amyblue

Amy Blue: “Home Made”

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Clapham Junction Doesn’t Like The YYYs

We’re just in the process of buying an 8-track digital input so we can start recording a lot of (better quality) in the rehearsal space. Over the past seven years we’ve relied primarily on Simon’s slowly-dying cassette recorder that captures things in a rather sporadic fashion (plus you don’t know if it’s stopped or not halfway through a jam). We could theoretically put out a lot more free stuff that covers our other interests.. people generally aren’t fussed about instrumentals or weirdness unless they go looking for it. It’s C-Side material at best. But if it’s free, well.. score.

In terms of the new record we’ve got 9 songs recorded, one of which will need a re-record as it wasn’t our best take of the song (we’ve grown apathetic, as we’ve been playing it for 5 years now), plus we some newbies that are yet to be recorded: the fatalist, the fortress/kill them with death (it’s SABBATH), scissors (part 2… a shoegazey slip of a song), forcing the end… some more i forget the names of. We have so many songs and haven’t played the majority of them live as they’re either too complicated or sound quite weedy without a wall of overdubs. We’ll never get away from that, but we’ve tried.

In other news, I watched the Final Solution episode of The World At War last night and it put me off going to sleep. There are no words really.

If I ever get back to blogging more regularly, I’m going to make this a writing blog as I’ve got a few things I’d like to waffle about. But right now it’s Sunday and I want to kill some zombies in Left 4 Dead.

Amy Blue: “Human Cannonbomb”

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Recently we played a show at the Brixton Windmill, organised by Dan Ormsby of ‘4 of 5 Magicians’ fame. We were up first on the Sunday and had to cover two songs by a band I’d barely heard a month before, The Butthole Surfers. Simon and T*** were pretty familiar with them, having more of a grasp of the early 90s American alt scene, whereas I never really had the chance to get into that era at the time as I was far too young. Coming back to it, and in particularly to what the Buttholes were doing, I can’t help but feel slightly short-changed. Noise “experiments” don’t generally make for interesting listening, and the first Buttholes record (the one with all the distended arseholes on, or stomachs) didn’t grab me at all. I was in search of a tune, and found none.

Later on things seem to get more interesting, and on the Locust, Abortion… (whatever it’s called) record there was at least one tune that I got into— ‘Human Cannonball’, which has a killer riff and nice scuzzy sound. Simon picked the impossible track ‘Something’ which came from a terribly recorded, almost bootleg LP. Being a fan of screamy stuff, he took to it like a goat to water. We probably rehearsed the tracks about twice, maybe three times, and then performed them live. Mine was arse; I forgot the lyrics to verse two and the ‘lift’ that was needed to give it more punch wasn’t quite there. I read them from a piece of paper to save further faffing, foregoing any sense of dignity or decent stage presence. ‘Something’ was much more enjoyable to play.. we pretty much survived the thing by making noise, and Simon headed off-stage to annoy the punters by screaming into an unplugged mic. Classy.

Next up, a rehearsal where we run through only new/half-finished ideas in the run up to recording album #2. It’s a very different beast from ‘The Fortress & The Fatalist’.

Amy Blue: “TFTF is on iTunes”

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Been a while since I last blogged. Can’t be arsed basically, but there’s been some events in motion, so may as well record ’em.

‘The Fortress and The Fatalist’ has gone off to the great big iTunes heaven in the sky and should be released in a week or so, artwork included. Very strange… I’ve no idea who will buy it or listen to it randomly. It’ll probably depend entirely on the reviews and if people think the record is good (or shit). The CD side of things has been more complicated, what with me having to learn how to use InDesign completely on the fly and working through hundreds of images to find the best ones that suited the piccy/lyrics/stuff idea. Which was pretty vague to say the least. But it’s looking rather nice and colourful, we had space for thank you’s and hello’s. Job done.

‘Who’s Wings?’
‘They’re only the band the Beatles could’ve been!’

We spent yesterday rehearsing in the sweatiest, most evil rehearsal space known to man. I felt like I was about to pass out from heat exhaustion during a rather long bit of playing. Absolutely buggered, I was. Took quite a while to get to, but it was clean. That’s a really unusual thing for a London rehearsal space. Most of them look like they’ve been befouled by Ostrich rapists. The place was also locked down like Fort Knox with the exit code being the date of the Battle of Hastings.