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.