When I was a kid my parents kept all of the family photos in a big drawer in the lounge. As well as the usual holiday snaps and pictures of me and my sister in infant school performances and sporting events, there were photos from when they first met, as well as some very old, decaying pictures of their respective families at pivotal moments from their lives – Strangers throwing confetti over couples that must have become grandparents long ago, people posing on rowing boats or standing proudly outside old fashioned shops displaying their old fashioned wares. There must have been about 100 years worth of history chronicled in that drawer. From time to time when we were kids, Sis and I would look through all of these photos, maybe to remind ourselves of summer holidays past, or maybe to catch a glimpse of something unexpected in photos from before our time, but something about them always troubled me, and it still does…
After I finished making my first album “Ric Neale hasn’t heard of you either”, I did gigs on my own pretty much everywhere I could and slowly but surely I started working my way up the bill and getting to play at nicer venues and with time found other musicians who wanted to play along. This was a gradual but gratifying process which enabled me to do what I had always wanted to – do really good live shows and use my songs as a way to engage with audiences. I was never that bothered about recording, I never really have been to be honest; it always seemed like a means to an end.
After I finished making my first album “Ric Neale hasn’t heard of you either”, I did gigs on my own pretty much everywhere I could and slowly but surely I started working my way up the bill and getting to play at nicer venues and with time found other musicians who wanted to play along. This was a gradual but gratifying process which enabled me to do what I had always wanted to – do really good live shows and use my songs as a way to engage with audiences. I was never that bothered about recording, I never really have been to be honest; it always seemed like a means to an end.
For those people not lucky enough to have been to a recording studio and might think it a hugely glamorous experience with cocaine and groupies as far as the eye can see it is necessary to point out that studios are sweaty places where time disappears down a vast chasm. They are usually incredibly uncreative places that smell a bit like old pizza and stale fag smoke. Music venues on the other hand are usually filled with people who are looking to have a good time, there’s usually beer which I rarely need to pay for and an audience who, if you show them respect and a bit of craftsmanship are up for a nice chat afterwards. There is also the constant opportunity for ‘magic’ to happen – that moment when the audience is completely yours for three and a half minutes or when the vibe is shared rather than forced. There is however, rarely ‘magic’ in the studio.
So when, at a gig I was doing down in Cambridge, two people came up to see me demanding a follow up album (yeah, I know I was shocked as well) I was somewhat torn. The fact that these two people were rather attractive young ladies made the decision even harder. I told myself that an album was not necessary that some little acoustic EP was a better idea, “it could just be vocals and guitar” I exclaimed, “it wont take long, and anyway, then there’ll be more songs for me to add to the live shows and that would be great” – if only I’d listened.
Not long after this I was gigging in Leeds and got chatting to a guy named Brad, he was a good laugh and clearly knew a lot about music (he was a sound engineer) anyway we got drunk and decided to record some songs together. Brad did a lot of work at a studio over in Bradford and said that we could do it there as he was good mates with the owner. I had a few songs already written so we’d go in to do the drums and bass at the studio and than do all the overdubs at Craig’s house (he was playing bass for me at the time) – so off we went.
And so began a process that took almost two full years…
The reason the photos bothered me was that they were in no particular order, haphazardly strewn across the bottom of the drawer with no thought for chronology or theme. Some where still in the wallet that they came in but you’d be hard pressed to get through a full pack without finding at least two or three that shouldn’t be there - a holiday in Mallorca when I was five would be interrupted by my sisters choir tour in Germany about ten years later, then a picture of my dad at some works party with flares on that would make Shaft blush, before we return to sunny Spain.
“So now we have the backing tracks for four songs we may as well do some more…?” we said. So I started writing some more tunes, which was a very enjoyable way to spend some time and now and again Brad and I would return to the studio in Bradford. As time went on we used other musicians less and less and I started to do more and more. With the aid of modern technology everything could be looped and cut and pasted beyond recognition.
