

But more like God is a Real Estate Developer, which I couldn’t find on youtube.   We then did a little boy meets girl song in Tuesday in May, with Andy taking on vocals.    We then closed the studio for the evening and began a cycle of staying up until 430AM doing ‘everything else’ (see below) and returning to the studio by 10AM, with a number of us rapidly declining in  lucidity.   In fairness, this gave the rest of us a chance to play new instruments. 

• Day 2, Saturday, June 26th.    Here greatness happened.  Gus game in with a song called Whisper – it had been with him a while and he played it to us on acoustic guitar.  Martyn, being Martyn, stopped proceedings and said – nope, this has to be done with just cello and your voice.  So we agreed that we would do the song later once Sophie had had her 19 hours of sunbathing (she suffers from FOMO she claims – fear of missing out – but that didn’t actually include FOMOOST, fear of missing out of studio time.  Mostly covered pool and drinking games).    Jumping ahead, Andy returned with Sophie and Gus and recorded Gus, adding a percussion effect from heaven.   Martyn’s insight, perfectly executed by the team.  Stunning song.  Watch this space.  The rest of us mortals, though, had to get on with things…  So we cranked thru Pretty Bad Agents, a letter from Jesus to Mohamad about the two of them getting their act together and start paying attention to the bad stuff done in their name thru their agents.  Kind of a sunshine, hang out at the pool song.   Well at least it was done at 153 Bpm, which is a new milestone for us.   And then Gus put down another Gus stunner, Angel in the Dark, with the best Abubilla lyrics so far:     ‘The best things in life are unseen.  That’s why when we kiss, we hug, we dream, we  close our eyes.’   Started to really hate this 17 year old wunderkind.    Sort of like this:

• Day 3, Sunday, 27 June.   England go out in a horror show.  But Ed arrives and so the song writing continues.    Ed put down Forget Me Not, great piano, emerging lyrics (his view).  Will be great song.  Then Lou came in for vocals on Depth Perception.  By this time, the 430AM to 7AM sleep patterns were taking its toll on Jimmy, so most lyrics were directly resulting from any discussions going on in the pool.  Lou was talking about starting a heavy metal band called Depth Perception.  Good enough for Jimmy and off he went.  Ed was around to create  a great riff and Lou delivered excellent Okahoma bar girl vocals.   And we got Rob to ride the bass neck a bit.   This might have been the song that Andy got to take over drums, with our drummer by this time emerging from his cave later and later in the day. 

And we wished we sound like this:

And then England lost, and we focused on Everything Else.

• Day 4, Monday, June 28:   A core group continues to see the sun hit the portch (stops at 0900AM) – Rob, Martyn, Lew, Lou and Jimmy.   Lew started talking about Ella Fitzerald and John Pass sessions and we played the following on our computers:

And we decided that was enough inspiration.  So over coffee Jimmy dashed out some lyrics called No Bells, about a young woman of today siting at home waiting to hear news of her husband fighting in Afgahanistan.  Teriffied the bell would ring with bad news so begins to shut herself off.  But we wanted it to sound like a session from 1940’s.   Lew had some great chords that he gave Ed to drive the piano bit, Lou delivered fantastic vocal (writing the melody as she sang — explain that!) and Andy got this cool plug in to make it sound like a 1940’s song.   We know one thing and one thing only about the next album:  this will be the first song.  Oh, and for reasons I’ll explain below we actually know two things about the next album.  it will be called ‘If I Were a Little Birdie‘  (don’t ask about the grammar).  This kinds of naming sessions happen around 3AM.  After No Bells, my brother brought his song to the band, Love One’s Call.  A blues number, a very personal song.   He had to wait until his fingers had stopped bleeding from previous guitar playing, but delivered a great vocal and lead guitar — Martyn did a fantastic job on rhythm guitar.    We followed this with Wisconsin, a very fast little ‘I killed a guy and feel sorry for myself song – but fun enough (for a ‘I killed a guy and feel sorry for myself song’).    Very special mention to magic Martyn – Jimmy came in with some lyrics and in typical ‘steeped in music theory direction’ said – ‘it’s fast and needs a country riff.’  Martyn delivered a great one in about 2 seconds and off we went.

• Day Five, Tuesday, June 29th.  Okay, you have to read thru Everything Else below to understand how we’re feeling at this point.    We now go into the studio to finish off Monkey Space Camp that was started the day before.    This song was inspired by watching Mike and Gus jimble jamble around the garden like monkeys playing body pong.  It looked and felt like Monkey Camp.  To bring some nobility, Jimmy add ‘Space’ so they these little monkeys could serve a higher purpose – being  those little chimps sent off to space to ‘not die’ so men could follow.  Special mention to Mike’s drumming and Gus’s smile when singing about Frankies Big Pink Butt.   The song sounds a bit like Mr Jones on speed and dumbed down after too many drunks — sort of a Day 5 intepretation of a good song…

So that’s it for the music.  We also have lots of snippets but believe we were pretty productive, especially when you realise what else was going on… we were living the ‘rock star’ life as we will now reveal (After you Watch this video):

And now the rest of the story…

EVERYTHING ELSE

So Jimmy’s going to list 7 things that he knows about.  He’ll leave it to his compatriots to add or subtract.    So here’s 7 things you need to know about ‘Everything Else’ :

