Rosy.

Our manager was due to drive up from the South West, but she had to cancel due to the snow on the roads.

Things were running fairly smoothly, she told us, but sometimes she likes to come up and check we’re all OK and tell us what plans she’s made, what people she’s been talking to, what our aims need to be for the next few months—things like that. These meetings have a reputation as ending up a bit boozy, but that’s slowed down a little, of late.

One thing that has perhaps contributed to this has been a change of location. It’s been about a year now since we moved operations out of the shared house and into our palatial studio. The thing is, though… I liked that lampshade. Well, it wasn’t a lampshade as such. It was a shirt. It was a perpetually damp shirt, draped around a lightbulb.

Our manager is happy we’ve moved on. She would often stay over in the house, and I have no doubt that her drive home the next day would necessarily include a stop at a pharmacy for some kind of cream or other.

“You’re manager of Phoria, right?” The pharmacist would ask.

“Yes.”

“That place on the hill?” 

“Yes.”

A pitiful shake of the head.

“...this one’s on me.”

And our manager would limp to her car with a crooked back, smothering herself in ointment with both hands.

But I liked the place. We could kick the floor, there. Things peeled and fell apart. The house stank with the effort of slight improvement, but we were never able to lift ourselves out of the swamp. The doors all sat uneasy on their hinges—especially the ones removed from their frames and stacked against the wall, blocking the hallway. Vacuum cleaners ran, but they rumbled like 4x4s over the black encrusted lumps of chewing gum that enhanced the carpet. Tables looked like bits of trees that had rotted into shape after being thrown into the room. Cushions burst unevenly with makeshift stuffing and dusty display cases creaked every now and then, holding unread books and unused old toys found and brought in from the street for no other reason than that they needed a home.

The front garden had boat engines and a moss covered sofa with springs sticking out of it, and you had to walk through overflowing rubbish to get to the front door, which you had to break in to, because nobody had a key.

When it rained, and you were in the house, you had to put a jacket on.

We used to sit in the lounge and treat it like a railway waiting room. Any ghosts in the house no doubt looked on and grew fearful of us all. We were often disturbing and rarely sober, passing sheets with figures on showing how we were doing, discussing release strategies and whatnot before folding the pages into ashtrays and later on mopping up beer with them. Everybody smiling, sitting on the floor, laying across each other and listening to music and talking about where we were heading.

Now we do things in a chandelier strewn cathedral. The walls are pure white. There’s a picture rail. The windows are large and look out onto trees. The place is filled with antique furniture that’s comfortable. The carpet is actually fitted.

I can’t pretend it’s not nice. And I also can’t pretend there aren’t little islands of squalor that speak of who we are—but they’re islands on a calm sea. The old place was one single tempestuous bog. I loved watching the bubbles rise out of the swamp and burst. That doesn’t happen any more.

(I also love the chandeliers and the ability to breathe and the relative fearlessness with which I now enter the studio, but that’s beside the point.)

So instead of driving up, our manager booked us in for a conference call, and I joined in from home—a damp, bug infested hole in the ground near Hove seafront. Home. I drank coffee brewed in a stained espresso maker on a crooked oven that snaps the electric if you turn it up too high, and sat in unwashed clothes on a paint-stained chair while we talked about everything we were going to achieve. I cooked bacon and sniffed richly at abandoned glassware while she talked. My eyes were dry. It was cold, because of the drafts, but I wore layers and spoke calmly.

Tim

Slow-forward.

The cold bit me hard on my way to the studio.

There was plenty of work to do, but what needed doing was known, so it was very easy to put it off. It needed to be put off, in fact. We’d been slapping our foreheads against a government authorised plastic wall for months. The coffee was already brewing as I entered. The kitchen was thick with steam and bandmates.

We moved into the recording room and Ed and Trewin drank their coffee and chatted about bikes, I think. Maybe engines or something. I don’t entirely remember. I don’t altogether care about engines. I’m not one of the engine people. I can’t stand over an engine and enjoy it. I mean, not really enjoy it, like engine people do. Sometimes I think I’d like to, but then I remember that I don’t care at all. Is that clear? I don’t like engines. Am I getting through? Hello?

Seryn and I sat in silence until I put forward the idea, for no reason other than fun, of watching something I’d found the night before. I could feel the conversation winding down (like an engine), and felt very much that this slow (like an engine (which I don’t like)) start (like an engine) to the day should be maintained (like a loving relationship). 

"Do you want to see something awesome?" I said.

"Sure," they said

So, with the chilling wind howling outside, we sipped on steaming coffee in our grey, unlit recording room, and watched this video together in a singular, comfortable silence: 

That’s the voice of HAL, there. And a clear influence on many of our favourite things. It’s a cool little nugget, no? Very few engines—that’s what I like best about it.

