(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.