Behind the Waterfall

After our fourth album Odyssey (1998), we found ourselves in an interesting situation. We had a huge backlog of songs, most of which weren't quite good enough for an album, but some did still show some promise. Meanwhile, by late 1999, we were already working on what would eventually become Ephemeris (2001), and knew that none of the older tracks would really fit alongside the new ones.

For those of you who weren't there at the time, the end of the twentieth century also saw a lot of people looking back at their past, and for us it seemed a good opportunity to finish our first period, the early days. So Ephemeris would mark the start of a new era.

Hence Behind the Waterfall, released on this day in 1999. On its initial release, it was a four-track EP, featuring Behind the Waterfall, Rome Wasn't Built, Annotated Dream, and Avalon.

The title track is typical of the era - it's actually quite good, but the lyrics are appalling. Twelve years later, we re-recorded it with a new lyric, which you might be able to hear soon. In those days, we always made a point of writing one of the tracks on our own, so Annotated Dream is one of mine, and Avalon is one of Simon's. I can't think of anything to say about Rome Wasn't Built.

Then in 2001, a few months after Ephemeris, we decided we were actually quite fond of Behind the Waterfall, and so it became the first of our reissued releases, accompanied by three more previously unreleased songs - the daft Friends in High Places, The Chaos Theory, which was only ever released in the form of a six minute long 12" version, and the inevitable closing track And Finally...

Amnesia EP

Today in 1993 saw the release of our first single ever!

If you're not too familiar with our history, what we loosely term our "career" in music had started a little over a year earlier with our debut album, the frankly dreadful Schizophrenia, and due to some problems with the record company and some general incompetence, we hadn't quite got around to releasing a single yet.

In summer 1993, we played our first live concert, in Worcester, just a short set with highlights from the first album, which was moderately well received. We recorded it, just in case it was ever going to be useful, but we didn't intend to do much with it.

With releases, we had faltered somewhat. We knew we wanted Dangerous to be the lead single, and so we started work on a set of four remixes, which over the course of one mammoth session led to our first attempt at a single, the Brain Cell EP. The two b-sides were going to be Merciful Rhythm and Seeing is Believing - neither of which actually made it onto the single in the end (Merciful Rhythm resurfaced six months later on our second single, and Seeing is Believing eventually turned up on our second album Nemesis in 1995).

The Brain Cell concept was shelved - we revisited it a couple of years later in 1995, which actually never happened either, but it was that which led to the development of the second album. For the first single, now called Amnesia, we took five of the six tracks from the Worcester gig. We were considering You are a Mirror as the second single, so we left that one off for now, and replaced it with a hastily thrown together b-side, Tunnel Vision. It had completely daft and meaningless lyrics, just like most of the things we released during this period, and there we had it: our first single. Thrown together in a couple of days.

Stream of Consciousness

Exactly fifteen years ago today, we released the second single from our comeback fifth album Ephemeris. After the success of the first single Electric Avenue, we opted for a remixed version of Stream of Consciousness as the follow-up.

The remix was fairly minor as it turned out - we just rejigged the album version a little, adding a few more beats here and there and edited it slightly. It had been four months since the album came out, and for some reason it took us a bit of time to get our act together with the second single, so the rework was a little cosmetic.

Backing up the a-side were two previously unreleased tracks. First was Elements of the Eucharist, lyrically a slightly haunting religious-inspired piece, which, as with many of the songs we were working on around this time, became a bit of a daft pop song. As you can probably tell, we're rather proud of it.

Finally came The Thief of Baghdad, which we had thought initially told the story of the thief in a very silly and irreverent way, but after it came out we had a sudden moment of realisation that it actually tells the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which was a bit of an oversight. But never mind, it's another totally daft pop song, and really that's all that matters sometimes.

Free music all round!

You'll no doubt have seen the offer of a free download of our most recent single Blood, Sweat and Tears a few weeks ago, and maybe you even managed to snag one of them yourself. If you tried at some point but found all the codes had been used, don't worry - just try again later. We've been updating the codes regularly (in fact, we just updated them a moment ago) and there are still plenty left to post.

You can also download our completely free four-track remix EP Intermission at any time, by clicking here, including an exclusive version of Eyeballing, reworked by our friend Sappy. If you download rather than just streaming, you might also find an extra bonus treat hidden on the end!

Free download!

... as in "free".

How would you like a free download? For a limited time, we're offering completely free copies of the four track version of our 2013 single Blood, Sweat and Tears. All you need to do is click on this link, and try the download codes below. If none of them work, then the codes have all been used by someone else. Simple as that!

Codes to try:

• 9bbp-xra2
• yxxb-esuc
• 3qe5-3dax
• w87f-hhrp
• skwl-5ecn
• p3jj-73se
• rdg7-5xh3
• jjdr-3qap
• 7b45-c932
• vdsb-xtlh

Here's the link again. Good luck!

Aeration

The singles for our third and fourth albums Prophecies (1997) and Odyssey (1998) were pretty much all four or six-track EPs, typically around fifteen minutes in duration. Odyssey yielded just three singles - the "different" Rangoon Fairytale, the entirely uncommercial Atlantis Rising, and finally the one obvious single on the album, Aeration.

