For the record ...

I have been recording for about thirty years now. It hasn’t always been a matter of free coffee and biscuits in the private lounge, while a highly trained engineer replays the most recent take of a tricky middle eight, looking for stray plectrum clicks on my behalf. Oh no.

On a very early session I remember balancing the condenser mic on the case of the cassette I onto which I was recording, this fed into the sort of portable tape player more usually employed in bootlegging Top of the Pops off the telly. Local byelaws, strictly enforced by the austerity government of the time, insisted these machines were then passed on to a younger sibling for the purposes of either recording their own radio show (girls), or committing their nascent musical compositions to tape (boys) - which the latter would then attempt to impress the former with. Over the years, the technology has changed, but the general principle remains very much the same.

I put down my first full collection of songs on the best quality chrome tape I could find. This happened to be the blank side of John Martyn’s ‘So Far, So Good’, courtesy of Island Records’ attempt to halt the flood of home taping then ‘killing music’. To be honest, by the time I’d finished the album (also titled ‘So Far, So Good’) I was getting pretty good at aiming the microphone and managed to capture a fairly decent acoustic guitar sound. Particularly impressive since every time I reviewed it, I had to listen to John Martyn’s ‘May You Never’ first, as the rewind button didn’t work. Comparisons were inevitable.

Later, once I’d formed a band, an attempt to capture the lightning that made those early Magwytch** performances so sedentary, involved hiring four microphones and a disco mixer from an understandably reluctant proprietor of Whitmore’s Music. We set up the band within the lines of a badminton court in a vacant school sports hall (for the reverb, you see), plugged all four mics into the mixer, then that fed into someone’s older brother’s shiny silver cassette deck (with Dolby for extra noise reduction and a splendidly appropriate ‘metal’ tape setting). Finally, we turned up the volume on our HP guitars and then just got to playing, man - rewinding the cassette, listening to what we’d just done on headphones (the brother wouldn’t allow us his hi-fi amp as well) and then deciding whether we needed to redo it.

Once we’d rewound, done a retake and
finally agreed on a version we were all
happy with, we had to reset the tape
counter to zero so if we needed another
take of the next song, we wouldn’t go
back too far and tape over the previous
song. All of the numbers started with a
loud clunk as someone pressed ‘play’ and
 ‘record’ together, and then the sound of
footsteps as they ran back to their allotted place in the line up and assumed the position.
We ran off a few copies on a parent’s music centre with dual tape decks, Xeroxed some inlays with the letter ‘c’ carefully circled and dutifully posted one copy to ourselves (not to be opened unless in case of copyright infringement and dispute) and then waited for the A&R letters to flood in.

A couple of weeks ago I went into a friend’s home studio to do a twenty four track demo. I sat with a cup of tea and some biscuits, vaguely directing, while people sang, harmonized, double tracked and at one point, when we thought we could repeat a couple of phrases in the outro but time was getting on, cut & pasted.

Last night I went back to mix it and, by the time I got home, there was a finished copy waiting for me in my email inbox which I uploaded to Soundcloud making it available to thousands of phones in an instant.

My friend produced all of this on a box about the size of that portable cassette player from thirty years ago. Thirty years before that, Bill Haley changed the name of his backing band from The Saddlemen to The Comets.

Shane Kirk - January 2012