So then we were ready to drop back into work. Sit, listen. Suggest. Maybe this here, maybe this there. Entire songs needed reworking, but nobody was rushing. There was rushing that had been done, and rushing that were yet do, but for some reason on this particular day nothing was urgent, nothing needed to be done in a panic, and the time in which to get everything worked out was plenty. Our transport was casual—unmotorised. This suited me, you could guess. Oh yes. Everything was soft. We rode the waves between projects. One beat didn’t work. We took a note. Some harmonies were too complex; too much for a person to do. Retract. Redact. Unwind the twisted thing. Slow it all down. No need to grind uphill, dear friends. No need for horsepower. Surf gravity. Make your mode of transport a stolen ASDA trolley.

This splendid day inspired a small offering, which I hope tells a story:

Nothing there was crisis,

and nothing there was war.

A deadline is a noble aim,

but ever nothing more.

Tim

No.

He still didn’t look right.

When I got in, Ed and Trewin were bickering over the implementation of our new inter-band messaging system. The system came along with a whole bunch of news email addresses, apps, and all the elements of integration that make the modern world such a great place to hang out.

To recount that actual conversation would be nothing more than the kind of tennis match you’ve heard a thousand times. Was it a tennis match, or was it an endless relay race? More like getting drunk and lost at a party. There we have it—the goings on in this band either scale the heights of an ornate skill set or devolve into the most granite-brained stupidity. And it is never possible to know which one it is at any given point in time. All we know is we breath, and we’re ugly, and there’s always something to do for somebody, somewhere. Our crunched-up and stepped-on shells have pierced our soft insides.

So Trewin was crumbling under the pressure of a new app. He was lost in the wilderness of words on a screen. I couldn’t blame him—he had been staring at the same computer screen, sat in the same chair, sleepless, dreamless, and with only a limited depth of tenderness for about seven weeks straight. What I thought was dust on the piano keyboard was actually dirt from unwashed fingers.

Ed, Seryn, and I showed him how you can share music instantly on the new system; how quick, easy, and beneficial it was once you looked at the screen and took in the words rather than tried to make them bend to your will. I wouldn’t put it past the man to call up the particular multi-national company that makes this system and—after much talking, holding, and department hopping—convince them what to change and what to scrap. I’m sure I once caught him on the phone to Heinz whining about the inevitable regression of society when the logo of a basic foodstuff impresses a childish nostalgia on an entire public. Or maybe it was him catching me.

I want to forget what I know and learn to hate what I love.

Beans.

So we settled the issue of the system. He would...basically do what he always did, and not talk to anybody anyway. Meanwhile, the file sharing system was good. He could work it. We rearranged things better to his liking while he showed us why it was pointless, terrible, and an interruption to his day.

He rolled and lit a cigarette, grimacing and hissing as he inhaled, but brightening immediately.

His eyes were bulbous, his skin grey, and his voice was that of a sad dog.

We listened to a track that needed work. We thought it was finished months ago, but on this listen something seemed a little off. Could it be that as the other tracks have been polished and buffed and improved, this one had fallen a little behind the curve? But we thought we’d finished it! This was the one about which there were no doubts! We all loved it before! What’s it doing now, tormenting us like this!?

All of our phones beeped with a new incoming message. New James had sent a message concerning Trewin’s problems with the system.

Stop being an idiot. It’s easy freaky lemon squeaky.

The track continued to play, and the meandering structure caused a loss of interest.

Trewin folded his arms on the table, smacked his head on them, and moaned.

“Oh God,” he said, “kill me now.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “just work on it and send it over.”

Tim

Yes.

When I walked in the door, he span around and eyed me gleefully.

‘I’ve had no sleep,’ he said.

‘I bought biscuits.’

‘Nice.’

I laid them on the desk among the cigarette butts stuffed straight into the table and coffee cups with whole gardens growing out of them. I sat on the piano stool, removing from it a pair of suspicious underwear.

Ed pointed at the chandeliers. He’d replaced a couple of the two-hundred light bulbs that had nearly all blown.

‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘The place looks better.’

Ed smiled as he reclined on the antique sofa. He’d hired the Rug Doctor a week before and was riding the crest of a foaming wave.

‘I’ve had no sleep. I need a cup of tea,’ said Trewin as he span around in his terrifically engineered chair. It was the kind of chair that an Italian technology-fantastist might baulk at for being too gaudy. Visibly, it was a locomotive.

Seryn walked in, handing Ed and Trewin two dirty pint glasses in which puddles of creamish liquid sloshed about.

