Article
Mongrel
1 Jul 2005
The Kids are all Asleep
Stoat keep on truckin
We are one of the zillions of bands who no one has ever heard of. You know - the people you see putting up photocopied posters in someone else's sutdent union, and struggling to get a Marshall amp into a two-door Ford Fiesta at closing time, who are probably playing to no-one at all right now in some shithole near you. We're the rock;n;roll peasant class. You'd need to look very hard indeed to find some glamour in what we do.After 18 years in the business we finished our first album. Most of our recording took place in an empty office space we lined with fibreglass and sacking to abosorb the sound. Every month we had to go to the landlord and say "We're leaving, we can't pay the rent anymore". Lucky for us no-one else wanted the place, so he'd always reduce it to something we could pay, a little technique we call Success Through DespairŪ. It came in handy again when the office place got sold and we needed cheap studio time. Someday we're gonna write a book on it.
We had to get John's parts done first because he had a baby on the way, so he spent weekends travelling back and forth from his home on the other side of the country to record. Stephen borke his hand just as we were due to record drums and when it healed Niamh (my wife) cooked him breakfast, lunch and dinner every day to make sure he wouldn't only eat Mars Bars and zone out at 3pm.
Most of the equipment we used was borrowed, and we had to borrow it again and again to re-do stuff we had done wrong the first (or second, or third, or whatever-th) time. And eventuall we had to borrow money too so we could pay to get it all mixed and mastered.
Of yeah, and it took us almost two years to do. And by the time we even started work on it we'd been together as a band for, well, more-or-less forever. In the real world the rock'n'roll lifestyle is no land of milk and honey and there is no pot of gold at the end ... but this album was made not because we'd enjoy making it - we just had an itch that had to be scratched.
[This text is adapted from the text on the inside cover of our album Future come and get me - you can find the original text here]