Blog
12.09.01 This Week in the Studio
Written by Jimmy
This was our first full on session since the Summer Jam and our goals were to ‘finish’ Chris’s Discovery Album, work on a few songs for the SMCC 5 and discuss some ‘studio issues.’ Oh and pizza. Attendees: Andy, Rob, Chirs, Jimmy, Mike in morning, joined by Ed in afternoon and then Ed, Rob and Jimmy closed the day.
The Music
Abubilla Music is coming to the Half Moon on September 16 (8:00 PM, £5 in advance) and we will be launching Chris’s Discovery Album. So a lot of the morning at the Studio was simply making sure we were happy with each song and where necessary doing over-dubs. The great news was Mike was back, being on a 5 week hiatus from international super stardom with Kyla La Grange and her new album. So we put him to work on a number of snare over dubs…. Andy will add a few B Vox and then we’re done – off to final mixing and mastering.
We then spent the rest of the day working on ‘Blessed Nights/Back on It’ – we started over to get a nice ‘nasty macrabre blues’ sound and we created a nice groove between Mike and Rob (drums and bass) with Chris playing lead guitar throughout. Andy setttled on smoky blues vocals in the key of ‘B’, which led to a lot of music theory debate and a struggle for chords. We were going for Ray Liotta from Something Wild Sings Leon Red Bone after a Keith Richards circa 1971 Smack Night out with Clapton. Not sure we got there, but goodness what a great song that would be if we did. here’s a mixture of what we were after:
1. Leon Redbone of Lazy Bones:
2. Meets Keith Richard on acoustic guitar…
3. And clashes with Eric in a dark alley:
We also worked on Let It Rain, which Jimmy wanted to move away from Pink Floyd trip out toward Alt J Breeze-blocks. Luckily, Ed arrived ready to chuck his heart out and we think we’re on the road to redemption. Alt J is currently the favourite band in the Allen family, and here’s Breeze-blocks, which is for the record on the other side of music (and a far better side) than the current versino of Let It Rain, but we’ll get there:
2. Everything Else
First, a massive victory. Mike finally watched Stop Making Sense and agreed it was the best concert film of all time. With this victory, Jimmy then convinced him to watch Something Wild and reconfirm to the world that the single best use of music in a film was Demme’s use of the Feelies at a High School prom, doing a cover of Fame – as they switch to another song, Ray Liotta’s character appears and the film switches on a dime from Comedy to Thriller. We’ve written about this a lot of course.
Second, we talked a lot about the studio. We need to expand and we need to change the ‘front living room’ feel of Abubilla in London. The two choices are build something at the house or move to warehouse space. Lots of debate and please watch this space. This led to long discusisons of the relative importance of a cool vibe vs. good transport. Good transport won out, which gives a lie to the Labour Government and Cool Britania, but that is a separate discussion for another day.
We distributed our very cool Spanish Jam 6 Pint glasses and called it a day. Good time had by all.