Back from the Brink...

So, Dave had headed to the continent for a few weeks, he had a desire to lie low for a while and some knobs to twiddle with some other band or other. Stu had an equal desire to re-write lyrics and re-sing vocals - it's the way things always go, he is the most uneasily satisfied of the whole band. But anyway, with a squeeze of the 3-in-1 can the cogs and wheels have slowly started crunching and turning and stuff has started to take shape.

A steady stream of initial mixes have started to find their way earwards and the results are what I would call more than pleasing. Things are a good way off being finished, but the shape of things to come is becoming more and more apparent. As is always the case with Decoration, things will take time - but with talk of the odd gig here and there and murmurings of artwork and track orderings the future at least looks like it will one day be the present.

A Law Unto Laverne and Shirley...

So, in the wake of the unseasonal heatwave three of our indie balladeers headed back to the big city for another weekend with Dave. The plan is to supposedly do the odd tweak, add the required guitar tracks and chant the obvious lyrical re-writes into the vocal mic. Steve stayed at home in Horwich to re-decorate the back bedroom, while I was cleaning the grout on the bathroom tiles.

At this stage it is pretty much a case of all the parts being done and just waiting to be put together in the right order. The Decoration jigsaw is a 1000 piece puzzle and nobody knows exactly what the picture should look like, it’s still living and breathing, growing and mutating with every listen. The weekend is a catalogue of listening, pondering, revising, re-writing and recording. The first Apple Mac expires late on Friday, a replacement is dug out and the process continues.

Stuart’s notebook is by now bulging, the album has been a long time in the making, and even though some of the tunes are relatively new lyrical ideas, couplets and puns are all in existence if not yet in place. Stick brings in new guitar parts, worked on since the last session and Sam is the authority on what sounds good and what doesn’t.

Saturday afternoon and the replacement Mac packs up - whatever happened to the good old world of analogue recording? Wires are pulled and chased and eventually things get going again, it’s as though the gods aren’t happy, but the ship sails on.

From here on there will doubtless be further tweaks and changes, but Dave has what he needs to start mixing and he’ll be on with that as we speak. Things are taking shape, I can see the end of the pier form here.

Only at Weekends...

So, with all things being equal, last weekend as the moon and stars aligned along The Westway Decoration reconvened at Shambles Studio to fettle and tinker and to see what the digital equivalent of the one inch tape could suck out of them and hurl skyward towards the still forthcoming album.

By the time I got there everyone else was already settled in, Steve was brewing up in the kitchen as usual and Stick was beaming guide tracks over from his laptop to the main console.

First up was ‘Doppelganger’, or ‘Gluhwein’ – ‘whatever way it’ll be something Germanic sounding’ says Stuart as we all sway in the control room. It is, as Max the engineer says ‘…a bit New Order-ish’. To my ears it resonates of Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ and I can already see the band dressed in Matalan bath robes carrying a huge picture of Fred Dibnah across Ainsdale beach.

With all that done we head down to Shepherds Bush where the lads disappear into a club in the old underground toilets on the green, I decline the invitation and go in search of food. I sneak a Big Mac meal into the hostel up my coat and head off to bed with ears full of the Cowboy Junkies and a couple of chapters of Woody Guthrie’s ‘Bound for Glory’

Cometh Saturday cometh the pop injection… The lads are ready and raring to go, and as soon as Dave hits the big red ‘record’ button a suitably rocking number is issued forth. All chiming guitars and driving rhythm ‘This Olive Branch has been Withdrawn’ seems to spring form nowhere, but nobody is complaining – it’s their ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. Later in the day, a band jam in the live room forms the foundations of another new, unscripted song. Provisionally titled ‘Tannery Row’ it is of a more introspective, moody tempo but is tempered with an optimistic feel. We order Thai food that proves to be slightly more spicy than anticipated and crack on into the night.

Sunday morning arrives and so does Dave, he is looking a bit grey around the gills but insists on getting the job done. Stick plays some piano on ‘Tannery Row’ which we record from the corridor outside, the idea is to have it sounding a bit far away-ish. Remember when you were in primary school and you could hear the piano in the hall from your classroom, a bit like that. Periodically Dave sprints out of the back of the control room to throw up from the fire escape, he’s a trooper he really is.

Come early afternoon I am heading back to Wales, the boys stay and work some more on ‘Paulie is Dead Nice’ which is growing into a C-86 epic  and another new song with a working title of ‘Primark Scream’ which would have Spacemen 3 running for the hills.

