Adventures in Lo-Fi

This is my mate Dan recording our second album in my bedroom in 1982. The Silent Shout was a concept album - well, I say album, it was a tape. A concept tape, about alienation and that. Sales were sluggish; only two copies were ever produced.

By today's standards studio equipment like homemade speaker cabinets, hallucinogenic carpet, a broom handle and some sellotape must seem as retro as valve amps or rickets, but we were pretty pleased with this setup. At its heart is the Tensai Studio 5000, seen here on top of the bass amp. It had six preset rhythms - Fast Rock (bip bip tss, bip bip tss), Slow Rock (bip.... tss...), Waltz, Rhumba, Beguine and one I've forgotten. Madrigal, probably. Even better, you could record to one channel on a cassette, rewind and overdub a second track, then bounce these down and add a third, and so on. In practice this got very muddy very quickly, so we rarely did more than three tracks, then played it back through that August cabinet and added further 'live' elements for a final mix which was recorded on another cassette player. So that's drums, three pre-records, vocals, BVs, lead guitar and percussion - eight tracks, twice what The Beatles had.

Dan's hair is in a transitional period between Not Looking Much Like Brian May (1977-80) and Not Looking Much Like Marty Willson-Piper from The Church (1983-5). He's holding his Epiphone Scroll. Leaning on the pre-duvet bed is my first bass. I think that may even have been its name - My First Bass by Fisher Price or Chad Valley. It came with flat black plastic strings and sounded like a stream of wet farts.

Other albums recorded in The Dan and Dave's prolific career (1980-86) included Golden Grates, You're Not Listening, The Final Conflict, A Box of Everything and FNEB. There was also the all-acoustic Songs of Love And Similar Things by our spin-off project, The Band Of The Same Name. Oh and my solo album, Politicians and People (I know, I know. I KNOW) which only sold half as well as the others.

Come September Dan and I will have been best mates for 40 years. Forty Years, bloody hell. There's talk of a reunion album - we reckon we could shift four, maybe five copies.


Postscript


Since I posted this Dan has dug out his copy of The Silent Shout, our 30-year-old concept tape about alienation and that, and armed with large whiskies and a soundproofed outhouse we sat down to listen to it. When we emerged 40 minutes later, ashen-faced and unable to make eye contact, we told our wives we had been enthusiastically strumming each other to vigorous climax, rather than reveal the deep, dark truth from our past: we were Teenage Pretentious Twats.

Steve Hannigan / No one, none to know
He's just another one / Of the units that come and go

Our protagonist works in a factory and mopes around a lot. He meets a rich girl who briefly gives him a glimpse of a better life, before dumping him again, possibly because he's such a moaner. Steve rails against the unfairness of life for a while before having a personal epiphany in a Mini Clubman and, in a stunning denouement, going back to work.

Throughout we are treated to Steve's Aristotelian search for understanding of the human condition:
What the hell am I doing here?
I should have listened to what they said
They never seemed to have anything to say
Now I'm alone in an empty bed

At one point, for no other reason than I had written a song about it, Steve goes to Paris. I reproduce these lyrics as a form of penance - those of a nervous disposition may want to look away now.

The Boulevard / Was frozen hard
And the autumn leaves in the Champs Elysees were falling
I strolled along / The Petit Pont
And dipped my toe in the stream below
It's strange / Without you I'm in Sienne
September, Paris, In the rain.

OH LORD MAKE IT STOP. I now realise that the reason we suppress painful memories deep, deep down inside where they can never hurt us is that, had I suddenly recalled the full horror of my 18-year-old self's bloated self-regard in, say, McDonald's one Saturday afternoon in the Nineties, I'd have had to stab myself through the eye with a plastic tea stirrer just to make it go away.

There's even a five-minute guitar noodle called Ennui. Ennui!

I guess teenagers should be allowed to express themselves. They should aim high, distain the mundane, explore possibilities. They should hold up their creation and say: this is mine, I made it. It is mine. It is art. I am ART.

And then they should burn it before any poor fucker has to listen to it.