Studio Kinda Lousy

I know why Tim’s here. He’s my brother. I know why Dave’s here. He’s Tim’s best friend. I guess Fiona turned up because she’s a professional. She’s been on other records. She was one of the backing singers on a top 10 chart hit by The Beat Masters or House Masters or some such 80s dance act. (I should look this stuff up, but hey, I’m enjoying the unreliable narrator thing at the moment). I’m not quite sure why the drummer turned up, but I guess it’s a good thing that he did.

Anyway, let’s back track.

Where are we? 

Thornton Heath. South London.

When are we? 

198- ooh, let's say 1987.

Why are we here? 

Good question.

*

There was a band (a collective?) called the 82 Downers. I can’t tell you their story, only my interaction with it. I believe they began life in Coventry, where my brother had done a degree and then been a student union rep for a year. The 82 Downers were a group of students who shared a house in Coventry and made music. And then they were just Tim and his friend Dave and they’d gone from Coventry to Dalston in east London. They were now trainee teachers.

In their downtime they were just having fun, writing and recording songs to pass the time of day. Sweet songs. Mad improvised instrumentals. Joke songs. Guitar and vocals. Sometimes piano. Bongos or pots and pans for the rhythm track. All recorded via a microphone that had been salvaged from the mouthpiece of an old telephone. Added ambience came via the sounds of the traffic, often the buses, passing outside the open windows of their shared flat that was located above a hair salon by the main Dalston Kingsland Road.

On one occasion I visited and sat in on a session. My cheap Casio keyboard can be heard on some of the later 82 Downers recordings. Not being played by me, so I guess I must’ve loaned it out at some point.

There used to be hours of 82 Downers recordings. Everything was committed to tape. Very lo-fi, charmingly lo-fi. I didn’t own any of this stuff, but I did make copies of some. I had a best of compilation on a TDK C-90 cassette. Still have. It’s a time capsule now, I guess. The original creators are lost to us.

In that same flat, where Dave still lived after Tim had moved out to Enfield, I did play on a session. It wasn’t the 82 Downers. As a trio we’d adopted the name Monoshock, which was the name of a company who made motorbike parts. Dave was a motorcyclist, so the name came from him. It wasn’t important. We weren’t planning to start a band. I was only there for a day. We had no songs, so we just made stuff up. I played some basic keyboard parts on my cheap Casio. Tim and Dave did the heavy lifting. It was fun. It was captured on tape and then we all went home. Apart from Dave, who was already at home.

Monoshock were a one off, but I’d begun trying to acquire a band for my newly formed record label. I wanted people with some actual musical abilities to supplement my own non-existent ones.  And thus was born – deep breath – Dancing From The Neck Down.

Yes. Really.

You can see why I took over naming duties after that.

Tim had moved to Ponders End. The long, narrow house mentioned elsewhere. He’d graduated from recording on a simple tape recorder, via scrap parts of a telephone, to a four track portastudio and a proper microphone. Friends would come round for ad hoc jamming sessions. The cumbersome name related to one such session where Tim was recording his vocals with headphones on (to stop feedback from the backing track). Getting into the vibe of the song, someone had described him as literally dancing from the neck down…

The sessions only really became more focussed because I had this longing to be in a band. And I wanted material to bulk out my catalogue for the record label. I guess I nagged enough for things to happen. At the heart of DFTND were Tim and Dave. They’d been writing songs together for years. Dave worked as a motorbike courier and he co-opted a fellow courier named Trevor to join us. Trevor arrived with a violin and added a different dimension to the sound. I thought this was a great direction to go in. Unfortunately Trevor didn’t want to play the violin. He was taking guitar lessons and the next time he turned up he wanted to be a guitarist. He wanted to play flashy solos on top of the simple bass and rhythm parts that Tim and Dave provided.

Tim was a good guitar player, but he’d settled in as bassist to keep the peace and for a quiet life. So musically the band were being pushed in opposite directions by myself and Trevor, even though it was Tim and Dave that wrote most of the songs and had 90% of whatever talent we might claim to possess.

Fiona became the final piece of the puzzle. She was another courier. She was a friend of Trevor’s. She was a singer. Had done session work for other people. Had been on a hit record. She liked the songs my brother had written. She added a layer of class to our ramshackle music.

