Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Recording Femme Fatale

Spirit of Nick, it's 8 p.m. and I've been editing and recording most of the day and part of this evening. I have a decent backing track demo of Femme Fatale with some guitar overdubs that are slightly out of time but (I might completely change my mind tomorrow) in a really good way that might become permanent. Very Velvets-sounding.

Tomorrow morning early I might put a guide vocal on it for my (male) backing singer(s). I hope to have two but I might ask more: I've only asked one so far. This moment has come around quite quickly.

I'd meant to do more rehearsing today for the gig in Stockton on Sunday, but I can do that tomorrow and Friday and Saturday.

On the cassette that I was digitising this morning I found fifteen anti-advertising feminist jingles that I wrote in 1983. They are strangely relevant right now, which is a bit depressing. Listening to all the tracks we did I can hear Simon Walker talking in the background between tracks, and imagine us all there at Elephant Studios in Wapping with the engineer Simon Tassano behind the desk- he actually showed me what it did, which was great because I was so curious. We had big glass panels dividing us to separate the sound, and endless tea and coffee from the ubiquitous stained mugs that still collect in studios and reproduce silently when no-one's looking.

I remember at one point, when the music was finished, walking down Coldharbour Lane in Brixton with two grand's worth of tapes in a supermarket carrier bag. That was a genuinely surreal moment: a whole TV series worth of music on quarter-inch tape reels carried by a scruffy twenty-something who lived in a semi-squat. The glamour!

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