There is still lots to do, vocals and the odd tweak of guitar parts being the main part, but as of that the vast majority of the nuts and bolts for the album are now in the tool box and Dave can start putting them all together and seeing what we come up with.

It’s amazing what a winter in Horwich can offer up.

From the Bottom of Your 'Ignore List'...

…And well, yeah, where was I?

So, the last few months have been a little more quiet after that initial burst – but there are good reasons. I’m not going to lather you up with excuses but I can assure you that things have been trundling along in a more steady than slow manner. The line up of Dec Club Juniors has been enhanced, weight has been lost and regained and a new shirt has been bought. The Stick has been in and out of the potting shed with his four track, making and melding in the manner that only he does, Stuart has taken these leads and scoured his thesaurus for rhyming couplets and delved into the darkest recesses of his teenage diaries in the never ending search for tales from the back room of the Blue Boar circa 1987 and it’s elusive fairground with which to fill in the gaps.

Whilst all this was going on Sam and Steve have been much more productive, revisiting the studio with Dave to set down the foundations for more songs for the ever distant album. Working titles of ‘Paulie’s Dead Nice’, ‘Menace’. ’Doppleganger’ and ‘Songs in D and G’ (which owes more to Stuarts vocal range than a fashion label) have all been worked around and on. So you can see, even though I have been a little quiet, maybe even tardy, things are progressing and the album is starting to take a distinct shape.

With all this in mind, the band will converge on London again in a couple of weeks to see what they can make of these tracks. It has been haphazard in the way that all things Decoration tend to be, on then off and then on again – not always our fault though, you can blame Paul Weller and his indecision and the thankful vision of the big Decoration jar of coppers for where we find ourselves now – braced for a few days in the city with the hope of a bunch of songs that we all love at the end of it.

I’ll keep you informed, I promise.

(And a Lot Worse Besides…)

Last weekend saw Stuart and Steven sneak back into the studio with Dave to layer up the guitars on the first six tracks, and for Stuart to re-do the vocals (again). It’s not as though Stu needs lots of attempts at it, it’s just that once the vocals are done it gives him (and us) a better, more objective view of them, and more often than not a re-write or two is prompted – that’s unfair, not so much a re-write, more of a tweak of the odd line here and there. Although I’m not saying his lines are odd as such, well, I am, and it would be fair to do so. Indeed, there is a line in While I played Misty for You that had us all pissing ourselves laughing in the control room, even the post delivery explanation induced a hefty dose of mirth.

Sometimes it’s just like that.

Still, with the songs steadily growing and becoming what you’ll hear on the finished album the whole feel of the record is becoming more and more apparent. It’s easy to have plans about how a record should sound when you set off recording, but I think it is fair to say that the songs evolve themselves and dictate themselves how they should turn out. If I were writing for the Guardian I'd call it 'organic', to try and do anything else with them would be disingenuous to the way that the band work. There are often hours of fractious frettings about arrangements, parts and tempos, and these issues are almost always ironed out with a couple of run throughs in the studio – the song itself will suggest how it should be, if it feels right then they don’t fight it. Maybe that is what makes it sound so good.

So with the bulk of the work done of these first six tracks attention has turned to what and when will make up the rest of the album, as always with Decoration being a long distance relationship diary issues are the hardest to resolve, but out of the roughs and demos there are any number of contenders for the record, and already the band are compiling the final set of songs in their heads. Just exactly how it’ll turn out is yet to be seen, but feeling that it’ll leave in your gut is already being formed in a studio in London.

Well It Feels Like Something to Me…

So after a clean but restless sleep the routine starts up again. Everyone is grateful for a hot shower and we head out as usual to find a café. Today we find a nice little place run by a clown, still, beggars can’t be choosers – at least the coffee is hot and they have some kind of bacon on their muffins.

Back into the studio, and Dave is running late, it affords us a nice leisurely start to our last day of this session. The mood is one of quiet optimism, creative types are generally (in my experience) the least confident about their efforts, but there is an all round good feeling about what they have done this weekend – we all know that it is a long way off being finished, but the groundwork has been done and everyone is pleased with the way things are going.

