"Long," exclaims
Miles Willey the band's bassist in a lingering tone.
"Yeah it was a lot longer than we expected," agrees
Darren. "Also a lot harder than I expected as well, because
up to that point all we had ever done was recorded in my house
on the four track. We got Tony Lash from America to produce
it. It was the first time someone outside the band and had an
influence on how we sounded. So at first it was a bit difficult
but once we developed confidence in him we realised he was a
talented bloke. It worked
a fucking treat. This guy's a genius."
Indeed Tony Lash has been quite visionary and influential on
the American music. Producing the likes of The Dandy Warhols
and Quasi, the member of Elliot Smith's former band Heatmiser
set to on Lowgold. Though did he
encourage the band to work in a cramped studio?
"We actually recorded it in two places," begins Darren.
"The first three weeks were in a place in Chipping Norton,
just the worst place I've been to in my life. Studiowise it
sucked fucking big time and was really unproductive."
Did you get any work done there at all?
Darren leans forward in his chair and continues. "We wasted
a week and a half with the drummer out of time. It took us a
week and half to get the drum
takes done and it just didn't sound right. Although when we
toured with him,
he sounded like a good drummer when we played live but when
we tried to sit down and record stuff it became blatantly obvious
that he didn't understand about the music that we were doing.
So Tony took over on the drumming
front for most of the album and Paul the old drummer had to
leave."
As if with a sort of release, Darren leans back. There were
no hard feelings
with Paul?
"No it was a mutual agreement to part company," explains
Darren. " He knew that it wasn't going well. It's a hard
thing to do basically."
Miles continues the story. "It put the recording into a
bit of lull. That after ten days someone leaves the band. From
there it went from scratch. Tony started drumming and then we
moved onto Jacobs in residential Surrey and that was far better.
We were there for six weeks and it seemed to work a lot better
being away from the sterile eighties kind of studio in Chipping
Norton." >>
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