That Difficult Third Album

Welcome, friends!

James here, lately of Bikini Test Failure and the Manchester, UK-based, (vanity!?) label Blague ("blag") Records.

I’ll keep this brief (I have the right intentions), I’ll keep it regular (it’s good to be regular).

That said, this one will be, of course, a whopper. The Great Big Intro Blog. (TGBIB). In 2020, when you’ve happened upon a particularly interesting entry I’ve written that day, this is the one you’ll scroll all the way back to, just to see how it all started.

It’s nearly five years since I finished promoting my last BTF album, Fleecing The Easily Pleased. I’m nearly FIFTY for goodness’ sake, so why all this waffle now? Why not keep all this to myself? Why, of all things, My First Blog?

Well, since then, beyond a handful of simple but intriguing tunes, demoed on my Mac, I’ve neither written nor recorded a sausage. You can imagine that for someone who, despite strong evidence to the contrary, spends his days convinced he’s still an active singer-songwriter-producer-label-owner, suffering such daily, unrequited, burning desire to create music, has over time had the potential to put me in a pretty depressive position.

However, given the repetitive nature of this pattern throughout the past 32 years of my-so-called “career” in music, sooner or later the smashing of this self-built, non-productive bunker, became inevitable and the delightful odyssey I began a couple of months ago, as walls began to crumble and light began to flood in, seems a story worth recording and sharing with others. Maybe you have found yourself in the same position from time to time.

In doing so, always with the Reithian principles in mind, (inform, educate and entertain), I aim to write a log of my activities, specifically the creation and execution of my new, big plan, named, incidentally, The New Big Plan (TNBP) and perhaps of more use and interest, the influences and inspirations that are leading me to devise these new plans. Along the way, together, you and I might create a masterplan to end them all; imagine if all the good ideas any self-starting Indie Entrepreneur ever had could be gathered in one place...

Well, if I can put fingers to keyboard on a relatively regular basis for say, the next 52 weeks, there might at least be a book in it.

So here we go. Do we have common ground? Did we both religiously read Word Magazine every month and now make do with their podcasts? Perhaps David Hepworth’s Whatsheonaboutnow blog? If we don’t, we should. I realise I'm reaching a certain age and some things seem to matter more than others.

I’ll close this first Welcome To My World missive with a brief note on exactly what happened to me this summer (2017) when the sky fell in and cracked my writer’s block.

The early-July weeks were free from my other freelance work (technical, live events, never showbiz) and in theory I could use this time to “really make a start on recording that difficult third album”. Blague Central studio was sitting there quietly, as it had throughout these empty years, willing me into it and on this particular day, against the run of play, I showed up!

My Brand New Rule Number 1:
Show up!
Sit in the chair, switch it all on, pick up the guitar and the pen. That's all.

“Song 1, Day 1”, I wrote in my recording log. (Yes, I keep a recording log). First job, open a new, empty songfile in Cubase (v3) on the 1992 Mac Powerbook, make empty song files on the Fostex D-90 digital 8-track and the two Roland VS-1680 digital 16-tracks, ensure they’re all talking to each other and their digital audio outputs (SPDIF & coaxial) are playing nicely through the Yamaha 03D digital desk.

They weren’t. Nothing was. You’re supposed to be able to press play on one of the Rolands and all playback machines and the Mac, kick-off and slave nicely. I’d had this set-up for 19 years at this point, I’d become next-to immune to Gear Lust and had safely ignored the post-digital, digital revolution of ProTools and Logic (I’d even GOT Logic on my 2008 MacBook Pro and had recently used it to toss down my little tune demos but that wasn’t “proper” recording, was it?).

Throughout that time, if ever the combination of MIDI and Machine Time Code settings failed to do their thing, I’d never managed to come up with a reliable fix beyond spending half-a-day changing settings and switching everything off and on again. Eventually this would always work. But not this day. This day, as I felt sandpaper on my soul and the creative urge being sucked out of me, one of the Rolands told me it could no longer access its harddrive (eventually it turned out to be lying - these things are bulletproof) but this day, it succeeded in provoking in me, a minor psychotic episode, when Cleese-like, I took a metaphoric silver birch branch to the Roland and all its work-shy fellows, furiously (but diligently) disconnecting all their cables and neatly packing them away in bin bags. By nightfall I had listed the lot on Ebay.

I wasn’t sure where I’d end up, but I conceded the future had to be LOGIC. I made another cup of tea, sat in the garden in the unusually seasonal hot sun and began to research “Control Surfaces”. Inside half an hour the VISION of a new 27” iMac running Logic, with a deskful of control surfaces and whatever the latest in/out audio interface was, had enough joy and power in it to fuel the next couple of months of extra work I took on to save the four or five grand I’d need to pay for it. Last Tuesday, finally, I plugged in the newly-arrived iMac, an external monitor, the worldwide-sourced Mackie surfaces, the Focusrite in/out box, switched on and sat back...

That will more than do for now as a start. Next time I’ll relate how the New Big Plan crystallised with David Byrne’s help during more sunny, garden-based tea-drinking. Meanwhile, as an antisocial introvert I’d be more than happy with no comments at all but if you feel compelled, it’d be great to hear from you.

Until the next one, remember to back-up!

James