As soon as Dave arrives the band crack on with getting the bulk of Misty tidied up, with the pressure off now they relax a little knowing that they have the feel of the song just right. Throughout the day we re-visit the other songs, performing little tweaks, overdubs and changes here and there, making sure that the basics for all six songs recorded this week are as solid as they can be. Future sessions are already being planned in our minds, there are further guitar parts and new layers to be added and lyrics to be finalised and sung. Stuart will be back with Dave next weekend to put vocal tracks down, but we all envisage him returning to them at the end of the process to revise and re-record, it’s just the way that things work round here.

Mid afternoon we take a break and all head out onto the fire escape out the back and take some photos, looking back at the images later I am struck by how relaxed everybody looks. I load up the car and head off, I have a long drive ahead of me but I have that warm, fuzzy glow in my gut that tells me that we have done something good.

Once I am gone the band continue with the studio work, with Sam and Stuart staying until after midnight finishing things off, eventually though a line is drawn and it is left for Dave to start work on the mixing. As I said previously, there is still a lot of work to do on these tracks, but a damn good start has been made.

The next day we get rough mixes from Dave, all instrumentals so that Stuart can work on his lyrics/vocals without any distractions for when he goes back in next weekend. They are all sounding good, it’s the shape of things to come - and I like it.

Just Itching to Let Fly...

…And a pretty unpleasant night it was. As I shuffled through the murk for a 5.00am visit to the bogs I was greeted with a liberally vomit splattered bathroom, it sort of summed up the place in one puke stained act. Departure could not come too soon.

Depart we did, as soon as we were all awake – we had nothing to pack as none of us felt it the sort of place that you would want to leave your belongings hanging around. We soon enough found a café which offered us sustenance and the ever vital caffeine. All positively relieved to have seen out the night we soon turned our thoughts to the studio, what had already been done and what was planed for the day. Even after sleeping on it the band were visibly boosted by what Dave was pulling out of them, and how he was doing it. It was in this frame of mind that we re-assembled in White City and set to work.

The first things to be tackled were last nights run throughs of Silent Kisses, in the cold light of day they held up just as much as they had the night before. The basis for the drums and bass were there, if in need of a little tweaking. Each part was worked through meticulously, Dave has a great ear for both pitch and timing and whereas we might have considered something to be good enough he would keep the boys at it until it was much more than that. As this progressed the lure of Brazilian bacon proved too much to resist, so Stu, Stick and myself wandered up to Harlesden to stock up on supplies for the day. Realising where we were going Dave got all passionate about the Brazilian deli items that Sam had got so excited about yesterday, and the two of them had a verbal love in on the matter. Still, the rest of us are from the north, so we resist culture at every turn.

Getting back I throw myself into finding new digs for tonight, the horrors of Willesden shall not be revisited, the best I end up with is a Travelodge just off the North Circular Road, nothing if not glamorous. Still, we are all relieved to know that we’ll get a good night sleep and have a nice hot shower in the morning, to be fair we are all starting to stink a bit.

As the songs are rotated to keep them fresh we revisit Blink, and 97 Pound Weakling through the afternoon, all goes well until the spectre of While I Played Misty for You starts to loom over everyone. It is perhaps the oldest song to be tackled this weekend, and has been complete in arrangement for the best part of 18 months. It is because of this that the band seem to have had problems with it whenever they have played it recently, it had lost a lot of the fizz and bounce that went along with those first demos from the Gatehouse in Bolton. In short the band were close to losing faith in it. Before they began there was a lot of debate, which was finally and expertly concluded when Stick suggested that they just forget about how they had played it before, forget that they had even written it, just consider it a song by someone else and approach it as though they were doing a cover version in their own inimitable style. So, by the time they went back into the live room at 11-ish they were all back in the right frame of mind. I stood out on the balcony that overlooks the cemetery and watched a fox mooch around the graves, even from out there I could tell that the fizz was back.

Again, a couple of blasts through and then all back into the control room to listen back. It was obvious to all that they had finally managed to drag the song back form wherever it had wandered off to in their collective imaginations, it was fresh and exciting once again, more punchy than it had been for a while, in short a triumph.

The elusive cleanliness of the Travelodge beckoned, but despite driving past it three times on the North Circular the entrance eluded us. Eventually we got booked in and settled into the bar, the news channel was Czechoslovakian for some reason, but Stick was entranced. I turned in only to be kept awake for a good 45 minutes by the noisy sex people in the next room, still they knew that they were beat when they found themselves hammering on that wall at 4.00am to try and get Stu to stop snoring. I tell you, you couldn't make this stuff up.