Looking Back - Dusk

This is the fourth and (to date) final chapter of my Looking Back series, which brings us to from 2006 up to the present day. If you've been reading its predecessors then... well... you have a lot more patience than I have.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken we started this blog about three months before its release, so a lot has been said already about our 2006 album Dusk. But if you're joining us now for the first time, maybe it will serve as a good introduction. This will sound horrifically pretentious, but for me, Dusk is really the story of my life from roughly 2002 to 2005. Obviously you put a lot of yourself into anything you do, so this could be said of anything we've done, but I think this helps explain Dusk. I was in my early twenties, going through a lot of change, and struggling to understand who I was, and what that meant (if anything).

It's an album I'm immensely proud of, but it is very dark, and listening back with the benefit of hindsight it suffers a bit from its production. We made mistakes - some of the bonus tracks and different versions on the singles are better - but we also recorded a pretty good album.

So anyway, roughly in chronological order, my personal highlights of 2006-2009:

1. Writing Red Shadows after an amazing day walking the streets of Berlin. It's very literal - when it says "I walked along the wall today," I really did. Well, alongside it, anyway
   
2. Being inspired to write I Have Never. And several of the other tracks actually, some of which are actually verging on being quite good songs. In my opinion
   
3. Putting MP3s on the internet for the first time, and people actually listening to them
4. Writing Beneath the Silent Skies on Ilkley Moor (I took a piece of paper with me)
   
5. Working out what Signs of Life was going to be about
6. Making the artwork for the CDs, based on Simon's amazing photos. Incidentally, the sleeve for The End may not look it, but it's our most photoshopped ever
   
7. People saying we were quite good. We've been sent a lot of nice comments over the last few years, which was surprising and very pleasant
   
8. Being asked to appear on the Electraparade compilation
9. Working out the Ostkreuz mix of The End. Someone commented that we sounded a bit like Kraftwerk, so we duly made it sound more like them
   
10. Putting the iDusk EP on iTunes, and people actually wasting money on it. Thus far we have almost doubled our money on it, although we're not entirely sure how or why
    

That concludes this series of blogs. Whatever will come next?

Looking Back - Empires

Wind your way back through the postings of this blog, and you'll find one I unearthed in our archives from November 2003. It's the rather low-key announcement for our seventh album Empires.

For a long time after it came out, I was extremely unhappy with this album, but this was almost entirely unfair. There are a couple of less good tracks on there, and a lot of bad production, but there are also some of the best tracks that we've ever written.

In no particular order, my personal highlights of 2003-2005, and the aftermath thereof:

1. The rainy autumn day when I wrote When October Comes. As the British weather hammered against the window and I pondered my future, this song came very quickly.
2. Getting really emotional while recording the vocal for Not a Million Miles.
3. Recording the as-yet-unreleased Golden Wheel at Simon's old house, with him strumming a guitar, and me playing synth arpeggios.
   
4. Simon's first suggestion that Empires would be a good title. It was the name of an incomplete song, which was based around a quote from Winston Churchill. Somehow, in a world suddenly full of terrorism, imperialism, and wars that we didn't agree with, it seemed to be the perfect statement.
   
5. Listening to the completed version of Wherever You Are Now, while walking through the forests near Berlin. This will always be a special memory for me, and if we ever make a video for this song, I know exactly what it will be.
6. Working out the final tracklisting for the album, sitting very late at night in a Berlin youth hostel with a CD on shuffle.
   
7. Devising the album artwork, which for the first time used relatively undoctored photos from our holidays. We could probably do better now, but they were an important step following the Photoshop swirls of the Zero era.
   
8. Entering In Your Eyes into a BBC songwriting contest. Obviously it didn't win, but it was our first stab at trying to crack the outside world.
9. Our first forays into the world of online music. Uploading Here We Stand onto an MP3 site, and it taking six months to get approved, possibly because I used the word "Iraqification" in the description?
   
10. Lots of people, including Greek band Marsheaux telling us a couple of years later that they really liked Here We Stand.
    

Next time: we'll be coming right back to the present, with 2006-2009.

Trimming the fat

If you're the sort of person who cares, you'll find a number of tracks on our download sites have changed. To start with, I've got rid of a lot of the less popular (good) ones. Next step, possibly tomorrow, will be to start replacing them. The end result will be that a selection of the same 6 or 7 tracks will be available on all the sites.

The reason for this is simple: the tracks that we had were all over the place. They will now be all neat and tidy and whatever.

There's also some generally constructive stuff going on elsewhere, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Looking Back - Ephemeris and Zero

It was in late summer 1998 that we bought our first proper synthesiser, and then on the run-up to Christmas, a 4-track tape recorder. Together, these two events truly heralded a new era for us. We ditched everything we'd ever done before, and started from the top, recording what resulted in our fifth and sixth albums, Ephemeris and Zero.

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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".
   
7. 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.
   
8. 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.
   
9. 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.
   
10. 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.
    

Next time: 2003-2005.