Anyway, at some point throughout this process things started to go a bit wrong – in fact there was a period during the recording when both me and Brad were in therapy at the same time due to a number of complex things involving failed relationships, dead friends, and addiction (in no particular order). We were, quite simply, a mess. We were also drunk on the amount of time we had in the studio and developed the musical equivalent of dartitis – we couldn’t see when things were finished and spent all our time in the studio tidying bits of music into the boxes where we thought they should be – trying to bring order to the chaos that was going on in and out of the studio. Sometimes that worked in our favour, songs like ‘Free’ and ‘I Said’ were very much based on this patchwork approach and wouldn’t have existed without it. However, simple songs like ‘Share This Weight’ were made incredibly complicated. I remember recording ‘Lend Me Your Ears’ in one take and us having no idea what to do with ourselves – there was nothing to tinker with.
It’s also worth remembering that Brad and I were actually working throughout this whole time so we could only get to the studio maybe once a fortnight which added real pressure. Also, everyone kept asking where the album was, and when it would be finished – it became something of a running joke between a number of people. Everything seemed to be against us. Hilariously, when we went to get it mastered the studio was struck by lightning and all the work we had done that day was lost.
Slowly but surely as our mental health improved so did our work in the studio. This meant that we had to re do a lot of things that we had thought were finished. There was a particularly agonising period when we had to re record the drums from the very first recording session because they didn’t sound right; it felt a bit like painting the Severn Bridge. But bit by bit it started to take shape, and every time we drove away from the studio we had more things actually in the can and it felt good. I remember ‘I Don’t Wanna’ being a particularly difficult tune to get right – there were so many fiddly bits in it and I knew that it’d be the closing track – it seemed to be about a character that created his own unsolvable problems and didn’t know what his future held. These themes were a massive part of the recording, and served as a fitting end.
The name ‘Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time’ was a bit of a catchphrase in our house and was often quoted by my friend Nobby to whom the album is dedicated. He committed suicide halfway through making the album in some fairly horrific circumstances leaving a wife and son behind, not to mention a fairly devastated community of friends that crumpled under the weight of mourning. Brad and I were both keen to commemorate him in the title of the album as a lot of the lyrical themes (escape, family, relationships, communication and friendship) were all brought into pretty sharp focus when he went. Once that concept was in place I came up with the concept of light bulbs (to show ‘ideas’) and contacted my friend Joe Simpson. He is a brilliant artist (go to
www.joe-simpson.co.uk for proof). I had done a couple of dreadful sketches of how I wanted the photos to look and knew that I wanted to do them in ‘Mook’ the bar in Leeds, famous for the amount of light bulbs there are above the bar. Joe did a great job on the photos and my friend Ben Brown and I did the design stuff. So when, at a gig I was doing down in Cambridge, two people came up to see me demanding a follow up album (yeah, I know I was shocked as well) I was somewhat torn. The fact that these two people were rather attractive young ladies made the decision even harder. I told myself that an album was not necessary that some little acoustic EP was a better idea, “it could just be vocals and guitar” I exclaimed, “it wont take long, and anyway, then there’ll be more songs for me to add to the live shows and that would be great” – if only I’d listened.
Not long after this I was gigging in Leeds and got chatting to a guy named Brad, he was a good laugh and clearly knew a lot about music (he was a sound engineer) anyway we got drunk and decided to record some songs together. Brad did a lot of work at a studio over in Bradford and said that we could do it there as he was good mates with the owner. I had a few songs already written so we’d go in to do the drums and bass at the studio and than do all the overdubs at Craig’s house (he was playing bass for me at the time) – so off we went.
And so began a process that took almost two full years…
The reason the photos bothered me was that they were in no particular order, haphazardly strewn across the bottom of the drawer with no thought for chronology or theme. Some where still in the wallet that they came in but you’d be hard pressed to get through a full pack without finding at least two or three that shouldn’t be there - a holiday in Mallorca when I was five would be interrupted by my sisters choir tour in Germany about ten years later, then a picture of my dad at some works party with flares on that would make Shaft blush, before we return to sunny Spain.
