THE RECORDING OF "SAFE SEX, DESIGNER DRUGS AND THE DEATH OF ROCK'N'ROLL"

Being the cocky bastards we are we figured we didn't need any help recording our first album we knew how we wanted it to sound "so lets just get on with it" we thought. In hindsight I'm not entirely sure we did know how we wanted it to sound. We had our classic nineties rock albums in as a reference point (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden) and I suppose we thought "somewhere about there will do fine".

We came into the studio off the back of a month long tour in late June '94 so in theory we should have been as tight as latex underwear, but then again theory was never our strong point and some of the songs which were second nature to us may have suffered a little. What I'm trying to say is that some the songs we thought we could play in our sleep kind of ended up sounding as if we did play them in our sleep. I'm really sorry about this and I suppose I hope you didn't notice. It bugs me a little but I think we learned from it.

The studio we were using, Rhythm Studios in Bidford-on-Avon, was one we were quite familiar with having recorded our earlier EP's there. It looks sort of like a cow shed from the outside and I reckon if you gave it a good hard kick with a pair of steelies on it might fall over, but it was cheap, clean and we knew we could get what we wanted from it. A lot of this was down to Paul Johnston the engineer who owns and runs the studio. We'd worked with Paul a lot before and knew he was more than capable of getting the right sounds onto tape. It had already been decided that someone else would do the mix so we were at Rhythm for the actual recording part of the deal only.

Most of the backing tracks were done live, with drums, bass guitar and guitars going down all together and I think it took about a week to lay down the basics for the fourteen songs we did in the session. After this was done Davy and Bobby pissed of back home to see their birds and left me and Grant to get on with the vocals and overdubs. We had a couple more weeks for this and managed to get almost all of it done despite the World Cup interrupting our progress a couple of times daily.

For the mix we went with a bloke called Colin Richardson who, although more noted for his work with out and out metal bands like Cancer and Machine Head, we thought would give things the bollocks and bottom end we were after. Mixing was kind of a bore, it was so hot at the time (July) that we mainly just staggered from the hotel to the studio, collapsed in a heap, voiced our approval or disapproval of whatever song was going down at the time and then staggered back up to the hotel, via the 7-11. We were at Battery Studios in North London and I suppose we could have made the effort to get out at bit more but we all seemed like we couldn't be fucked to be quite honest. I think maybe all the touring had done more damage than we cared to admit and the heat was definitely not agreeing with our fragile temperaments and translucent Scottish skin. Everything got done, after kind of a slow start, in about two and a half weeks and at the time I'd say we were well pleased with the results. It sounded fat, not like most of the other British Rock albums that were floating about at the time which seemed miles behind the stuff coming out of America mainly in terms of production.

When I listen back to it now it's easy to see where some things could be improved but the benefit of hindsight is only available before the event to psychics and unfortunately none of us are anything more than mildly psychotic, shagged again I think. Still you live and learn don't you and if you don't learn anything you're a dildo.

Chris.