EP Launch Gig, no excuses

Dan Austin Session -|- August 2010

One Last Thing Tonight

This was Dan's idea not ours.

Phil

Recording Update / The Drunk Drummer

Top of the morning!





Saturday morning in Bath, rain coming down and we're locked into the studio mixing 'Undertows', the second of three tracks.

Yesterday was spent mixing 'Figure 8's' from 10am til 1am - Dan Austin's ability to sit in the same place all day listening to our music for 15 hours straight is admirable. Nathan and James went out to get food around 2pm and came back two bottles of wine and two pints heavier. Then things got silly, we went for a "couple more beers" before dinner and James took it too far. This is him at 8pm before he's had his dinner:



This is him a few minutes ago, he's feeling the burn and is on a diet of water.




Silly.

The rest of the day will probably be spent mixing, doing edits for radio play, and generally listening to Dan tell us his horror stories about bands and the music industry, top stuff. This morning the other three non-singing members were in the vocal booth doing the choir part for the end of Figure 8's:





I never want to leave.

With love

The Winchell Riots

PS. Proper pictures coming on Monday.

Bath Moles August 2010

So we're currently four (five, not sure) days into a recording session in Bath with producer-to-the-stars Dan Austin and I keep getting told I should "write something about it" so here I am.

It's 11.30am Friday morning and I'm sat in the control room of Moles Studio with Dan and Nick (who is engineering the session). Dan has got a sticker on his back that says something offensive that Nick stuck on there as a joke this morning. Here is a picture of Dan taken a few years ago, in front of an amp he was paid to say nice things about.



The other three are still asleep.

We're recording three tracks over seven days - 'Figure 8's', 'Undertows' and 'The Man Who Mapped The Oceans'. All the recording has been done - drums first, then bass, then my guitars, vocals and lastly Nathan's "sounds-like-a-plane-taking-off" guitars. Every band who has ever been into a studio will, at some point in their time recording, utter any of the following combinations:

"It sounds like a level up"

"It sounds BIG"

"Listen to that kick drum!"

and we are no different, huddled around our early evening pints of Bath ales in the bar over the road talking about how and when we can get these tracks released. One of them sounds like Nine Inch Nails which I never expected to say, and 'Undertows' sounds like it would have fitted nicely on the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack. Dan's production - he's worked with Doves, Cherry Ghost, Biffy Clyro etc - is in keeping with our ethic of sounding massive, and of being unashamed of sounding like the end of the world. Here are some facts about recording this EP for you.

• All the guitars were recorded through an Orange Rockerverb amp and then split into Dan's Audio Kitchen amp which is in the picture above. That amp has got Dan's name inscribed on the circuitry.

• The session is being recorded on Doves' rig which makes me remember when I was about to walk my dog all those years ago and Lamacq played 'Cedar Room' as the last song on his show, I couldn't believe what I'd heard.
  
  
• There are hidden messages on 'The Man Who Mapped The Oceans' from phone messages that Dan left on my answerphone. The track is being referred to as the 'serial killer' track.
  

• We are living in a flat which is 9 storeys above Bath and every morning I sit at the dangerously big open window and drink my cup of coffee looking down at all the people running around or looking over the rooftops across the city.
  

• Last night we sat up in the bar underneath our flat and drank with the bar staff from Moles after hours. One of them was a massive Queen fan, which matters to James ("I can go b-side deep"), and one of them didn't utter a single word all night and then stood up, pointed at me and shouted "JOHN MARTYN" at me, which I found weird because how did the guy know I was a fan huh?

• We played these guitars guitars: a Fender Telecaster Thinline Deluxe, a Fender Telecaster Deluxe, a Fylde Alchemist acoustic and a Fender Stratocaster.

• I recorded all my vocals over two nights singing through a Neumann 149 microphone which Dan just told me costs £5000. There was me thinking I would pick one up for home but I've changed my mind although my girlfriend just said "it's something to work towards" on the phone which made me laugh.
  

Rich has fucked off with the camera so I can't put any photos up but I'll get some up over the weekend so you can just how beautiful the inside of a control room looks after 5 days work.

