Our first headline gig OMG!!!
After the Pazuzu support slot, we booked what would turn out to be our last recording session at Cherrytree. The week before we were due to record, Leigh brought in a new tune of his, called "End Of The World". We all thought it was one of the best songs he'd written and an arrangement quickly fell into place. We also wrote another song as a band the same week - "Stick To What You Know" was based on a riff of Mike's and had a great outro section, largely written by Sug. Although we'd underachieved a bit with our live performances, this was a great time for us as a band. We seemed to be moving forward every day and we had an incredible amount of self-belief.
We were so excited about these new songs that we decided to add them to the five tunes we had already planned to record. Unfortch, this once again meant that we didn't really have enough time to devote to each track. In order to speed things up, we allowed Dave, the studio owner, much more freedom than we had during our last Cherrytree session, which resulted in the return of the 'flat' sound that had plagued our initial recordings. Balls. Although we said we were 'demoing' tracks, we would have liked them to resemble demos a little less, and the 'actual' songs we heard on the radio a little more...
It was still a hell of a lot of fun though, and some of the tunes came out better than others. "Take It Back" sounds tighter than it ever did live. There's a slight air of menace about the track, even if it is a little sparse and under-cooked. Mike had written a bass line before Sug joined, and he ended up playing bass as well as rhythm guitar on the recording, at Suggy's suggestion. Annoyingly my guitar is a tiny bit out of tune, but I don't think my parts are that bad considering it was my first stab at writing something out of my bog-standard indie pentatonic comfort zone - there are some wheaty lines in there, amongst the chaff.
Novacain - Take It Back
"Second Time Around" was improved by the addition of an acoustic guitar, doubling up my rhythm parts, and features a great vocal from Leigh. The song was written about his girlfriend, and there's a nice degree of honesty and intimacy about his performance. "Second Time Around" marks the first time we really tried adding backing vocals to a song. Ricky and Leigh had done some bvs on "Find A Way", and Leigh had added some harmonies to "Cyanide" and "Weakening", but all our other recordings featured just a lead vocal. This was partly because the rest of us didn't want to sing, and partly because we never had the time to record additional tracks when we were in the studio. The backing vocals aren't all that polished, but they definitely give the track an extra something compared to our other early recordings.
Novacain - Second Time Around
The real stand-outs, however, are the two new songs - "End Of The World" and "Stick To What You Know". Both are a tiny bit basic, but they also capture the excitement that comes with writing a new tune. The former sounds darker than we perhaps intended it to, but it has a charm that was lost when we changed the arrangement later on in an attempt to make it more 'rocky'. My lead parts are a mixture of really good melodies and clunk-tastic clichés, but I was chuffed with them at the time. "Stick To What You Know" features some great work from Winny and Sug. Winny's verse part, played by hitting a cymbal stand with one of his drumsticks and the hi-hat with the other, is ace, and contrasts really well with his heavier drums in the chorus, and Sug's bass on the outro is PHENOM. And did I mention my lead guitar? There was a lot of luck involved, but I think the track features some wicked bits. The song was so new that Mike didn't play on the outro, as he hadn't written a part at the time, and Leigh had to write his lyrics in the studio. I made a frankly MASSIVE contribution to the track, suggesting the (meaningless but cool sounding) line "beat the ones you haven't met". Boom.
Novacain - End Of The World
Novacain - Stick To What You Know
"New Song #1" is kind of ok - Mike's lead guitar is really good, but the recording is definitely missing the spark present on the other tracks. I hadn't properly got my rhythm parts down, and my playing is a bit sloppy. And, while my attempts at a more edgy style of playing worked well on "Take It Back", I think I kind of spoilt "Party Politics" trying the same thing. The song sounds slightly daft, with me wrenching ill-fitting alt-rock licks out of my guitar. Because the track contains the lyric "God save the Queen and all her men", I thought it would be a good idea to end with a Hendrix-aping run through the national anthem. It wasn't. And lack of time meant that, although we recorded drums for "M.F.S.", we didn't get round to completing overdubs or recording vocals, making it one of only a handful of Novacain tunes without a studio version.So we'd spent loads of money, camped out for several days at Cherrytree and come away with one unfinished song and six others that, once again, we weren't happy with... Awesome. We had a chat afterwards, and realised that we weren't sure why we were recording in the first place - we'd managed to get some gigs so we didn't really need a demo to hand out to promoters, and we had no intention of self-releasing any of our songs at this point. As a result, we decided that we'd go to a more 'professional' studio next time we wanted to record, and that we'd wait to do this until we had a couple of songs we were completely happy with. Although we did bits and pieces of recording ourselves, it ended up being two years before we paid to book a studio again.
