So the last entry\ about our third 7" release Heavy Sigh/Rainbows ended with the promise of the story behind our 5th release, 'Chasing Christmas' to be up next.
Amazingly we let a single slip by.........seriously??.......so many singles in such little time.
'SEEING IS BELIEVING' - "The best 50 pence I ever spent!" - b/w - 'SHADOWS' - "The best pound I ever spent!".....etc, etc...
SIDE A
'Seeing is Believing' started with a overheard loop from a piece of music on a nondescript charity shop LP. Over time we've noticed how many versions of the original track there are!!! It's that thing where until you actually start listening out for it, you hardly notice how many times it's been covered.....and probably sampled...not as well as us though!....oh come on?
It's still a rather delicate area for us to start naming the source but lets face it, those who know, know! so theres no point. So the track was sampled, two separate bars, arranged then shelved for about 6 months. Standard practice of course.
The new studio was based in Kensal Town West London, just off the Ladbroke Grove, the far end before Kensal Green gets started. Home to a multitude of Caribbean take-aways. In fact the dinner of choice, and sometimes lunch was a deep fried, potato, onion and spice doughnut. Sounds grim but this culinary delight meant that you didn't have to think about eating again for at least another 24 hrs. Heavy to hold and always washed down with a cold can of Red Stripe, Lets carry on with talking about the music....jeeeez..
So the next tinker would involve writing a song over the arranged piece that'd been roughly cobbled together. Getting some vocals and harms down then taking it from there. Dan got going on this during an evening of madness holed up in the studio, a couple of hours before his night bus back to Brixton, probably on a School night. It's a shady period and one you'll need to ask him about when you see him. On the next get-together, we both got to working on fixing up the arrangement and Vox levels with Miles spending some more time feeling out those elusive sonics. No deep fried donoughts that day, probably a sausage sandwhich.......
Anyways!....
We got it done pretty bloody quick and it sounded great straight away...well it did to us and we're usually right. It was a short while until we played what we had to our closest confidants and then nobody else got a look-in until we pressed up the 7". And even that was a slow burn.
Apart from 'Would it be Impossible', over time, it's become one of the most favoured Superimposers songs from our 'first' album. It's cropped up on numerous comps, TV programs and what nots in the past and once when half of Manchester, led by his Royal Highness, Moonboots, journeyed down to one of our gigs at the 3 Kings Public house in Clerkenwell, there were people jumping up on the tables when we played it. It was great ,we could've ended the gig there.
Whilst we're on the subject of The 3 Kings, we have to extend our appreciation to Deke Eicher who allowed us to finely tune our live set in the form of a night we would do every month on a Saturday. We popped in to ask whether we could put a gig on, he was pretty wary, asked if it would be a loud because he couldn't be bothered with that sort of nonsense and fair play to him for agreeing to give us a trial. Deke would DJ, set us up with ales and generally make us feel at home. Top bloke, top pub.
Whilst we're on the subject of The 3 Kings, we have to extend our appreciation to Deke Eicher who allowed us to finely tune our live set in the form of a night we would do every month on a Saturday. We popped in to ask whether we could put a gig on, he was pretty wary, asked if it would be a loud because he couldn't be bothered with that sort of nonsense and fair play to him for agreeing to give us a trial. Deke would DJ, set us up with ales and generally make us feel at home. Top bloke, top pub.
SIDE B
'Shadows' may have been one of the last few sample heavy tracks we embarked on but once again it worked too well to pass up, we had to throw caution to the wind on this one too!
Two loops from the same side of an LP from two different tracks. The same key as well? YES SIR! The details of the sampled tracks we used are a little hazy, ahem, locked away in the Wondefulsound vaults for future astronauts to find whilst on an expedition far into the future.
To be fair, we did layer a fair amount of Wonderfulsound magic over this track to get it sounding good, keys, guitars, wobbly stuff, white noise etc and whilst the music was being mixed, the lyrics were being written down frantically between mouthfuls of Potato Doughnut on an A4 writing pad. We'd also recently acquired a late Fifties 'Shure Bullet Mic', which we used on the vocals for 'Shadows', 'Seeing' and a couple of other tracks. We bought it off a 'Borough Cat' and over time found that the Crystal technology contained within this little metal beauty, provided us with just the right amount of grit needed.
At this point we'd moved studios down the hall. It was a bigger joint, with a main room and an odd layout with a vocal booth built in which provided great privacy when we had guests. We had a drum kit set up too, coutesy of our old friend Barney who would spend time with us on the Mac G3, in a very patient manner being a gent and all that, helping us fine honing the current artwork for whatever single we had ready to go at that time. We were gigging with Barney at that point to, all guitars, drums and keys until we gradually filtered it down to the two piece..... .that's another story.
So......'Shadows' needed a mix...we'd been to see Lone Pigeon the previous night at Spits in London, it was weird and great and there may have been a hangover of that feeling that crept into the quickness of completing the track that day. For us, 'Shadows' turned into a surf movie theme or a Jack Nitzsche B-Side, anyway we loved it and stuck it on the flip of 'Seeing is Believing'. The rest is all History.
Next up.....'Chasing Christmas'......honest!