“So now we have the backing tracks for four songs we may as well do some more…?” we said. So I started writing some more tunes, which was a very enjoyable way to spend some time and now and again Brad and I would return to the studio in Bradford. As time went on we used other musicians less and less and I started to do more and more. With the aid of modern technology everything could be looped and cut and pasted beyond recognition.
Anyway, at some point throughout this process things started to go a bit wrong – in fact there was a period during the recording when both me and Brad were in therapy at the same time due to a number of complex things involving failed relationships, dead friends, and addiction (in no particular order). We were, quite simply, a mess. We were also drunk on the amount of time we had in the studio and developed the musical equivalent of dartitis – we couldn’t see when things were finished and spent all our time in the studio tidying bits of music into the boxes where we thought they should be – trying to bring order to the chaos that was going on in and out of the studio. Sometimes that worked in our favour, songs like ‘Free’ and ‘I Said’ were very much based on this patchwork approach and wouldn’t have existed without it. However, simple songs like ‘Share This Weight’ were made incredibly complicated. I remember recording ‘Lend Me Your Ears’ in one take and us having no idea what to do with ourselves – there was nothing to tinker with.
It’s also worth remembering that Brad and I were actually working throughout this whole time so we could only get to the studio maybe once a fortnight which added real pressure. Also, everyone kept asking where the album was, and when it would be finished – it became something of a running joke between a number of people. Everything seemed to be against us. Hilariously, when we went to get it mastered the studio was struck by lightning and all the work we had done that day was lost.
Slowly but surely as our mental health improved so did our work in the studio. This meant that we had to re do a lot of things that we had thought were finished. There was a particularly agonising period when we had to re record the drums from the very first recording session because they didn’t sound right; it felt a bit like painting the Severn Bridge. But bit by bit it started to take shape, and every time we drove away from the studio we had more things actually in the can and it felt good. I remember ‘I Don’t Wanna’ being a particularly difficult tune to get right – there were so many fiddly bits in it and I knew that it’d be the closing track – it seemed to be about a character that created his own unsolvable problems and didn’t know what his future held. These themes were a massive part of the recording, and served as a fitting end.
The name ‘Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time’ was a bit of a catchphrase in our house and was often quoted by my friend Nobby to whom the album is dedicated. He committed suicide halfway through making the album in some fairly horrific circumstances leaving a wife and son behind, not to mention a fairly devastated community of friends that crumpled under the weight of mourning. Brad and I were both keen to commemorate him in the title of the album as a lot of the lyrical themes (escape, family, relationships, communication and friendship) were all brought into pretty sharp focus when he went. Once that concept was in place I came up with the concept of light bulbs (to show ‘ideas’) and contacted my friend Joe Simpson. He is a brilliant artist (go to
Every time I return to visit my parents there is a pretty huge urge to wrestle the photo drawer away from them and put everything in some kind of order. One day of course these photos will belong to me and my sister and it’ll be our job to decide how to preserve this scrambled legacy. I can’t help thinking that we will be pretty keen on scanning them all onto our computers to store in whatever order we choose. To be preserved and emailed and cropped and re coloured and added to the digital histories that we have amassed in our own lives.Finally, the album got back from the printers and me and Brad were pleased as punch with it. We put on a big launch night at the Lounge in Leeds and it was a great celebration of a lot of effort finally coming to fruition. It was great to see people getting copies of the new album and a few of them even said that it had been worth waiting for.
As the album was finished many external things started to take shape. It’s hard to find an upside to the loss of friend, but Nobby’s death made everyone question their place in the world and take a bit more responsibility for themselves – it strengthened all the links in the chain and made it stronger as a whole. The failed relationship that plagues the lyrics to this album got back on track – in fact I’m getting married this summer, and Brad has since moved to New Zealand and is doing very well for himself as a sound engineer over there – I am very proud of him.
But really, what’s the point? Why put things in order anyway? I’d rather not know what I’m getting when I pull my hand out of the photo drawer. It can be tempting to make everything ‘make sense’ but there’s not much sense to life – there’s not much ‘order’ in death – and a ‘cut’ and ‘pasted’ relationship would be boring as hell. Sometimes it’s better to leave things where they fall.
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