After I left music college I took a crappy local job in my home town so I could concentrate most of my time on my band back then. We worked hard rehearsing up to four evenings a week at the drummer’s house, a most desirable abode, conveniently detached with no neighbours to annoy, where one of the front rooms had become the local unofficial best free rehearsal room.
After a while we decided we were ready to record our first demo of three tracks and to save money did it in the living room of the drummer’s house. We had all our gear there, a sufficient desk and DAT recorder and a friend of the band who was suitably gifted to be our engineer so we were sorted.
When it came to recording the vocals I recall an inspired feat of ingenuity. As in most studios we wanted to capture the vocals in a sound proofed booth with as dead a sound as possible. So we upended the two large 7 foot leather sofas in the living room and sandwiched them together resembling a sort of upholstered Tardis. I was then ordered into the contraption, which was quite cosy at first but soon became extremely stifling, Once inside the remaining gaps were cemented with duvets and cushions. A small gap was left to squeeze through a microphone and then Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.
So in my quickly assembled upended leather coffin, in almost pitch blackness, buffeted by the fumes of ancient take-aways, stale dried sweat, cigarette ash, spilt alcohol and sweating like a porn star, I recorded my three vocal tracks.
Oh the hidden glamour of the penniless musician.
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