Trewin took a glug.

‘Cold,’ he said, looking blankly at Seryn.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, ‘That's because I left them on the side for about fifteen minutes.’

‘The biscuits are nice,’ said Ed.

Seryn and Ed went to Seryn’s room to set up a new synthesiser while Trewin and I sat and chatted about very little of note. When is the album coming out? How are we? That sort of thing. Predictable. Unimaginative. Of little or no note. Trewin played the same fourteen seconds of music over and over again for the longest time, tinkering with a graphic equaliser which sat in a little box inside a little window inside a project in another window which filled a screen packed with squares and other oblongs and infinite simulated knobs drawn on to all colours of pixelated pretend equipment. The bass elements of a distant whining sound phased in and out, ever-so slightly.

The music stopped.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing any more,’ he said.

He leaped out of the chair and went to microwave his tea as an atonal trumpet sound blasted at concert volume from Seryn’s open door.

Tim

Hurdles and hoops and living.

The album is pink and fleshy and tender.

We are dusty old husks; skeletons with decomposed muscle and skin. If we move, everything cracks around us and crumbles away.

I suppose it coincides with the new year. As I have said to trusted company many times before only slightly differently, I can feel a big shift coming on. A big, thoroughly gratifying shift.

The sky is still pale but there is less flourescence in it. The coloured fairy lights in the room have flicked on. It’s my favourite time of day.

We have just come away from a meeting discussing the album and the way ahead. I have in my possession a clumsily executed photograph of the final tracklist, along with marks next to the ones that ‘still need a bit of work’.

Take-offs and landings are the most dangerous part of flying. We have been here a few times now—with previous projects—and there is no telling what might crop up over the next few weeks.

Trewin could get stuck under a manhole cover after flushing a valuable penny down the poo box and then going into the sewer to fish it out.

Ed could choke on some gratin made with cheese of questionable organic certification leading to what’s known as ‘Brighton flu’, which will necessitate a long spell on his back on a mattress delivered by a funky online start-up (i.e. a mattress retailer) being fed curly kale and wearing some of those leopard print MC Hammer pants that girls wear.

New James could take a corner so fast in his new car that his sunglasses will fly off and land perfectly on a baby, who will proceed to do a double thumbs up and say something like ‘That’s what’s happenin’ in a really low voice before some disco music kicks in. That’s New James done for a few weeks. That party’s not stopping any time soon.

Seryn could accidentally cook himself and starve to death as he waits for himself to arrive to eat his meal.

Each of these would be tragic and each of them is as likely as the next, and all as likely as everything getting finished without a hitch.

It’s not cohesive, but it’s about time we stuck things together a little less and just looked at what we’ve got. If you’re in pieces, you’re in pieces. Just be that way.

The album will come together when it’s ready to do so. It’s ripe and it’s there on the bough. It’s pink and fleshy and tender.

It’s midweek. We hope your hump-day was survivable. Sorry if it wasn’t. If there was something wrong that is within your control: make it better. There’s no point in putting it off. (Unless dinner’s ready. We’ll allow you dinner.)

Be fresh and have fun with it all,

Tim

Parks and decoration.

Brighton is cold tonight.

Happy New Year.

And we hope you had a fine Christmas.

Christmas is a time for reminiscence (and meat) (dead animals that is) (a dead thing in every house, plonked proudly on a table made from another dead thing, only for things that will eventually die to shovel it into themselves because I need it in order to live what a boring excuse that’s become for everything it’s an excuse for), but we didn’t do any of that (as I recall).

New years is a time for resolution, and new beginnings, but we’re on the tail end of finishing the album – by the time we’re ready for new beginnings it’ll be springtime, and what is there to celebrate about spring? Flowers? Literally who hasn’t seen a flower by now? Why do we lower our standards so? Flowers grow in Chernobyl.

I’ve just come back from a band session and the rather pleasant feeling is: more of the same with a bit more. We’ve hit a few periods of momentum over the past year – it’ll be nice to hit one of those again. We’ve all got it in us, we just need to keep the temperature down and see what happens. It’s true we’ve got to up our game in many ways – but it’s always been like that. More of the same with a bit more. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to learn. We’ve got to be open.

This isn’t anything new. This is just moving forward. Doing this is about standing and waiting to jump on a moving roundabout. There’s nothing more to add.

So if I’ve understood everybody correctly, I’m going to spend the next few days down the park (it’s cold, so I’ll wear my mac), trying to hop on the roundabout. I’ll also try out the swings as a metaphor for the ups/downs (forwards?) of career/life, and probably end my day early by going down the slide.