Odyssey remains to this day our longest album, with thirteen tracks, which we quickly acknowledged as a mistake (that's why the follow-up Ephemeris only had eleven). It is, in retrospect, consistent but dull, with way too many long and downtempo songs, but the short uptempo section, right in the middle, does stand out, with The Sky at Night closing Side A, and Aeration kicking off Side B.

Having established that it would be the next single, we set about remixing it, coming up with an alternative instrumental version, Back Into the Deep, and an extended version which combined elements from the original and the instrumental, which was confusingly titled Back Into the Deep: Part II on its initial release (for the 2003 CD reissue, we changed it to Back Into the Deep: Extended, so it was a bit less confusing). We then edited the extended version down, and came up with an exclusive single mix too.

The b-sides initially included Serengeti and No News is Good News, but we thought the latter might have potential as a single, and Aeration was partly being released to promote the new remix album Iliad, so we took The Cold Light of Day off the album and swapped it with No News is Good News.

Does God Play Dice?

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Does God Play Dice? was our fifth single. Released twenty years ago today, it was the last single from our second album Nemesis (1995).

For the first time, it was just a two-track single, on a cassette tape with a Side A (an edit of the title track) and a Side B, the previously unreleased Self Destruction. This was primarily decided by the cassette stock that was available to us - a 3:28 demo tape which we could easily record over. So there was one simple rule - each track had to be three and a half minutes or shorter.

It would be nearly another year and a half before our big return with 1997's Prologue EP, and we've come to see it in a way as the end of an era. The last release of our very early days...

Interestingly, today is also the fifteenth anniversary of our later single Electric Avenue. More on that later...

Nemesis is, by the way, surprisingly not that bad, unlike our debut effort Schizophrenia (1992). Hopefully we'll be able to share it with you one day.

Something borrowed

As I explained a couple of weeks ago, we have spent a lot of the last couple of years buried deep in our past, remastering such classics as Reign of the Morons (1992), Spherical Ditch Cheese (1995), and Make Time for Vindaloo (1996).

At the same time, we were vaguely thinking about the two albums which are currently in wide distribution, Transmission (2011) and Dusk (2006), both available through our official website here. Some of the highlights are available through iTunes and Amazon Digital too, but we wondered if it might be nice for a full-length album to be on there too.

Quite what that will be hasn't entirely been decided yet, and it won't happen for a few months yet. Hypothetically, a compilation might be nice, as we haven't done one since our singles collection Synopsis, which covered our first ten years, and that was fourteen years ago now.

So right now, you find us re-evaluating our back catalogue, trying to figure out what the highlights are, and whether some of them might fit nicely alongside our newer material, whether remixed or just remastered.

If you want to see (or rather, hear) where that leads, stay tuned!

The olden days

I was speaking previously about the progress - or, more accurately, the lack of progress - on our awaited tenth album, but of course as everyone knows, things were much better when we were a lad.

Spurred on by the successful reissue of our 2006 album Dusk and its accompanying archive a couple of years ago, we have also been looking at remastering some of the material from the preceding seven albums.

Unfortunately there's a lot of work involved, as some of them aren't in particularly great shape any more, and honestly a lot of them never were. At best, they are crackly, unclear recordings, and in a number of notable instances the original recordings no longer actually exist.

On the plus side (inevitably, that statement depends on your perspective) there are something like 250 tracks to choose from - that's approximately 150 songs, and 100 remixes, second parts, and alternative versions. A lot of them have never seen the light of day before, and we're hopeful that a lot of them never will, but hidden in amongst them, there are actually one or two good apples.

So what next? More on that next time...

Album number ten

Time for an update on the long-not-awaited follow-up to 2011's Transmission, I think!

Basically, we've got more than enough good songs to get on with recording the next album, but we haven't quite managed to find the time to actually get on with it.

Also, we've noticed on the last few albums (actually going right back to 2004's single mix of Not a Million Miles) that the subsequent remixes of songs often end up being better than the originals. This might be because recording an hour or so of music for an album, all at once, is actually quite a lot of work. Anyway, there are plenty of recent examples too, in particular I'll Give You Electro, so we've decided to do something about it.

So with all of that in mind, this time around, the vague plan will be to release it pretty much as we go along, starting with some EPs, and then reworking as necessary until it takes the shape of an album. I suppose that presumably means that our recent record of releasing albums further and further apart may well continue ("recent" ones have been early 2001, early 2002, late 2003, end of 2006, and late 2011, so we aren't actually due to do anything until roughly 2018 anyway).

But what can you do? Not a whole lot, it would seem.

The year we forgot to write anything

Well, I started writing a post, and then forgot to finish it in time to post it. Apologies for the delay - normal service will be resumed; we're just not quite sure when yet. Things have, admittedly, been a little quiet recently. I was just on the verge of writing a big long post with all the major headlines in it, but then I thought to myself, why not split it out into multiple posts? That way it looks as though we're actually doing something!

So keep an eye out for the major headlines as of early 2016 over the next couple of weeks...