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When it was decided by ourselves and our cohorts that the recording of our first album with Reprise would take place in Los Angeles, California, it was a mixed bag of merry emotions that my fellow band members and I had tagged and tossed on the Virgin Jumbo which would take us, in some twelve hours, from London's Heathrow to the city of Angels. Of course we were excited to again be moving in the magical world of the music industry, it had been almost a year since we had agreed this new deal and we were rampant to roll but good friends and girlfriends would be left behind for a long while and I for one was a little nervous about the work to come. We took with us eight guitars and a flight case full of their cables. The rest of our equipment had been pre-blagged by my genius brother and was awaiting our perusal at a rehearsal studio in North Hollywood. We had planned to unite the old and new gear on the evening of our arrival but fatigue and the strange new city robbed us of our sense of direction and it was all we could do to find our accommodation.

The Oakwood apartments are a temporary housing facility with branches throughout America. The Toluca Hills Oakwood, being as it is in North Hollywood, is home to many not yet famous or rich actors and models and scriptwriters and directors, not to mention all the out of town bands who reside there while recording. I, having requested a single room, was treated as an outcast by the band when it was revealed that my single room was in fact a single apartment and the rest would share a two bedroom pad in another block. There were mutterings that perhaps my ego was bloating prematurely to petulant Rock Star proportions all in good jest of course, although perhaps not. I saw the shimmer of fear in their eyes, their voices trembled as they attempted to tease me but stopped short of insults as they knew I commanded them and would strike them down with one almighty blast of my vengeance……..Oh dear, it seems they had a point. It turned out that I spent most of my time over at their pad anyway. Solitary confinement was good for sleep and reflection but the buzz of company was often equally comforting.

To my mind the apartment situation resembled a holiday camp. There were swimming pools and hot tubs, tennis and beach volleyball courts, a fitness suite and sauna. Many people from the record company gave it the standard "Oh you're at Oakwood, that's too bad" response but we were all quite content in our new environment, it suited our needs well and the lack of an on-site boozer was probably a blessing.

We had a day, a Sunday as it happened, to get our heads together and rest up before pre-production (which I'll explain the nature of later) began. The man who was to guide us through the next few months, our producer Nick Launay, had left messages inquiring as to our availability for breakfast. We were available and having never met him in the flesh, were eager to make first contact. What were our initial impressions? He had fore told of his rake thinness and specs and there he was before us rake thin and with specs. He was pretty much as I had imagined except my imagination had him with a shock of tight curls and the reality was short and straight hair, which he informed us was eight inches longer not a week before. Time comes in every mans life when the long hair of his youth must finally be shorn. If it can happen to Metallica it can happen to you. Launay, a resident of Australia who was raised in both Spain and England, was now doing most of his producing in America, having left England in a Stock, Aitken and Waterman inspired despair during the eighties. He had worked in L.A. on many previous occasions and over breakfast we discussed the strange nature of the behemoth that is the American recording industry (about which he had a good sense of humour and a wonderfully positive outlook). We were happy to listen and take in his experiences, he would basically be a member of the band for the next few months and the consensus after breakfast was that we had wisely chosen a wise man whose wisdom we could only benefit from. Nick suggested a drive down to Venice Beach to tap straight into that L.A. vibe and soak up some warm October sunshine and so we clambered, full of Coke and hamburgers, aboard our respective wagons and rolled down the Freeway towards the Pacific.

Venice Beach was much the same as any tourist hot spot, selling t-shirts and tons of tat adorned with logos of geographical relevance. We had no glamorous expectations and so walked the length of its shop fronts unperturbed and somewhat amused by the muscle men of Muscle Beach and a few fairly freaky buskers. One guy, who had apparently appeared in a couple of films, skated the promenade on his blades with an amp strapped to his back playing heavy metal guitar licks to anyone who would slip him a few greenbacks. We left in the early evening with night falling and dined at Toi on Sunset.

Nick informed us that this was a real hang out for musicians due to its late opening hours and Bobby (bass) made instant friends with the food. He would request many, many times (much to our amusement) during the next few months that we dine there again. The time difference was victimising us once more and by ten o'clock we were bleary eyed and ready for our scratchers.

Pre-production would take place in Swing House rehearsal studios for five or six days and to keep things interesting for ourselves we hadn't done any practice for quite a while. The plan was that we could approach the material (already demoed and gigged) with new enthusiasm but the risk was that we would be playing like rank amateurs. Pre-production itself is when the songs you are about to record come under close scrutiny. Any suggested improvements in arrangement or structure would get tried out here, before we end up in a $2000 a day studio with the "time = money" equation disrupting our thought patterns.