Anyways, back to this here gig... We hadn't brought as many fans to our last show at the Cockpit as the promoter, Flatnose John, would have liked. But he still thought we were a decent band and offered us our first headline slot at the Duchess a few months later. We were quite excited about this, and were really looking forward to showcasing our new songs. We pulled out all the stops to ensure that we brought enough people to put the smile back on Flatnose's greedy head. This was made more difficult than usual, as it was still summer and most of my friends from uni weren't back in Leeds. Some invention was needed. Rather than accept the usual bag of poorly guillotined flyers from John, we asked for one pristine sheet that we could photocopy and cut up ourselves. We bought some fancy 'crumple effect' paper from Staples and set to work. I'm not sure this extra effort brought more punters through the doors, but the flyers did look a touch better than the usual rubbish we got off Flatnose.
One thing I do remember though, dear reader, is that an American couple were snooping around outside before the pub opened, and Mike's Dad persuaded them to come and watch us, as we were a "hot new UK band". Or something. The bloke kept banging on about some radio station back in the States that might play our records. Although this was before we'd played...
As I said we were really up for the show. We had new songs, Sug had been in the band for a while now, so we were musically tighter as a group than we ever had been, and we'd just done a decent gig at Joseph's Well. We were so sure that this would be a wonderful pop concert, that Leigh had a (vee Madchester) t-shirt printed up with the slogan "And on the sixth day, Novacain created God". It was going to be ACE. And it was ace. For about four minutes.
A typically eclectic few months at the Duchess. Indie darlings Hefner and Ooberman rubbed shoulders with Led Zep and Radiohead tribute acts and local bands like 5' 4", Speewah Rouge and Helen (featuring a pre-fame Corinne Bailey-Rae). I'm gutted that I missed Scottish band Astrid, who played in the middle of August. I fell in love with them a few years later, having heard the tracks "It Never Happened" and "Play Dead" on the radio. Sad face.
We opened the set with "M.F.S.", and a clutch of young women THAT WE DIDN'T KNOW started dancing in front of the stage. Mint. Ok, so we made a couple of mistakes, but it was all good. Except it wasn't. Watching the video I can see the point, a few seconds into our second song, "Stick To What You Know", where I began to realise that there were SIGNIFICANT problems. For reasons best known to his stupid face, the soundman decided that it would be a grand idea to swamp Leigh's vocals in the sort of delay usually reserved for baddies on Dr Who. This wonderful effect meant that the vocals came through our monitors as a random wall of sound, seemingly unrelated to the tunes we were playing. It was bad enough for the rest of the band, but it must have been horrible for Leigh. It probably wasn't great for the crowd either. Leigh struggled to hear himself, which meant he found it difficult to sing in tune. We struggled to hear Leigh, which meant we frequently got lost and fluffed our parts.
From left to right: Mike, Leigh, Win, Sug, Me
And did I mention that me and Suggy were battered? Oh. I've been playing in bands with Suggy for over ten years and I can confidently say that he's never performed as badly as he did at this Duchess show. The worst bit was when everyone else played "Take It Back", but Sug played "End Of The World". All the way through. Without noticing. Despite the fact we'd played "End Of The World" a few songs earlier, and most of the chords were completely different. For my part, the first half of the set was awful, with my fat, drunken fingers alighting on random frets in a failed attempt to play the right notes. Christ on a freakin' bike.
Novacain - Paracetamol (Live)
"Paracetamol" is the only song from the video that's even remotely acceptable for public viewing. The soundman kept randomly turning the delay effect on Leigh's vocals on and off throughout the set but, mercifully, it remained off for the entirety of this track. [Soz about the high-pitched buzzing noise - it's on the original tape and no amount of EQing will get rid of it.]
It would be fair to say that we weren't best pleased after we'd finished. Our friends tried in vain to convince us that the show hadn't been as bad as we thought it was, while the American couple who'd been so enthusiastic earlier in the night, disappeared well before we ended our set. I can't remember if we had a go at the soundman or not, but we bloody well should have done.Several changes came about as a direct result of this Duchess gig, some good and one... odd. Firstly we imposed a 'two drink' maximum on ourselves, to stop us getting drunk before we'd even played a note (getting hammered after shows was still actively encouraged obvs) We also decided to avoid playing the Duchess for a while. John was putting on more gigs at the Cockpit and, even though the sound on stage there was shocking, it wasn't as bad as the Duchess, so we felt we'd at least be giving ourselves a chance to perform well. One thing I don't think we were anticipating was that Flatnose really liked the gig. He kept banging on about how ace we were, and comparing us to Mansun. Now I quite like Mansun, but I don't think we ever sounded like them at all. John insisted on describing us as "Mansun-ish rockers" in press for the next four gigs we did for him, which led to countless conversations with confused looking audience members along the lines of "I thought you were meant to sound like Mansun..." For the next year or so, when I spoke to other promoters or bands and told them I was in Novacain, they'd say "oh yeah... you sound like Mansun don't you?" Sodding Mansun. It occurred to me recently that perhaps it was John who asked the soundman to add the echo in the first place. Despite not having a musical bone in his body, Flatnose loved to 'be involved', and it would certainly explain why he was the only person in the place who thought our performance was any good.
Set list (Novacain)
- M.F.S.
- Stick To What You Know
- End Of The World
- Slipstream
- Take It Back
- Paracetamol
- Party Politics
- Airflow
- New Song #1
- Second Time Around
No comments:
Post a Comment