TM records again

...and then buggers it up completely.

Saturday's session at the Brill Building went like clockwork. We all arrived near enough on time and set to work with military precision. Doug and Dave set up a borrowed 4-track tape recorder (hint: this motherfucking device is the unwitting villain of the piece) while I set up Doug's drums and Mart and Dom tuned up and twiddled with effects boxes.

The Grand Recording Plan was to feed the vocals and bass into separate tracks, and to have the room mic pick up everything else. From the last session we did it was apparent that the vocals and bass were the hardest to nail down and record consistently, hence this arrangement. We'd mix down the recordings at leisure in Doug's flat.

We were ready to go after about forty-five minutes (i.e. half an hour earlier than last time!) and battered straight into Neil Jung as a warm up. A couple of goes later and we started to record. I think it's safe to say we played at least as well as we've ever done before, and some songs were really starting to come together.

After recording a few tracks, the tape ran out so Dave flipped it over.

For those unfamiliar with 4-tracks, this is a Bad Thing. A few tracks later, Dave's face spontaneously fell. "Guys. I think we just taped over side 1." 4-tracks, you see, record on both 'sides' of the tape simultaneously.

Flipping the 4-track to playback mode, we listened to side 1. Yup. Run played backwards, with no trace of the first few tracks.

The faces of everyone else simultaneously fell.

We soldiered on. Nay, we turned defeat into triumph! We played All I Want To Do Is Rock - the first tune we ever practised - damn near flawlessly. Dave sang his heart out; Mart embarked on a long-awaited, feedback-laden solo, and even the one interesting bit of the bass line came off pretty much perfect.

We took a triumphant break. Dave and Doug wound back the tape, and were about to flip it to playback mode, when Doug said something like: "Was this always like this?", gesturing to the 4-track.

Yes. We had recorded the entire second tape in playback mode. We pressed 'play'.

The PA hissed for a bit. Silence.

The upshot is we've got one recording of Neil Jung played with cold fingers and straining vocals, one of Sister Isabel where Mart is too tired to play any more, and one of Run. Played backwards.

Postscript: to be fair, despite managing to utterly screw up the recording side of things, we did play well. Andy, an ex-workmate of mine and veteran of the live circuit (comparatively speaking - he's played some open mic nights), opined that our last recordings were good enough to get us a gig, and I'd be willing to bet that Saturday's Lost Tracks would have been even better...

Ah well. Next year will be the Year of the Monkey. As well as this year. Oh, you know what I mean.

Now, you may remember Jeff's birthday present to me last year. Yes, the speed dating. The speed dating. Jesus.

This year, he, Devon and Neil clubbed together to get me a present. This time, it was, and I quote verbatim from the gift voucher, a "seaweed mud wrap and full body massage".

Okay, I spend too much time buying clothes, but for the love of God, a seaweed mud wrap? I didn't even know what that meant. Anyway, I couldn't make it to the time booked on the voucher, so in the interests of not appearing to be an ungrateful bastard, I called the place and changed it to Saturday morning.

And then went out on Friday night to get unintentionally plastered. Come Saturday morning, I felt a little ropey, but dragged myself out of bed and along to the mud wrap emporium or whatever one calls such places. I looked for the reception desk when I arrived, and did a mental double take: for a split second, I thought that the woman behind the desk was actually a man in drag.

I was...unsettled.

Turned out she wasn't a man, but was still the one who was going to be doing my mud wrap and massage. Great. The magic happened in a small, dim room in the bowels of the place whose temperature would have been, to a non-hungover person, on the warm side of pleasant. To me, it was like a furnace. I mainly lay still, surfing an internal wave of nausea and trying to enjoy having the skin tone of my back improved by being smeared with mud and wrapped in clingfilm for 15 minutes, and then having a massage that lasted for a full hour.

It was, to be fair, actually quite nice. I only wish I hadn't been quite so under the weather, as evidenced by a hasty walk home to drive the porcelain bus.

Boo:

it looks like Tiny Monkey's stated aim of playing live before the end of the year won't come to pass. Dom is off to a trade show next week, so he's out of the country for about a week and a half. Just before he gets back, Doug then embarks on a marathon succession of voice acting, playing with his other band and then holidaying which takes him all the way through to Christmas.

<sigh>

And all this after I go and order myself a compressor to even out my bass's sound.