Don’t worry if you don’t read this – I won’t use this opportunity to make you feel guilty – but if you’re here then hello. I don’t know what this is but it’s going to get better.

It’s an odd ride, isn’t it?

So have fun, and stop being so careful. Quit your job (if you're looking for a sign - this is it) and go back to school or go travelling or whatever and just do it. Live in one room for a while, if you have to. It’ll be fun. What do you think you’ll be missing? There’s literally nothing here.

Tim

Put us in a square on a flat thing.

The music industry is a relentless, devouring beast. If life is a landfill (show me evidence to the contrary), then the industry is an ill-bred dog, stalking the cruel and uneven hills of waste and rust and looking for something to take in its razored teeth and shake for sport.

The dog hunts with his eyes.

We’ve always had a mixed relationship with photo-shoots. I used to consider the cultivation of a look a distraction from the cultivation of a sound. The job of a musician, I thought, was to make music. The construction of an image or brand was about selling music. It took a little while past my most idealistic years to recognise the essential link between those two activities--a bit like when you realise Santa is a lie, or that any notion of political and personal freedom is an illusion cynically exploited in order to keep you in the mental prison of this false reality.

Your devices photograph you.

While potentially deceptive (so I’ve read), appearances are important.

I have just downloaded the new GCHQ app that tells you when you’ve got a bogey hanging out of your nose.

Still, beyond the narrative, beyond the waking up at five in the morning to growl through London rush-hour traffic, beyond the eye-rolling do we really have to do this and cardboard roadside coffee that tastes like Baudrillard’s gulf war, beyond the horror of living, beyond this mournful pop-up book of imagined successes, this veil of only death, this window of colour, this loud tomb, this fuss of speed and air where love is mechanised, where hope is monetised, where even the categorisation of emotion serves as a means to oppression, where empty hollow husks of proud apes bray and pump and starve and feed and hardly bare their teeth at one another so displaced are they by the consistent, Über-like punctuality of new heavens in screens and servers, beyond the industrialised death of glorious hot chaos, well past the point of no return for any cogent thought, well beyond the soft memory of that tall cliff that we all see when sleep appears entreating us to leap into a reddish black with hands to catch us disappearing into something human but not here, not death but not quite in between release and what lonely strand tethers us to this mirage of well copywrit feculence...

...we had fun at our photoshoot last Friday!

It was a really fun and nice day!

Cheers,

Tim

 

P.S. Photos shown soon. Cool fun. Music working. 

The Fable of the Van, or 'How to Make an Album Underwater'.

We were cruising just fine, until a problem came up.

The van’s engine, until then our must trusted ally in the fight against Achieving Nothing, was sputtering, groaning, and cutting out at random intervals. Its glitchiness started just as we entered London—as if the four wheeled veteran had made an effort to wait for the best time to finally admit its frailty but, in a case of combustibilia nervosa, was guilty of a gross miscalculation.

Sometimes on failure the engine would burst into life, and roar, bringing us smiles of relief. Sometimes it would crank and its tones would veer up and down, like a hoover singing a Christina Aguilera song. Sometimes, after the engine cut out, we found ourselves riding a large, yellow, four-wheeled rock.

This blog entry tells of the first time we drifted over to the side of the road.

We got everything started again, and, making decisions on what to do, approached Blackwall Tunnel. If you’re not familiar, Blackwall Tunnel is a long...tunnel, with no place to pull over. Tons of traffic makes its way through it every hour of every day.

There were stories about people who had broken down in there, causing tailbacks for miles and grinding half the city to a halt. These stories hit the whole of London. Some wanker’s broken down in Blackwall Tunnel...

It was rush hour, and after numerous delays we were running late for our gig at OSLO. We had to risk getting all the way through. Cars were piled up on either side of us, trailing down into the dark entrance. The opening scrutinised us like an eye. It scowled. It knew what we were up to.

‘That’s the point of no return...are we sure we’re going to do this?’

To our left was the final turn-off before all traffic was funnelled into the black by a hundred signs.

‘We don’t want to be the ****’s who break down in the tunnel.’

‘How long will it take us to get around to another crossing?’

Phone’s were whipped out. Sat-navs smashed with sweaty palms.

‘In this traffic? About forty-five minutes to get there, and then we’ll have to get to the venue from there aswell.’

‘Right. I guess we don’t have a choice, then.’

And then the engine died.

‘Oh no...’

We drifted forward a few feet, restarted the engine, and scarpered off the main road on the last turn-off, out of everybody’s way, to pull over, spend five minutes on our lives, and make a decision.