We arrived at the studio around noon although Nic (manager/brother) and Gen (drummer) were a little delayed as they had gone to collect some more blagged gear from various parts of the city. Our room was a dark oblong and lights were hastily arranged to lift some of the gloom. We unpacked and examined all the shiny new stuff which the good people of many companies had been kind enough to lend us. It took a while to set things up in sonically pleasing locations, but when we were done we realised the room sounded really good and the potential torture of six hours a day in high decibel hell had been admirably avoided

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When we first rattled through a few of the tunes things were inevitably a bit sloppy but as the day wore on we were working well and I was confident that our lazy approach had been vindicated. This was a welcome and overdue challenge and day one indicated that we might well be up to it.

From Monday through Friday we pulled the songs this way and that working from Launay's notes and our own instincts. There were a fair few differences of opinion but no raised voices or tantrums, it's not really our style, everybody entered and left each day with an open mind. This was something new for us, working so closely with a producer and allowing him some leeway in order that we could benefit from his knowledge. In the past, when making Baby Chaos records, we had been extremely insular and overly protective of our songs. We rarely worked with producers and were pretty damn stubborn when we did, which kind of negated the point. This time however, we had made a very conscious decision to at least allow the man his say, mull over his points and then tell him he was talking shite.

We had about fifteen songs to work through and wanted to record only twelve of them, which allowed us the freedom of discarding (at least temporarily) those few songs which we were struggling to make sense of. The twelve were settled upon by Friday and on the whole they were ready for recording. Some, such as "Conversation" and "Christine II" had changed a lot in terms of structure, from the demos. Others, such as "Sycamore" and "Christine" had not changed at all. Others still had been left for closer scrutiny in the recording studio, such as those which would be built around loops of Gen's drums and those in which keyboard parts were integral with the vibe.

Saturday was left as a day of fine tuning and pure rehearsal with our American management duo of Darren Lewis and David Gilbert and our A&R person Tripp Walker joining us in the late afternoon to see how things had progressed. We ran through all the tunes for them and everyone seemed well pleased with the week's work. According to Launay, a strange thing happened as we played for this small audience, there was an extra edge, we all hit our skins and strings that bit harder and belted out the vocals with more abandon. I was not conscious of this myself but I suppose we were performing rather than rehearsing and the difference was plain for the alert listening ear to hear. Anyway, it boded well for the weeks to come where the purpose was to capture our best possible performances on tape.

That night we were to meet up with an old friend of Gen's at a club called Kanes on Melrose. Stacey Slater and Gen had met while he was touring with Jesus Jones and she was working with their record company SBK. They had kept in loose touch ever since, knowing that in this business there paths were more than likely to cross once again. Stacey, Gen and Bobby had already met earlier in the week with Staci's friend Diane and that night they arrived with another friend Megan. It is odd to recall this first meeting with people who are to become such good friends. You look for signs that this was the inevitable outcome, that fate had drawn you together because they knew you would get along and perhaps this is the case but although we got on well that night, it was with the politeness of those who don't yet know each others humour. We danced to the seventies disco beats and admired the skill and enthusiasm with which the Go-Go

dancers performed. Brother Nic outdid us all, already renowned in Glasgow for his special moves and general high energy levels on the dance floor he set about building his reputation in Los Angeles with a marathon boogie session. The evening was rounded off as it was to be so often during our stay, with a social visit to the Oakwood hot-tub for a final few beers and a soothing soak in the bubbling heat.

Monday, week two and recording was to begin at Ocean Way's Studio Two, recent clients included The Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Beck, but basically everyone who was anyone in rock music had probably set foot in here at some point. At least, so they told us and we were more than willing to believe them. It is not every day that three plebs from Stewarton and a token English get to play in such a place, but if I'm starting to give the impression that we were somewhat in awe of our surroundings then that is a fair distance from the truth. In actual fact we were quite underwhelmed, the history was why people worked here and the equipment from a bygone era had all been preserved upon the bequest of several big name clients. Our own Mr. Launay was however to encounter much frustration with the stubborn natured old beasts and if it were not for the local knowledge of the able assistant Alan Sanderson we may well have jumped ship to some less reputable recording environment.

