Although recording and mixing are what most people think of as the main jobs of producing a CD, its certainly not everything by a long shot. In the background there’s a whole load of decisions to be made and work to be done about what the damn thing is supposed to look like. While all the stuff covered in Part I was going on , we spent over a year trying to get someone to do the artwork for us. If I have learnt one thing it’s that even if you wave money at them, artists are really difficult to cajole into actually doing work! There were certainly moments where we thought we’d be joining Spinal Tap and Metallica in the “Black Album” territory. Or possibly “Mauve Album” Eventually though, local tattoo artist Bobby Long produced the version of Bone-R that adorns the cover, and Graham started the rest of the artwork, as well as the CD art. Continue reading →

With Theatre of War finally here, it seems like a good time to look back at how it all came together …

The plus side of recording your own albums is that you have the luxury of time. The downside is that with an almost infinite supply of time to tweak and refine, its almost impossible to say when something will be finished! We started the first recordings for this CD late summer 2010 with Moon On The River, which was the first song Lyndon had presented to the band. We did this song in more or less one go over a couple of weekends, as well as recording the drums for “Say Goodbye” at the same time, because we wanted to catch the vibe of the song before we started gigging it and before it became fixed in stone and we could still experiment with the arrangement… Continue reading →