For a brief period we became a band in development. We held regular weekend sessions at Tim’s, running through our small repertoire of songs over and over again in an attempt to hone them into something serviceable. We inevitably pissed off the neighbours – a Greek guy and his partner Alice. The Greek guy was a musician too, so at one point it became a war of attrition, where he would play his own songs loudly from across the narrow divide.

This situation didn’t last long. I’d engineered an end point for phase one of DFTND by contacting a fanzine editor and convincing them to distribute a 7” record with their next edition, the cost of which I would pay for. It was going to be a 4 song ep, 2 tracks from my electronic project 91 Vibrations and 2 tracks from DFTND. We booked a session at a  recording studio in Thornton Heath, corralled another colleague of Trevor’s to come along and play drums, and prepared to launch ourselves on an unsuspecting world.

*

I had a splitting headache that day. Enfield to Thornton Heath was a torturous cross London journey that involved two separate overground lines and a trek around the Circle Line. We were hauling the 4 track portastudio so we could mix the already recorded 91 Vibrations tracks on to a quarter inch master tape.

What we didn’t know at this point was that Trevor had been in a serious accident the day before. He usually drove a car for his courier work, but for some reason he’d chosen to motorbike on that day. Bad choice. Now he was in hospital with two broken legs.

Once we found this out from Dave, we naturally wondered if Fiona would show up. Or the drummer. Especially the drummer. Trevor was the only point of contact for them. This was all pre mobile phones and texting. If Trevor was in hospital they might reasonably assume the session had been cancelled.

*

Things started out okay. I’d arrived with my brother a couple of hours ahead of the rest of the band. We were getting those other two tracks mixed. The studio guy wasn’t interested in the weird music we’d made, but he did the nuts and bolts job of getting the tracks mixed and put on to master tape. So far, so good.

After that was out the way, we waited to see who would turn up. Luckily everyone did. I even had an unworthy thought that things had in one sense turned out for the best. We would be missing Trevor’s noodling guitar solos, but the songs were undoubtedly (in my view) better without them.

We were new to working in a professional studio. (Well most of us, the drummer had no doubt performed this kind of session work all over the place and Fiona had been involved in a hit record). It was intimidating for me. We acceded meekly to the orchestrations of the producer. He spent hours getting the drums set up and sounding the way he felt they should sound. Unfortunately the way he felt they should sound was some overblown gated reverb mess that people like Phil Collins had somehow made fashionable. This for a band who at one stage featured a guy hitting two cardboard boxes as our rhythm section. (The cardboard boxes sounded much more in keeping with the music we made).

Once drums had been laid down for our two songs, most of our time was up. With barely any leeway for retakes, the rest of the band had to record their parts and get out of there after a hurried mixing session. I’m sure we’d have done fine in a different studio with a different guy (or woman), but I’d simply selected somewhere that was affordable and within range of where everyone lived, and hoped for the best.

I never recorded in a pro studio again from that day onwards.

The finished songs certainly sounded as though they’d been well recorded. No hiss or noise or bum notes. Plenty of reverb. Enough to sink a battleship. We sounded like something, but we didn’t sound anything like the band we were. And I still had a splitting headache. But I guess at least both my legs were intact.

*

So what happened next?

Nothing.

I’m sure we all went our separate ways at the end of that day with the intention of continuing as a band. Fiona was keen to try writing songs with my brother. I probably had visions of us performing live at some point. There were records to be pressed from the master tapes I’d acquired that day. But…

The truth is the home recordings we’d made as DFTND sounded infinitely better – if way cheaper in quality – than the over produced stuff the studio had left us with. I don’t know what the fanzine guys did with the copies I sent to them, but if I had to guess they probably dropped them off at the nearest skip.

We never reconvened as a group at Tim’s house. It would never have worked anyway. One of our last sessions together had devolved into an argument between myself and Trevor as to what type of music we should be making. The other three weren’t invested enough to get involved and frankly I don’t blame them.

A few months later Fiona had a showcase solo gig at a trendy London nightclub. Trevor was there to film the whole event, but forgot to take the lens cap off the camera. Sometime after that he apparently went out to buy a pint of milk and didn’t return home again for over two years. That’s rock ‘n’ roll for you, folks.

Meanwhile back in Ponders End, Alice split up with the Greek guy and peace and harmony largely reigned for both households from that point onwards.