It was truly a golden age. For the first time, we could record songs in decent quality, and in time. Vocal recording was still an ordeal, but at the same time we were still learning how to write proper songs. Truly, it was one of our most creative periods, and although we still managed to churn out a lot of dross, we also managed to write a handful of very good songs.
Roughly in chronological order, these are my personal highlights of 1999-2002:
- Recording lots of rubbish on our new 4-track tape recorder. My favourite recording is a very avant-garde track which for the sake of argument has always been called Noise Demo, which consists of lots of sweeps and noises from the two synthesisers we owned at the time, augmented occasionally with sounds played in from a tape of someone (not me) singing which I had found in the middle of a road somewhere.
- Recording State of Decay and a six-minute techno-dance-trance jam on Simon's new SH-101 synthesiser (ours is red). Which, in my opinion, is still one of the best devices we own. A few months on, we recorded another wonderful jam, which features Simon playing chords and me jabbing random notes on a second synth.
- Buying an Apple LC and Cubase in early 1999. For the first time, we could record music and keep it in time. We also learnt quite quickly that everything we had written up to that point was largely guff.
- Learning how to use Cubase through The Chaos Theory and Nature of the Beast. We made a few mistakes, to say the least. Most of these ended up on our 2001 EP Behind the Waterfall.
- Spending a year in Germany, learning how to write quite good songs. You can almost see the evolution taking place within the year. Early experiments, such as Carol Vorderman, for some reason never made it through our extensive quality control process. Genesis, our europop-flavoured synopsis of the beginning bit of the Bible, did.
- Ephemeris, technically our fifth album, but our first to be any good. Statistically, more than half of the song titles contained the word "of" or began with the letter S, or both. That album was definitely brought to you by the letter S and the word "of".
- Writing a song about homelessness, called Urban Sprawl, which was an attempt to be a bit less pretentious than Phil Collins, but failed on almost every discernible level. We recorded Part 2 versions for this and a couple of the other tracks on the album, and you could make a good case that they are better than their corresponding Part 1s.
- Zero. A great title, and some very good songs. Also, lots of very long and dreary songs which turned out to be impossible to sing. It might have been improved if we hadn't released it quite so quickly, but at least there were only two songs containing the word "of" in the title, and only three beginning with S this time.
- Electric Avenue, State of Decay, Tower of Babel, Britannica, Closer to the Sun, Swan Song, Blind Youth... For the first time, we had some good songs on our roster.
- Our Greatest Hits album Synopsis, which contained mainly rubbish, because we had only written a handful of good songs at that stage and we were damned if we would put them all on the same CD. We then followed this up by reissuing the first four albums, which has been proven to be the point at which global CD sales started to decline.