The main recording area was a large well proportioned hall which brought to mind an old school gymnasium albeit with some fancy wood craft on the walls. On the far wall was an isolation booth on top of which was a mezzanine where Angus had stacked his full wall of Marshalls and there now resided a Fuss-ball table, kindly donated by the ever youthful rockers. There was another booth to the far right as you entered the studio where the equipment of Bobby was to reside for the duration of our stay. Gen and his kit of many drums and cymbals would take centre stage and eventually be blessed with a riser to elevate his thumping onto new levels of sonic intensity. The cabinets of myself and Grant would share the booth on the far wall but we would all play together on the main studio floor with the aid of headphones. The separation of the speakers and drums is common practice to avoid the bleeding through of the guitars onto the drum tracks, which would limit the amount of control one has over the sound, but it is always good to have the musicians (and I use this within the loosest possible parameters with reference to ourselves) in the same room for that mystical musical entity commonly referred to as the vibe. How can I explain the vibe? It is that thing I may hear in one take and you in another. It is both personal and universal. It is in my experience very tempting to dismiss it as a load of bollocks and say "But surely you just mean you want it tight" (tight being that other common word associated with rock music meaning musicians who play together with precision). And yet to dismiss it as such is to deny its power and to deny the greatness of many great records which were anything but tight. The debate will rage on, I have my view which, although could be dismissed as laziness, I regard as firmly rooted in spontaneity so there. Launay was in search of the vibe from us and it would have to be delivered to his satisfaction, resistance was futile. I was both glad to be relieved of the responsibility and wary of placing my trust in another's opinion but this was why we were working with the man and I knew that left to our own devices we might be too easily pleased. It was a compromise as it is so often.

Most of the first day was spent setting things up, checking out sounds and going for mad dashes to many music stores to buy various distortion pedals and guitary bits and bobs. We had already decided to record "Today is a New Chapter" first and hence went about getting the right sounds for its basic tracking. The plan was, at least with most of the songs, to put down the drums, bass, and two guitars all together and then at a later stage overdub another hundred or so guitar tracks, some funny keyboard noises and the vocals. This was the way Launay liked to work in order to have the magic of the musicians all playing together and we were happy to oblige, as it seemed that we could probably have the record done in a couple weeks this way. As always this was our downfall. The optimism after a good week of pre-production was on high and if any fortune teller or horoscope had predicted at this time how long the record would actually take to make I would have laughed heartily and said "No way man! No way!"

After a quick dinner at the Denny's a hundred yards from the studio (much to Gen's delight and Launays disgust) we set about a few takes of the song. In the control room on playback things sounded surprisingly rocking and so after a few tweaks and a few changes of guitar on my part (so indecisive) we launched headlong into a full on assault. We had been warned in the week leading up to recording about Launays catch phrase "That was good, do it again" and he had confessed his obsession with getting things just so and thus we were prepared for an infinite take scenario. My theory on producers is this; they have such finely tuned ears after years of such close listening that they are somewhat like dogs in the respect that they hear things most common folk cannot. Launay was no different and if something bugged him then it had to be set right. I completely empathise, as of course I am the same just to a different degree, but having recognised the potential for confrontation in this regard I decided to leave the calls up to him, unless I was unshakeable in my belief that I personally, or we collectively had nailed something. We did ten takes or so of the song and although confident that we had enough it was decided that we would listen back with fresh ears in the morning and so it was then that we gained our first true insight into Mr. Launays working methods.

He had mentioned his preference for chopping together bits and pieces from the best two or three takes to gain one master take that would represent the finest possible performance of the band at the time of recording. An honourable target and one that it was generally felt he had achieved with most, if not all of the bands he had worked with.



The technique for this, which sounds drastic but is actually quite common practice, is to slice through the "two inch" master tapes, taking the best verse from here and the best chorus from there and even inserting the odd drum roll which touched on the sublime. This patchwork song is then pieced together on one reel and sounds, if done by a man of experience, quite flawless. We were to discover, in the weeks to come that this was a time consuming practise, but what the hell, we were in Los Angeles and if Launay was going to spend half a day every other day editing tape, then we had time to explore.

The first week was spent in much this way, setting up sounds for the song we were working on, recording anything from ten to twenty takes and leaving Launay and sometimes Gen (as his drums at this stage were under the greatest scrutiny) to edit things together. After we had our master reel Bobby, Grant and myself would fix any bum notes we had played while the correct sounds were still set up on our amps and pedals. There was an early sign in this week of some of the turbulence we were to encounter later in the session but of course we failed to heed it and still the feeling remained that the album would be done in no time. "Conversation" was the song/sign, as after a huge amount of guitar and general sound changes during the set-up and the recording, of at least twenty takes, it was decided later in the week that we had to do it all again. Such was the well of enthusiasm upon which we had to draw at this early stage of recording that nobody seemed too perturbed and we got on with things joking "Oh aye, so this is how it's going to be then Nicky boy".

