Thursday, October 20, 2005

electronic mistakes...

I've just done a vanity-search and found yet another site, this time the BBC archive, that says Helen and the Horns split up because I had stage-fright. This is completely untrue- H and H was the first time I realised that stage-fright was pointless, because an audience comes to see you play, not to see you be frightened. We split up because I hated being with a major label, having my band's wings clipped by whatever a large corporation felt like doing, or not doing. We had a talk about it as a band, I went to the A&R man and asked them to release us from the contract, they did, the band pooled their money, we formed Rockin' Ray Records and released our album, and then split up, because we didn't want to be categorised as a sort of novelty cabaret band- we'd been playing proper venues to proper audeinces and didn't want to become a parody of ourselves. I also found it very difficult to work in the studio with producers who had never seen us play live! Freight Train had been self-produced and had been played on daytime Radio One (the Breakfast show, every day) and daytime airplay's supposed to be the reason for employing a producer. I'd asked for Dennis Bovell or John Collins ( both reggae producers who know what to do with female voices and horns and sparse instrumentation) but ended up with perfectly nice people who didn't understand the 'sound'. Blogs are for ranting, aren't they?

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