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TALKING BOLLOCKS AND CUTTING
LOOSE
How the hell did we get here so quickly? It’s the start of
2010, bloody freezing in my studio, and it seems like barely this
morning that I was last writing.
Well, where do I start with apologies? Having said that, this time
last year, I would endeavour to write more blogs, look what goes
and happens. Not a dickie bird for a full 12 months. Of course I
blame the economy, and my temperamental interface mate Mac, but
the truth is that time is just slipping through my boney cold fingers
like so much melted snow.
As much as I’ve missed you, my main reason for coming out
of semi blog retirement is that the band’s new album is finally
with us. I say finally, as the music was finished in October, but
what with artwork, mastering, pressing, admin and general heel dragging
to deal with, it seems like an aeon since we started it.
It’s called Cut Loose, has a beautiful cover, and is full
of 11 great Mustangs originals. What? You want to know more..? Oh
ok then.
The genesis of a Mustangs record is always a fairly natural thing.
We finish one album, gig it for a year or so and then start thinking
about songs for the next one. From this cycle a pattern of one album
every two years seems to have developed. Cut Loose was no different.
We played the last album, Nothing Stays The Same, to punters all
over the UK and on into the continent. The record was a good one,
and had some fantastic reviews, but most importantly it gave the
live show a handful of stone cold (I know that feeling) show stoppers
that will live on in the set for years to come.
But through the back end of 2008 and into 2009 I was living an
itinerant lifestyle, and one of my stopovers was Ben’s place.
Inevitably, we’d stay up long into the night drinking red
wine, listening to old vinyl records and getting the guitars out.
Oh, I forgot to add that we’d talk an inordinate amount of
bollocks to each other too. We’d both have little guitar licks
and riffs that we had come up with in moments of inspiration, often
fuzzily recorded for memory on our mobile phones, and we’d
play these to and with each other, sorting the wheat from the chafe,
and fine tuning melodies and guitar lines until we knew we had a
handful of potentials.
Next stop, rehearsals. JB would bring in an old creaky tape machine,
we’d bash through the numbers one by one, knocking them into
a full band arrangement until we could find that one sweet spot
between space, power, energy and restraint. Interestingly, the longer
the band has been together, the quicker we have found that spot.
With the numbers ready to roll, Ben and I set about researching
what kind of sound we wanted to achieve on the record. This involved
going back to his living room and vinyl record player, and listening
intently to hundreds of our favourite albums while drinking barrel-fulls
of Old Speckled Hen. It was hard work, but it paid dividends. After
talking yet more bollocks to each other, we could start to hear
the common themes in the production on the records we loved: Joe
Boyd’s Fairport albums, Led Zeppelin, classic Neil Young,
and many more. They all had a ‘room’ sound, that you
could hear on every whack of the snare. In all those records there
was space, power, energy, restraint. Bingo, we just had to record
the sound of the band, live, in a good room.
So at the start of September 2009, all rehearsed up and ready to
roll, the band crammed into Derek’s country pile, deep in
the West Sussex green leafery. On the first night we set up the
gear, plugged the guitars in and ..hit the pub. You can work too
hard, sometimes, you know.
But we had already decided to record the album live in just two
days to try and capture a spontaneous dynamic atmosphere that we
thought, as good as they were, may have been missing from the previous
albums. We spat out take after take until each track had the right
feel. JB thundering away in the stairwell under one mic (thanks
Bonzo), Ben’s bass buzzing and booming from an old fender
Bassman. Me in the middle of the room, singing until my throat was
hoarse, the sound of the instruments spilling over into the vocal
mic only adding to the electric energy in the air, an energy we
were all hoping was going down on to tape. Or 42 bit digital binary
code, as it is nowadays, but that doesn’t quite fit the vibe
now, does it.
Fast forward through artwork cockups, lost emails, awol record
company execs and a whole litany of other obstacles that were eventually
overcome, and Cut Loose finally arrived, looking splendid and sounding
even better.
This is our favourite Mustangs record yet, and I think you’ll
agree with us. Why it may even be a perfect record to stick on,
kick back with a big glass of red wine….and talk utter bollocks
to.
Hope to write again more soon
Adam
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