Ah well. I have a cunning plan to shoe-horn 18 hours of practising into a single week in January and to play, at the end of it, an open mic night. How's that for a New Year's resolution? Not very snappy, I grant you, but more likely to come true than "Eat less biscuits."

Preemptive update: Yes, Kate. Yes. I mean of course fewer biscuits. 5 points for spotting the linguistic cretin.

Vegas, baby, Ve-

So it was like Vegas' 7^th birthday last night and on Thursday Josh was all "we need some tickets for that," and I'm like "I'm so totally all over that," and I lay down sixty big ones for four tickets and I'm all "dude, I got the tickets," and he's like "sweet!" and we're both like "yeah".

So it's Saturday night and we're all Vegas'd up and looking pretty fly. I mean we're all looking good, but there's only one dude doing the whole black suit, black shirt, black tie gangster thing, you know? Yeah, you down with that, homes. You dig.

So anyway, we've been at Vegas for an hour or so and we've all had a few beers and I'm like "Woo! Drunk. Let's dance," and I'm actually dragging Kate towards the dance floor and then her strappy high heel explodes and I'm like "bummer," and we're like so totally out of there.

...

I'm sorry, I just blacked out. Did I write something? I'm off to watch The O.C. and play GTA: San Andreas. Prod me when it's time to go to work.

Fireworks!

So, Friday was Guy Fawkes night and Edinburgh sounded like Sarajevo, circa 1993. Kate and I had planned to go to Meadowbank to watch the fireworks, but a big meal and approximately a bottle of wine each took the edge off our enthusiasm.

Then, after watching the neighbours' kids running around the garden with sparklers, we thought "Sod it - let's find somewhere we can watch the Meadowbank fireworks from." Cue half an hour of wandering through gardens, thorn bushes and parks between Easter Road and London Road, culminating in an accidental B&E into Hibs' stadium, which we mistook for Meadowbank.

"Why are they football goals?"
"Where is everyone?"
"Why are there no fireworks?"
"Is it just me, or does that say 'Visit www.hibernianfc.co.uk' ?"

Go us.

After that, we met up with Dave and Michelle from work and got ver, ver drunk in the Café Royal, and then Pivo. So I'm told.

Top, top night.

So top, in fact, that I had to sprint a mile and a half at 7 am after about three hours sleep to avoid being (too) late to meet up with Jon and Josh so that we could go rafting up north.

We got to Tyndrum - a town that consists only of a hotel, a garage and South Africans - about 9.30 or so, to meet up with Rosie (Jon's sister), a workmate of hers called Mairi (amusingly, this was the same workmate that I harangued mercilessly on Hat Night) and Other Jon. We slurped into our wetsuits, were assigned the big red raft with the tendency to flip, and headed off down the river Orchy.

Apparently the Orchy has the most difficult rapids in Britain. Our crew, with my baggy, staring eyes and Josh's hungover countenance, did not look in a fit state to navigate through much in the way of danger. The previous rafting trip, on the somnolent Tay, had been livened up by our guides' desire to up-end the raft as often as possible, but we'd been reassured on this trip that the water was so cold that we'd be trying as hard as possible to stay dry.

What a load of claptrap. The only rapid we didn't flip on was the hardest one we had to negotiate. Just before the end, where we had to get out and walk past a truly frightening, Death Star-esque rapid, the guides offered us two ways to get back aboard: take 'the long way round' on the path, or a twenty foot jump into the water.

We all jumped, of course. It was absolutely freezing.

The last rapid (comment by our guide: "There's a fifty-fifty chance of flipping on this one. Comment by the guide on the second raft: "There's a five per cent chance of staying in." We flipped) caused us all to catapult bodily into the water, leaving Josh with a designer gash above his left eye.

A good day, I have to say. A fucking good weekend in all, really!

Update: Josh's blog has a rather fine photograph of the final spill into the river.

Coba Fynn(ish) in living colour:

Chris sent us all a photo from the 'Fynn's recent reunion. Apparently Doug and I have morphed into hobbits.

I'm getting into this band photo thing. More photos I say, and next time bring me a cigar to smoke in them.

TM in living colour:

tremble as we rock/smirk/smoulder for your edification. Pictures taken by Dave at last night's pleasingly rocking practise (dare I call it a rehearsal?).