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Hello The Blurs (T.Johnstone)
Dub Me Now (T.Bailey, A. Currie/J.Leeway)
Space Capsule (Right On) (T.Johnstone/
D. Johnstone)
Tween (T.Johnstone)
You Scared??? (T.Johnstone)
Brighton (T.Johnstone)
Wrong Girl (T.Johnstone)
Down Four (T.Johnstone/D.Morrison)
Produced and performed by Tam Johnstone.
Recorded and mixed at Fen's house, Hove. Mastered by Tim McTighe. |
The making of 'Honey Pie'
April 2002. I'd just played the IPO festival in Chicago and a couple of gigs in New York, one of which boasted an audience of three and a half people (including two friends, the sound man and a guy who walked in halfway through and then left again.) I was having lunch with some friends at the Chelsea Bar and Grill, barely hours away from catching a plane back to England, when I began pondering aloud what the hell I was going back to. As my pondering gradually morphed into anarchy, I decided I would screw going home, stay in New York, get a job and start a new life! Yeah!!
Rob Sacher at the Luna Lounge gave me some work in the bar and my grandparents lent me some money to keep me going. However, within a couple of months I'd come down with bronchitis, ran out of money, had to sell my guitar and come home anyway. So much for anarchy! After several panic attacks and having pissed off numerous ground staff at Newark airport, I finally managed to get on a plane at JFK and stay on! (See "Airport Breakfast" for a brief history of my aerophobia.)
I arrived back in Britain and moved in with my long-suffering friends, Julie, Rob and Fen into their house in Hove. Summer was just starting to make itself known but I'd become a bit of a hermit since I got back from the States - it was the beginning of my 'sandbox' phase. I was gripped by anxiety on a daily basis and it would be almost 2 years before I would start to feel relatively 'normal' again. It got to a point where simply leaving the house became a major problem and I would spend days on end, hidden away, watching TV and wondering how long I was going to feel like this.
My solution to all this was to busy myself with a new project: a complete overhaul and radical redesign of several 'Local Honey' tracks, completely changing the original structure and direction of the songs. I'd recently discovered Kraftwerk and Neu! and was also heavily into Radiohead's 'Kid A' and the first Miss. Kitten & The Hacker album. The album was recorded very quickly and since I didn't own any kind of sequencer at all, everything was done manually (even the 'loops') using delays and chopping up musical sections on minidisc.
Some pieces already existed, marked as 'instrumental songs waiting for lyrics' (I tend to have a lot of these just lying around and they usually have working titles like "Bummytitbags ..1" .) The hardest part was trying to 'sync' the original vocals to the instrumental pieces as this involved a lot of speeding up, slowing down, pitch-shifting and chopping up in order to make them fit. I didn't have the luxury of a hard disc recording system, either: these tracks were created manually, without any sequencing or tempo map.
Even though 'Honey Pie' began as an experiment, I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Sounds occasionally slip out of time, ideas sometimes loose their way and an eerie atmosphere hangs over the album. Nevertheless, it's an experiment I plan to revive and repeat again.
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