The 'Red Square EP' - which comes out in September: incidentally, the vinyls turned up during recording and we spent a day hand numbering them with a custom stamp, so one of the live rooms has got 300 vinyls on the floor, picture to follow - was such a labour of love, and was surrounded by a lot of pathetic bullshit from outside the band, that to be doing something that sounds so fresh is such a relief, and to be working with Dan Austin, who is near enough the most talented person I've ever come across, has injected our band and our music with a bit of self-belief which has been lacking lately. We've heard a lot of people say 'no' over the last few years, and it's nice to hear the sound of your own voice(s) saying 'yes' sometimes. This has probably been the most fun I've ever had in a band, and that counts for more than anything.

This last week

Hello again everyone,

So I thought I would give you a quick update about what we'd been doing this week before I shutdown the computer and go into the Other Room to start recording some new stuff that I've been doing lately on my own.

Last week finally saw us get this Red Square EP mastered at Turan Audio in Oxford (which is a technical term for 'Finished'). We started recording it last year (as in, 2009, do you remember that? what are the memories?) and due to an immense amount of bullshit and negotiation, it took WAY LONGER than we'd ever imagined. Alongside the said Total Bullshit Of Being An Independent Unsigned Band, we're also major league perfectionists, and we all wanted the EP to be more than just an EP by an Oxford band, but a proper document of the last year of being in our band. So we're doing the release on 10" vinyl and each copy will be stickered and hand-numbered, with artwork by a totally brilliant designer based on the real heart of the EP. But it took time. The deal was - if this is the last thing we ever put out, is it worth it?

On top of this (good news for those of you who have been waiting patiently and worried by that last sentence) we are now in the process of booking the next studio time with a good friend and all round brilliant producer to record The Next EP which - all plans going well - will be out at the start of next year. So there'll be plenty of music because that's what we promised.

Lastly, we've been putting together UK dates around the release of the EP which will be on or around September 20th 2010. So there'll be a bit more of a wait, but it will be totally worthwhile when you get it, I promise.

That's all for now. The next blog will tell you Absolutely Everything you need to know about the release, including artwork and preordering details.

There you go..

Phil, The Winchell Riots.

Election Morning

I first heard about the poet Edwin Morgan after his appearance on Idlewild's third album - he read a poem over the closing track 'Scottish Fiction'. It turns out he lectured my Mum at University in Glasgow when she was younger, so I bought some collected poems several years ago, and last Christmas I got given 'A Book Of Lives' which was a collection from 2007.

The opening poem is called 'For The Opening Of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004'. I read it this morning watching all the election stuff going on and it serves as a reminder of what this is all about. Please take the time to read it if you feel completely dismayed by everything which, quite frankly, me and my friends all do.

Phil


For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004

Open the doors! Light of the day, shine in; light of the mind, shine out!

We have a building which is more than a building.
There is a commerce between inner and outer,
between brightness and shadow, between the world and those who think about the world.

Is it not a mystery? The parts cohere, they come together
like petals of a flower, yet they also send their tongues
outward to feel and taste the teeming earth.
Did you want classic columns and predictable pediments? A
growl of old Gothic grandeur? A blissfully boring box?
Not here, no thanks! No icon, no IKEA, no iceberg, but
curves and caverns, nooks and niches, huddles and
heavens syncopations and surprises. Leave symmetry to
the cemetery.
But bring together slate and stainless steel, black granite
and grey granite, seasoned oak and sycamore, concrete
blond and smooth as silk – the mix is almost alive – it
breathes and beckons – imperial marble it is not!

Come down the Mile, into the heart of the city, past the kirk
of St Giles and the closes and wynds of the noted ghosts of
history who drank their claret and fell down the steep
tenements stairs into the arms of link-boys but who wrote
and talked the starry Enlightenment of their days –
And before them the auld makars who tickled a Scottish king’s
ear with melody and ribaldry and frank advice –
And when you are there, down there, in the midst of things,
not set upon an hill with your nose in the air,
This is where you know your parliament should be
And this is where it is, just here.

What do the people want of the place? They want it to be
filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its
architecture.
A nest of fearties is what they do not want.
A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.
A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.
And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is
what they do not want.
Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians, you are
picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem that has been
almost but not quite, oh no not quite, not ever broken or
forgotten.
When you convene you will be reconvening, with a sense of not
wholly the power, not yet wholly the power, but a good
sense of what was once in the honour of your grasp.
All right. Forget, or don’t forget, the past. Trumpets and
robes are fine, but in the present and the future you will
need something more.
What is it? We, the people, cannot tell you yet, but you will know about it when we do tell you.
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we
have no mandate to be so bold.
We give you this great building, don’t let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.
So now begin. Open the doors and begin.

Edwin Morgan