amyblue

Amy Blue: “2008 FAIL”

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We’re nearly at the end of the year and I feel that I’ve achieved practically nothing. After the positive 2007 (getting things published, finding Lex, recording the new album, etc.) this year has been pretty much a constant bummer. There have been some highlights, like trips to other continents, walks on beaches, eating a lot of houmous, but I’m hoping next year will be more exciting, challenging and inspiring. Note to self: write more songs. Note to self #2: write more songs that don’t sound like other bands or other songs you’ve already written.

Shit.

My friend Jen from work is leaving on January 9th. She brought the following ridiculous thing into my life: Fail Blog. The best thing I saw on it was MARRIAGE PROPOSAL FAIL. Absolutely horrendous, and featured my new bestest pal, Consolation Bear. God bless ‘im, and her.

Amy Blue played one of three(ish) shows this year. Here’s a video from the last show of Simon’s song Amy Dates Destiny. It’s the fifth track on the album.. a reasonably upbeat song for us, melodic, intriguing lyrics, and of course any excuse for us to put loads of fuzz and feedback on the end. God forbid we become formulaic!

Good news though. The album is finally (yes!) finished and we’re just waiting on Rich (Random Colours) to send over the final mixed down wav files. In the last trip to the studio, we belted through six tracks, doing a bit of top and tailing.. fixing the odd blip and click, and then mixed two tracks from scratch that were bothersome. It’s come out better than I expected – very powerful, very loud, and it should make for a good listening experience if you dare attempt to. Pop in places, dark, distorted as all hell, and featuring a song about Ipswich prostitute murderer Steven Wright. It’s a Xmas stocking filler for 2009.

The final task is to finish putting all the artwork together, cropping and photoshopping the hell out of everything and maybe even doing 90s things like TYPE LYRICS OVER THE TOPS OF DEM. Or maybe that’s so played, and we need to paint the words on in our own juices. Maybe it doesn’t matter, as most of the cunts we send these to will probably not even use them as a coaster. I dread to think how many live out their days in a bin in some wanker’s office. Hopefully not SPIN magazine’s either.

Thank you to you if you came to the shows this year. You poor bastards. Though I think they were the best yet. Well done Lex on producing a wonderful little child. Thank you band for working so hard. See you all in 2009.

Amy Blue: “It’s art, FFS!”

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I’ve been spending more time looking at the world around me over the past month trying to find a strong image for the album cover. Last week, Freya and I took a trip to Greenwich, the old home, and she snapped photos for a couple of hours with her digital SLR and medium format. The ‘proper’ pics we won’t see for a while, and I’m sure the ones of me will make me look like a complete cockspanker. To make things even more metaphysical, and I’m not even sure I used that in the correct context, I took pictures of her taking pictures for the album sleeve. Pointless, but still rather amusing as we got utterly soaked in the pissing Sunday rain.

Bizarrely enough, there are sphinx(es) in Crystal Palace park, the picture here is one I took on the old mobile. In the same year as Albert Fish’s execution at Sing Sing prison, 1936, the Crystal Palace burned to the ground. Not much is left there except steps and wire fences now. I took about 10 pictures there recently as the remains of what was probably something quite splendid didst intrigue me. Definitely the sort of place we’ll have to troupe back to to do really naff posed band shots. Cringe.

Freya went beyond the call of duty. She was attacked by midgies down by the Thames (the picture of that is priceless but I won’t be uploading it). Interesting aside: the street sign on the left is CROWLEYS WHARF. How he got a bit of street named after him, I’ll never know.

Final mixes should be done in the next few weeks! W00t!

Amy Blue: The Making of ‘The Fortress & The Fatalist’

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I thought I’d get down some of my thoughts about the making of the album before I forget. I have such a shitty memory by this time next year I will have probably forgotten that we’ve even recorded an album… or the fact that I have a blog about it too.

The title, The Fortress & The Fatalist has been knocking about for a while now. It came up in a coversation with Simon and myself one day when we were walking through Greenwich park sometime early in 2007. Our next record following the Amy Blue EP needed to be more of a statement (at least for ourselves) and build upon whatever interest we’d generated following the whole “Baker Demos scam/fiasco/PR stunt/whateveryouwanttocallit”. Of course, now we’ve sat on things we’ve probably missed the boat on capitalising on that (the “Baker Demos” was leaked by us on a defunct torrent site back in December 2006, 6 months before the first Pumpkins reunion show in Paris and 7 months before the release of Zeitgeist). Simon came up with ‘The Fortress’ as a title. I thought it was a great title… somehow the extra words slipped in there. Make of it what you will. At least having the title gives some sort of unity to the project.