About a week after we had started recording Gen was booked to fly home for ten days as his wife Mon was heavily pregnant with their second child. She was due to give birth at any moment and if luck was on their side he would be there for the new arrival and a few days beyond to help out with things at home. This allowed us a chance to get stuck into overdubs and hopefully by the time Gen returned the five songs we had so far recorded would be nearing completion.

The studio by this point had been transformed by Nic, whose knowledge of lighting techniques, gained from his experiences working in various theatrical situations, had always proved a useful asset. We had spied, at a lighting hire company near the rehearsal studio, a four foot mirror ball and this became the centre piece of the room. As we saw nothing secure enough to take its weight on the ceiling twenty feet above, we suspended it, rather unglamorously, from a set of stepladders. The effect was however undiminished and the various and variable lights, which Nic had placed around the room, allowed for any number of atmospheres to be conjured up. There were plain sheets on the walls with coloured lamps illuminating their whole and many spotlights highlighting drums or dazzling off the mirror ball. Guitars, mike stands, sound bafflers, headphones, chairs, amp heads and effects pedals littered the floor among our personal debris of coffee cups, beer bottles, ashtrays and literature. There was still ample room to manoeuvre around the fuss-ball table and the grand piano, by the stairs to the mezzanine, was occasionally accessible if one was careful not to upend one of Grant's guitars. Indeed the situation with the guitars was getting a little out of hand as was duly noted by Brett the Australian guitar tech who had given our axes the once over before recording began. He was now hiring us some hot-wired Marshall gear and was horrified upon arriving at the studio to see guitars precariously balanced on chairs or lying in the middle of the floor. The earthquake potential was a factor as even a minor tremor, not uncommon in these parts, could see several guitars topple to the hard floor breaking their necks upon contact. I have never met anyone who cared so deeply for the stringed beasts of our trade, seeing another mans guitar in such distress was too much for him and he kindly loaned us a rack with room for all our weapons. Consequently, if word reached us of his imminent arrival, we would quickly round up the beasts and strap them lovingly into the rack. Brett was to be a fairly frequent visitor during our time at Ocean Way, for reasons of maintenance and hiring and occasionally you would gain access to his past through a story or an off-hand comment. He was a veteran of touring who had settled in L.A. due to his confessed dislike for his own country and its inhabitants and he now worked mainly for some enormously rich Japanese artist whose studio was in the Valley somewhere. The stories of his history were full of reputation building and shattering revelations that only such an insider on the scene could divulge and often we would listen to tales of a bygone era knowing it would be our duty as men of Rock to perpetuate these myths.

Overdubs began on the Tuesday of the second week and I was keen to get singing as soon as possible. I had encountered problems in the past with the vocals all coming at the end of the session and my voice shredding into rapid decline and was glad of the opportunity to avoid a recurrence of this situation. However, first came the guitars and any relevant keyboard work. Launay played the guitar angle a little differently from those with whom we had worked previously. When doubling guitar tracks he preferred to use very different sounds from the original ones thus building up textures and leaving great potential for variety in the mixing process. Most of the time we had bothered with doubling before it would be with the identical sound to the original and purely for the purpose of beefing matters up a little. Here we used all sorts of direct input sounds from distortion pedals which on their own sounded well scuzzy but in context worked a treat. This was yet more insight into the mans working methods and I was surprised by the amount of guitars we ended up laying down as having recorded the band all at once, I presumed that there would not be too many overdubs of this nature. I could not have been further from the truth. We also put down some keyboard pads and the odd strange noise to keep things interesting, but once this was done I had a chance to start the singing.

If you could know your fate and yet have the ability to change it then that would pretty much make a mockery of the concept of fate. If I had known that almost every note I would sing at Ocean Way would have to be sung again, then I would not have sung a note. But this was not my fate and in order in the end to get things right, I realise I had to sing the six or so songs that I sang at Ocean Way in the manner in which I sang them, so that eventually I could sing them in the manner that they now appear on the record. To explain this further, I was trying, in the main, a slightly more reserved approach, having tired of singing so often at the top of my voice and consequently straining its resilience. I realise now, with the honesty that hindsight sometimes provides, that I pulled the reigns in a little too far on a few of them. Launay confessed when we had finished the record, that he had felt this at the time and I thanked him for not telling me then, as I'm sure I was not in the mood to hear such a remark.