It's loose sometimes, but boy am I giving it a go.

After five long months, I was reunited with my drums and a lot of other instruments in February 2008 when my internet chum Matthew Cullen and his band ‘Chorus of Arrows’ came and stayed at our arts collective building in South East London. They’d been let down for somewhere to stay at the last minute, and full of gratitude, the next day they suggested we drove out to Surrey to get some of my instruments out of storage (my mother’s garage), where I’d left them when I moved out of Middlesex the previous September. I was pretty joyous, and I could finally fill my tiny handmade wooden room with my toys and tools, hanging them around the walls of my 9x10ft studio/living space, rolling out a futon to sleep on that often had to live in the corridor outside. We'd rehearse with 5 or 6 people in there sometimes, it was tight.

Except for the first track, which would otherwise be last, everything runs in chronological order. 'CHP' was recorded in early May 2008. My girlfriend of a few months said I was mad when I played it to her. She said that a lot actually, and it slowly bothered me. Meanwhile I'd been decorating our new arts space with begged and borrowed paint as we had almost no budget after the move. The hardest section of wall to cover was where the landlord had spray painted 'Dickboy' on the wall in his teens when his father still owned the place. I joked about leaving it up there and renaming the space 'The Dickboy Gallery'. A lot of the sounds for the tune were recorded in the space with its pleasing reverb. About a year later I cut a hole through my floor and ran cables into the space so I could use it as an echo chamber using a spare monitor speaker I'd picked up working at the HiFi magazine a few years before.

I had itchy feet and spent three months in Wiltshire on a bit of a whim from around mid May. Without my recording gear or computer I busied myself making films of ink in water on my camcorder, which culminated in a little art show at our arts space back in London. At the opening, Rob Bidder (bass) and I (drums), with a trombonist I met on myspace called Tim, performed a short improv set where local poet and radio jock Patrick Lyons would read instructions pulled from a hat. Things like ‘play red’, ‘play what you find most distasteful about your instrument’, ’play the way you feel about your father’, and so on, some of which features on the track, ‘We Think You Ink’.

When I came back full-time to my now-beloved South East London village, I settled in a lot more and got back to recording. A little further East, I also joined the band ‘Now’ for maybe six months, on drums. I first saw them play at the first CWM festival in Wales in 2004, where I was invited to play glockenspiel in their set and ended up on drums in the big jam at the end, where everyone in the crowd joined in, banging pots and pans, bringing in instruments and singing and rapping. It was a pretty great way to end the night.

Since starting in bands in the early 90s I'd always been the guitar player who'd hop on the drums at rehearsal when the drummer goes to the toilet. I slowly built up a kit from 2005, and by 2008 my kit was always set up in my room, usually mic’d, and I was playing with recording techniques. The room was so small, but I made do and shortly after I started calling my studio ‘Make Do and Mend’. A lot of the music here is based around the drums, whether starting with a pattern (’I Did What I Did Because You Did What You Did To Me’, ‘Life Starts In Autumn’), or layering drum parts, as on ‘Drums Guitar Bass’ and ‘Financial Times’.

I sent out a little shout on the internet for parts in Eminor when I was making ‘FT’ and got some keyboard parts from Simon Nelson and George Patterson, as well as some (highly uncharacteristically ranty) vocals from Nate Trier, which I think are amazing. I also borrowed the odd guitar from one housemate, the occasional keyboard, amp or hand drum from another, and I had a couple of days with another guy's Juno.

I wrote ‘Candle Film Soundtrack’ for my then girlfriend Zee but never gave it to her, I think I was shy, which was silly because we were dating and it was her birthday. I enjoyed making that for her, playing along on the drums to the bass loop. I played for about 25 minutes and then edited it down to my favourite bits and added guitar, a second bass, clarinet and a touch of glockenspiel. I also made a little film of a candle reacting to the movement of drums, but didn’t give that to her either. Sorry, Zee.

I overthought generally at this time and it shows in a couple of the tunes here. The others are more spontaneous things, recorded over an afternoon or two in my tiny little wooden-door clad room at the top of the stairs, when I felt a lot more free and in the moment. This six month period started with lust and then regret (commonly seen nearby each other) and ended with a fairly profound experience; I saw the universe and it was real. Maybe that shows in the music too.


IWA4TH069