When writing some of songs for the record the year before, I went ahead and did the unusual thing of coming up with a concept and a huge list of song-titles before I’d even committed pen to paper on the lyrics, or even picked up a guitar to strum a single chord. This was a way of lying to myself that there was something already there to be listened to, I just had to chip away at the ether to give the songs form. Songs like ‘The Yellow House’, ‘The End of the World’, ‘Speak of the Devil’ and ‘White Noise’ were all conceived in title back in mid-2006. The songs themselves turned up much later. They were actually taken from, or modified, from chapter headings off one of the Millennium (the US TV show by Chris Carter) DVDs.

After Lex joined in February 2007, we spent a long time trying the songs different ways. ‘White Noise’ for instance began as a sort of Radiohead-esque electro track (according to my friend Andrew) that had a drum track, verse and that was pretty much it. In the rehearsal room, Lex bulked this up with a really heavy 4/4 beat. This seemed to work at first… as we progressed through the song, we would speed up until the whole thing turned into a car crash of noise, feedback and symbals. For a live show, this would be spectacular (or nonsense, depending on who you are); but on record, I didn’t think it would work. So I started rejigging the structure… the intro would be a lie, keeping that stock beat, then suddenly speeding up and slapping you in the face with a wet fish. I would sing verse one, then we would skip to a grungey chord progression, and then I’d pass the book to Simon to let him vent. The end section goes into a spacey breakdown and finally into that wall of noise that we all loved to play (it used to go: verse/riffs/noise/verse/riffs/noise/end). It was a truly collaborative effort from everyone in the band (at least, the Holy Trinity as Danny was starting to miss a lot of rehearsals in the run up to the studio sessions we’d booked).

Simon did a fairly comprehensive studio diary over at the official site (defunct link), so I’ll talk about other crap that comes to mind from when we did our recordings. A year after the sessions, Rich Johnson, who was our engineer during the three sessions, is mixing both ‘Leeches’ and ‘The Yellow House’. We may go back to the studio to remix and master sometime in the next month, before we embark on a mini tour of the capital and possibly beyond.

Back in October of 2007, Simon, Lex and myself booked ourselves into Random Colours studio in North London to do the first of two days of recording. We weren’t sure how many tracks we would end up recording in total, but we’d roughed out versions of:

THE END OF THE WORLD
NOT ON MY WATCH
LEECHES
THE YELLOW HOUSE
ITCH
AMY DATES DESTINY
WHITE NOISE
SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

in our rehearsal space during the previous couple of months. Out of all of these demos, Danny contributed bass parts to only ‘Not On My Watch’ and ‘The Yellow House’ (which is a really energetic and powerful performance). The rest we struggled through, not exactly 100% sure how the finished articles would turn out.

Rich had set up the drums before we arrived, so most of day one was spent laying down drum tracks. We tried a few different methods of getting the right performance out of Lex. Initially, Simon stood in the control room and played guitar and sang a guide vocal, and in the studio itself, Lex played along through headphones. However, nobody was really overjoyed with the results and Lex felt that her performance was a bit stiff trying to play off a click track. So we tried playing things live in the room with the drums, micing up our respective amps. By day two, we’d got this down pat, and the performances were considerably better – we recorded seven drum tracks, with ‘Leeches’ being overdubbed on a third day we had to book to finish vocals and a few twiddly guitar overdubs.

Final mixes were done at my house on Cubase, with Rich coming over to help shape them and sort out the EQ and mastering. We had some additional overdubs to do, such as the violin by Freya on “Not On My Watch” and “Speak of the Devil”, and Simon handled all electronic/synth overdubs himself. Bass parts were recorded by both Simon and myself, the majority by Simon as I wasn’t confident at playing bass at at all at that time, even just root notes. It’s possible it’s me playing on “Speak of the Devil” which I remember was recorded in shithole Enterprise Studios near Charing Cross Road on the same day at the violin overdubs. Freya was very nervous about doing her parts and it was completely improvised, but she’d been playing in an ochestra at the time and I had even tried to co-erce her into getting a few of the others to join as I love cellos. This would have fulfilled my Siamese Wet Dream, as it were.

Vocals for the songs were all recorded at Random Colours studio, but backing vocals and a few rerecordings were done at our respective homes in Lee and Anerley. I played Fender Jazzmaster on everything, with perhaps only 3-5 pedals, mainly Boss. Despite loving the Big Muff (US) it was nearly impossible to capture properly and probably was only used for the extended feedback at the end of “White Noise”, during which Rich left the room as it was a load of bollocks in his opinion. Plus it was a good moment for a smoke break.