1. A Typical Day:    Things did run in a fairly typical pattern.  Jimmy swam laps at 7AM, and Kathy ran in the hills at about 7.30AM.   All the old men (Jimmy, Lew, Martyn, Rob) gathered in the kitchen around 9AM and were joined by Kathy, Lou, Ed and Andy over time.   Steph and Sophie wandered in after that, and then Gus and Mike, well let’s just say they need their sleep.    Then the group sort of divided up based on song schedule – half into the studio, half to the pool, to ping pong, to sun bathing.  We all reconvened for lunch, served by Pratap and Jhoy and then hung out together around the pool for awhile retreating into various games.   There were always a few hard core in the studio – it stayed busy from 10 to 1930 every day – but largely the band stayed in the sun.  But by 1500, we all headed back in, for another 3.5 hours or so before dinner.  We then had a big dinner, and either continued games/videos or started games/videos.  More on that…
2. Videos:    Steph, Andy and Rob played a big role in getting videos going but they were most often behind the camera.  lots of special mentions for those in front.  We did three performance videos of songs from Misery Marmalade and Other Spanish Jams.   Gus did a solo effort on Fairy Tale, in the blazing sun near the pool.  Andy did the same for Box of Yellow Roses, but at night with stunning full moon behind him.   Lou, Ed and Sophie did a live version of Immovable Thing on the stairs to candlelight.    In addition to these, a group of aspiring directors did numerous cuts of Whisper to try to get a look and feel that match the song’s brilliance.  Close.  And then there was ‘Little Birdie’ — you’ll see if soon enough, but suffice it to say, Steph, Gus, Sophie and Lou have out done themselves — with lyrics to rival Angel in the Dark, ‘I’ll turn around and let one go, because that is how I roll.’   The way Gus can get into the mind of a little birdie is amazing.   Then there was Steph and Rob going around to interview everyone and hear their Abubilla story.   Always that fine line of video taping – waiting for them to wake up and be coherent, and catching them before they start drinking again.   Narrow, narrow windows.   Finally, Andy became obsessed with stop motion photography and did a cool entry shot for our future videos.  But we also did something about his magic red shoes.  Idea?  why don’t we clean up the studio at end our time there, but do it in stop motion so we see it gradually cleaning up.   Cool.   What it actually means, however, is that Jimmy, Ed, Andy and Martyn spent the next three hours cleaning up studio by marching little cups of coffee across the floor at 5 inches a click.  Fun for first 20 minutes.  Not after.
3. Games:   There was honk, which others can explain.  Rob won on catching, but Jimmy won on delivering.  ‘Nuff said.’  But there were classics that have been with the villa for years and then there were new inventions.  The family has longed played Perudo and Mexican Train dominoes, adding lizards to the trains.  We also played ping pong regularly with Jimmy playing the role of band door mat.  Don’t ask.  We added to these two rather stunning games, one shared by all, and one for the monkeys.   The Monkeys (Mike and Gus of they need their sleep fame), played Body Pong, which involved a ping pong ball, and body, and lots of running around the pool.  No idea.   The other game was called something — maybe kitchen pong.  Basic idea was to throw a ball into some glasses in the kitchen and drink.  But the actual game involved the chants we developed for each thrower and for the quality of each throw.  We are seriously considering an album of just those chants — we are determined to alienate our one fan (sorry Helen).     Now the stunning thing about all this is we did NOT play canasta, which we did for all of the Summer Jam of 2009 and from that playing we got the band name ‘The Saturday Morning Canasta Club.’  We discussed this and have two explanations – Clare, Helen and Kane were not around, and Gus and Mike were.  
4. FOMO:    Sophie uses this phrase.  A lot of us hadn’t heard it.  She came out in the sun one morning explaining that she had had 8 hours of sleep in 48 hours.   We asked why and she said she suffered from FOMO.    It does not stand for Friends of Mulanje Orphans, but that FOMO seems like a good idea, so please visit and contribute.    This is ‘Fear of Missing Out.’  And what we found is all of us suffered from FOMO throughout — if you were working in the studio, you worried that you were missing cool work on videos.  if you were on videos you were worried that some great conversation was happening near the pool.  If you were near the pool, you were worried you were missing something in the pool.  And if you were Gus and Mike — you were worried that the other was sleeping more.
5. Andy’s Red Shoes:    This started as a burning the shoes story, but has become a story for redemption.   A star is born.  Andy’s feet smell.  There we said it.  The red shoes are very good at absorbing the smell of his feet.  He’s had them awhile and they’ve absorbed a lot.  They stay in the studio, along with his feet.  So we have two things, his feet, representing current smells.  And two things, the red shoes, representing all smells past and present.  So a lot of smell.  Which AC can keep under control, by freezing.  But AC can’t play when recording.  And we recording a lot.  So… you get the picture.  The better we did, the worst the shoes smelled – a reverse Pavlovian response.    So we decided to burn the shoes.   We agreed to pay Andy 3 quid each to replace his shoes.   But then, those little shoes stared in the studio clean up video.  And now they must remain.  Redemption.  Redemption Song. 
6. The World Cup:  This is being written as Spain beat Uraguay, so that is a good thing for the villa.  But, while we were in Spain, we had to watch England vs. Germany.   Not good.   We mention this for no other reason to point out that all this music was created while the World Cup and Wimbledon were going gang busters.  We stayed focused.  Sort of.
7. The Brother and Sisterhood….As often happens when 13 people trip over each other for 5 days, nick names developed.  We mostly just kept to the Brother Lew, Brother Andy, Sister Steph space.  But there were exceptions, most notably Brother Martyn, who graduallybecame known as Sister Helen, for reasons mostly to do with a lack of basic senses. 

Ok.  First blog reporting back.  as we fix website, add content, we’ll update this with better links.  And the rest of the band will rush in we hope with lots of photos, lots of videos and better stories.   Until the Autumn sessions!  Oh, and Misery Marmalade and Other Spanish Jams comes out next week — that can’t be a bad thing, eh.  After all, it is all about the music.