Everybody had something to say. Six people all trying to figure out whether they themselves were stupid. Who was the most wrong person here? What’s the gamble? What’s the here and there? How long to wait for a fix? How long to take an alternative route? Do we run the same risk whatever we do? How late can we afford to be? What’s sunk? What’s up?

We are, when it suits us, a democracy.

Four votes to two: we go through the tunnel.

Ed’s arms are folded.

I’m jumping around the cabin.

‘You just have to believe, Ed. We’re all on board. If you don’t believe, then it falls apart. If we all do it, we’ll make it through. Trust me. That’s how it works.’

‘It doesn’t though, does it?’

‘No. But YES! DO IT ANYWAY. FEEL IT. BELIEVE IT. COME ON!’

‘It’s an engine, Tim. An engine that’s going to get us into trouble.’

I believed in that engine, and I believed in my bandmates.

We turned onto the main road again, ready for the great eye to take us in like a tiny photon, indeterminate, of unknown status, either a particle of success or a wave of unmitigated failure. Breakdown inside the eye will mean the gig is off, and London stops.

We passed the point of no return.

‘COME ON!’ We all chanted. Ed rested his head on one arm.

‘She’s been fine since we last started her,’ Trewin said. He revved the engine and it purred.

The traffic slowed as four lanes merged to two.

COME ON.

Once the lanes had merged, there was space. The traffic kept moving at a steady pace. The entrance to the tunnel moved over us like an eclipse, and from then on it was all concrete, tiled artery and grim, artificial roadside light.

Ed clenched his fist. He was silent.

The rest of us shouted.

‘COME ON! WOO! WE CAN DO IT!’

And we all believed into our bellies and we all starting singing football chants. There were three things to the experience: the doors of the lorry in front of us; the ochre warp of the tunnel walls passing on each side; and the sound and sensation of song and will in that cabin, driving us forward. We were already at the end, tasting victory. We had already succeeded. We were over on the sweet otherside, in the sun, nowhere to go but forwards in every direction. There was no questioning it. We had the sheer volume of voices on our side. We had taken our gamble, together, and we had won.

But we hadn’t. Yet. The tunnel was a long, and soon my throat cracked. Nothing changed. We saw no progress. After a few minutes, the white lorry, moving at the same speed at us, appeared static—a square void hovering in focus. The tunnel walls no longer passed in blurs but were blurs, like paintings. It had all turned to simulation; film set. Now our songs served not only to take us above the river where we could breathe but also to make the inside of this cabin real. We asserted not only our beliefs but the existence of those beliefs. We made ourselves real and looked at each other with doubts about our destination. We had fallen victim to bravado and brain chemistry. What were we doing? We kept singing, up and down. We should have called for help. The engine stayed smooth, but we faltered. We're not going to make it, are we? We were lost, on a path with only one road...

And then the pitch of light changed, from pub-tooth yellow to pearlish white, around the outside of the white lorry that now looked dirty and real.

‘YES!’

‘COME OON!’

‘VINDALOO...VINDALOO...’

The traffic stopped and we could see the ridges of the tunnel’s round exit.

‘I can’t believe we’ve done it.’

The traffic moved again and we moved off.

And then, twenty metres shy of the tunnel's exit, the van’s engine went dead.

‘NOOO!’

We cranked the thing and pumped the gas as the white lorry sped away from us. We drifted forwards shiftlessly, like a piece of debris lost and aimless in space. We chanted and hollered at the engine, at the world…

‘There’s a big guy behind us,’ said Trewin.

And the big guy blew his horn as we slowed:

PPPHHHHPHRPRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.

Which echoed down the tunnel.

‘...Christ.’

We were almost to a standstill, losing all momentum. Cars were slipping by us on our right, with ease.

COME ON.

We all shouted at the top of our lungs, cajoling each other and ourselves.

Ed shifted forward in his seat, an energetic smile on his face, completely in the throes of a new emotion.

Other cars were beeping around us.

The van stood still. Trewin cranked the engine.

‘Alright! I believe! I believe!' said Ed, 'We can do it! Come on, Buttercup!’

Our van is called Buttercup.

And we all called her name at the top of our lungs.

...

POWER.

And we roared out of the tunnel, almost rearing on our back wheels, beeping our horn. Trewin threw his arm out the window, clenching his fist, and the big guy behind us, a huge metal tanker, blew his horn again, short and repeating along with us. We caught up to the traffic and settled in the London evening light, ten minutes away from OSLO.

We arrived on time, and, as the venue had no lift, carried our gear up six flights of stairs in silence.

Tim

P.S. The album will be done. We have a date. What that date means, we do not know. Whether we get there in time depends on whether we can will ourselves across the river to the other side of the tunnel. Eh? Eh? Do you see?