Oh hai there. It's been a while since the last blog update, but we Coles' have been keeping busy. We've been frolicking about on farms and rolling around drunk on village greens and we also now have some songs recorded with the full band, which are available on our myspace. Do check out. In all we recorded 4 tracks: The Deer Song; 5,4,3,2,1; Last Days of The Summer; and Small Rooms.
Hopefully we will record Little Miss Sunshine too, and once that song is nailed down and all 5 tracks are mastered we shall endeavour to do a little pressing of a CD EP, which people can listen to on their hi-fi ghettoblasters from here all the way to the Don Valley to their blessed hearts content.
The recording session was conducted upon Hill Farm in Steventon, at Truck Studios. Hill Farm, famous for it's Truck Festival and awesome sunsets and drunken moments of fun, is a strange place when there is no festival happening. However there was an amateur rally going on at the time to provide some distraction. And distracting it was, because their savage little souped up Vauxhall Novas were quite loud and were blatantly disregarding the local speed limit.
Joe Bennett, who used to be in Goldrush (and could probably be called 'Mr Truck'), and currently plays in Dusty and The Dreaming Spiers, put his skills to the test by making us relatively novice recording artists bash out 4 songs in just one day. Which I think we did pretty well all told, and I'm quite proud of them as our first tracks. We intended to essentially try to create a really decent demo, and I think we've managed that. Joe helped massively and made us all feel at ease and confident in what we were trying to do, so big thanks to Joe. He also drilled into us knowledge of the quite shocking amount of wasted energy that is used when a kettle is re-boiled soon after it has already boiled. Something I have taken on board and notified my good friend Ciara about when she tried to reboil an already boiled kettle at work the other day. I demanded it was not reboiled. Lessons have been learnt.
We spent the first day amongst little mountains of carbonated soft drinks and confectionary and I genuinely felt like my stomach might explode due to the fizzyness of it all. I also had a secret weapon though, some baby bell cheese, which helped regulate the acidity a little, and i was surprised at my subconscious cleverness with regards to that. We ate in style in the evening however, with the underappreciated al fresco dining that is pot noodles sat on a hay bail. After that was eaten, i pretty much felt like a badgers arsehole. Next time, i'm going to be better prepared with regards to foodstuffs.
Amongst all this frivolous junk food consumption we managed to record the songs in pretty swift style - something we needed to do in order to get the 4 tracks completed in time. Martin, who plays the guitar with the 4 chunky strings, had to work during the day, so he didn't arrive until around half 8. Because martin has skills akin to that of an experienced wizard however, he nailed his bass lines all in one take. Job done in about 10 minutes for Martin. Heroic performances.
The second day in the studio consisted of a few finishing touches and the mixing - the 'sitting around a lot and stroking the beard' phase. We basically made sure that the part in the song Small Rooms where Ruben has made the sound of 'mario collecting gold coins' was at a nice volume, and other things like that. We added a few more vocal tracks and some handclaps here and there too, and the icing on the cake was provided when Joe got involved with his trumpet......and created a beautiful, melancholy, lonely trumpet line over the top of the deer song. Job done.
Within one week we had our first radio play with the results of our work in the studio, which was quite surprising and made us all do pretty epic smiles. Apparently BBC6 are going to whip The Deer Song on too this week.
We hope you like the songs. We are writing some new tracks at the moment, a couple of which we will air at our next gig, which is also our first headline show, at the Wheatsheaf on the 20th October.
In other news, with regards to friends and bands and stuff, it looks like I may be doing another temp stint in the hit band We Aeronauts for a while, which should be fun (providing of course it doesnt clash with the day job of the coles). The Aeronauts are currently recording their debut EP. It will probably come out in the new year so that they can be in all of those top 10 artists to watch for 2010 lists....as Greg Aeronaut so humbly put it in a radio interview - which he gets away with, because it's probably true.
Alphabet Backwards have their mini album for sale on itunes now too, if you want a nice slice of sunshine cider and shagging to get you through the bleak midwinter. Jonquil meanwhile have been spreading calypso vibes through continental europe and are currently recording some amazing stuff in a basement in the West Bank town of Jericho, which is literally going to fuck you all up with feelings of wow. Their blog is here.
The Gullivers also have a beautiful, fragile and gorgeous EP, Legerdemain (which translates as sleight of hand, I googled it) just out, which I'd recommend indulging in. Oh and Birminghams finest NME stars Ace Bushy Striptease, who have helped us get our first gig in Birmingham in November, did this thing, which is just far too wonderful to not CLICK HERE (stick with it....)
Take care of yourself, and take care of the ducks
Mark x
